A progressive Cuban-American physician living in California
For the last ten years, I have lived in a co-housing community in California. Co-housing is an intentional community composed of private single family homes and duplexes supplemented with extensive common facilities. In our community, we have a Common House with large kitchen, where we take turns making meals for ~60-80 adults and children three times per week, a large dining room, and a living room for meetings and TV watching. The main attraction of co-housing is the ability to live with other people who value community. When I asked by friends and co-workers, I answer that my wife and I wanted our children to grow up exposed to a wider range of dysfunctional behavior than my wife and I could provide.
Several weeks ago, our cohousing group was working outside doing maintenance work in our community when the conversation turned to politics. It was just after the Republican convention and McCain/Palin was enjoying a significant bump in the polls. As a regular reader of Daily Kos, Huffington Post, Pollster, and 538.com, I considered myself a news and polling "junkie" at the time and was feeling pretty depressed about a potential Obama loss. This was the first election where I have truly been excited about the Democratic choice for President and have often responded to Obama's and Plouffe's e-mail requests for money but felt like I wanted to do more.
While taking a break from pick-axing the hard ground, two fellow co-housers/neighbors/friends and I spoke about the depressing poll numbers and our feeling of impotence. We quickly decided to throw a party the following week to cheer ourselves up. There would be food, drink and dancing (I am the resident DJ in my off-hours). We would put out a donation jar and have people contribute whatever they could to support Obama's campaign.
The community became excited about this event and we decided to first have a silent auction with donated products and services from people in cohousing with proceeds going to the Obama campaign. Soon the silent auction idea morphed into a live auction as a neighbor with auctioneering experience volunteered to come help out.We e-mailed all our co-housers about this event and outside friends as well getting about 30-40 adults to commit
On the day of the auction, kids volunteered to create a giant Obama banner. Adults created a banner listing all 25 items/services up for auction. Neighbors donated wine, fruit drinks, and many appetizers to the event. The actual auction included services like: guitar lessons offerred by my 13 yr old son, a one hour piano recital offered by an 11yr old, 3-4 classes on silversmithing offered by another neighbor/local artist . There were also offers of babysitting, housecleaning, kitchen duty . Mixtapes were auctioned off along with leather jackets, Christmas cookies, and expensive champagne (saved for a future special event). The community showed amazing creativity and generosity. Our next door neighbor, who had undergone training from the local Obama campaign, brought donation sheets and everyone was encouraged to donate to the Obama campaign in addition to the money spent to buy auction items.
By the end of the evening, everyone had had a great time dancing, eating and bidding. The final question was: How much did we raise during the auction and fundraisers?
Final tally...... over $7000 to the Obama Campaign. We couldn't believe it!!! We made this plan on a Sunday and pulled everything together by the following Friday and we made over $7000... Twenty euphoric minutes later, our numbers cruncher came back and shared that there had been some mistakes in accounting and some donations had not been added. The total take was actually over $10,000. Not bad for ~40-50 adults and 15 kids and 6 days of preparation.
Next weekend, several families will be driving with their kids to Reno, Nevada to volunteer for the Obama campaign there. I will share our experiences in the next post.