After almost 2 weeks, I'm back with some news. For those of you who missed it the first time around: http://www.dailykos.com/...
As many of you know, I come from Bakersfield, CA. It's a great town though rather conservative. I'm always interested in bringing the town into the national spotlight and focusing progressive energy there when I can. Most of the opportunities that present themselves are negative though, which makes it a tough call since moving a town towards progressivism is best done by getting progressives to do something good rather than attacking the bad. As I was looking around today, an opportunity to do a lot of good, help a great cause and have some fun at the same time presented itself in the form of a black bear.
In Bakersfield, there is an organization called CALM, The California Living Museum. It is an organization dedicated to preserving and nurturing native California flora and fauna. http://www.calmzoo.org/
The long and short of it is that this great place just got a new black bear and they are having a "Name Our Bear" fund raiser. So I decided that I'd mount a grassroots campaign to name the bear "Stephen Coal Bear".
I talked to the people at CALM and they were excellent. They of course wouldn't pick sides and while they are working on getting some online fund raising going, they don't have the ability to do it now. I talked it up on some of the local blogs and created a MySpace page. I went out to CALM and took pictures of the bear and submitted my vote for Stephen Coal Bear (with an extra 20 bucks on top of admission).
On Labor Day, I got a call from one of the local TV stations (coincidentally the same Bakersfield station that had been previously featured on the Colbert Report) and they wanted to do a story. Word to the wise: if you're mounting a grassroots campaign in a city, actually have someone who can talk to the media in the city.
A friend of mine totally stepped up and she did an amazing job. She's in the video linked below. When you see her, realize that though we'd emailed a bit, we hadn't talked to each other for 13 years before that morning and I just asked her to be on the news as a spokesperson an hour before the van got there.
So now we get to the ask: We've got a great town with a great cause and a fun way to show how awesome progressives are. So here's what I need:
First: Go to my site: FriendsOfStephenCoalBear.org You can get to the rest of these things from there.
Also, if you're a MySpace person, check me out there.
Next, watch the local news segment on Stephen Coal Bear.
And finally, go to the CALM website, download the entry form and mail it in with a donation. It's a dollar recommendation, but we all can do better than that. It's a great cause in fairly conservative town. We need to show them that we are there, we're paying attention and we care.