For the past few months, I’ve been involved with an organization called Democrats Work. Today, I’m going to tell you about a Democrats Work event here in San Francisco that happened just this morning. I blogged about a previous event here, and Thomas Bates, the executive director, has had a couple of posts about DW opportunities. In a recent post, Thomas mentioned that Wesley Clark had joined my grandpa, Jimmy Carter, on the National Advisory board for the organization. We believe that we can really make a difference.
The mission of Democrats Work, according to the website, "is to mobilize grassroots Democrats to perform community service projects . . . as Democrats." The idea is to let people know that Democrats work; that they care enough to get projects done in their neighborhoods. In the long run, they’d like for people, when faced with a difficult task, to say "Call up the Democrats – they always have people who can help." To me, it’s about reminding people about the good aspects of politics. Politics, at its most basic, is about pooling your resources and organizing people to accomplish something bigger than what an individual could do on his or her own.
On Saturday, I participated in a Democrats Work event in San Francisco. We joined with the SF Young Democrats and other groups help to clean up Gilman Playground and the areas surrounding it. When we arrived (many of us in our Democrats Work T-shirts), we all put on our name tags and got to work. About 40-50 of us divided into four teams. One cleaned up and helped organize the recreation center (those were the lucky folks who got to be out of the 40 to 50-degree weather); another group pulled some seriously overgrown weeds from the sand that padded the playground; another cleaned up the baseball field; and the last went up the hill and cleared branches and debris from a huge tree that fell a while ago, but had never been cleaned up. You can check out the photos from the event at the Democrats Work Flickr page.
I was happy to join the group doing the heavy lifting on the tree branches (yes, that’s me in the photo with my hair in my face). It was truly hard work. Two men named Robert and Richard who worked for the Recreation and Parks department did some great work with their chainsaws and the rest of us hauled branches of all sizes (including many trunk-sized chunks) up the steep hill to the road. I was glad I wore my heavy boots, and all of our complaints about the cool weather dropped off almost immediately as people got going and started shedding layers of clothing. The huge pile of branches then had to be disposed of by transferring it to a pick-up truck and into a truly impressive hydrolic-powered garbage truck (the smashing mechanism on this garbage truck was capable of breaking logs 8 inches in diameter with ease, and liquid would squirt out of the ends – like I said: impressive). It was nearly three hours of hard work, but it was done in great company by people who were motivated to help. Most of all, it felt good to actually get out and do something good for the community.
You should join a Democrats Work crew near you! Or, if there are no events near you, you can create an event or suggest a project. Democrats Work is a national organization (read about their Atlanta kick-off at the DW blog) and they’re always looking for people who are interested in helping out. I’ll keep you updated on opportunities and news from DW.
Thanks for reading!
Sarah