A thing you can do to help

[swan_tower]

Doing something is a really, really good antidote for stress and worry. My chosen Thing to Do: write letters through Vote Forward, which sends personalized messages to voters, encouraging them to vote and providing them with information on how to do so. They specifically focus on young and/or minority voters, i.e. the kinds of people who have historically been underrepresented in our electorate, timing the mailing for maximum effect (this year letters will be going out on October 17th); they've got several years' worth of data backing up the idea that this makes a measurable difference. This year they have blown past their initial goal of ten million letters prepped, so now it's moving on to the stretch goal of 15 million. Each one takes about three minutes to prep and you can "adopt" voters in batches of five or twenty, so it's easy to make this as small or large of an undertaking as you want -- I've done sixty so far and want to do a minimum of a hundred, though once I hit that target I may add more. You can volunteer here.

Comments

[kore]

Oh, this is fantastic! Thank you.

[swan_tower]

Credit to starlady for making me aware of it.

[sonia]

Dropping by via network to let you know that your post motivated me to join and write some letters too. Proven to help, young and/or minority voters, and small initial commitment combined to make it feel right for me. Thank you!

[swan_tower]

Yes, one of the things I like best about it is that you really can choose the scale of effort you're able to tackle! Plus I can do it totally on my own time, and at the end there will be a stack of letters to make me feel like I have Done something.