A canvasser describes his conversation with a voter during a canvass debrief

This November marks one year since the passage of Proposition 8 in California.

It also marks one year since Vote for Equality began working to help our community restore marriage equality. We are very grateful to all of you who have volunteered or donated your time, money and other resources to help us achieve our shared goal. We also have some very exciting results to share from our work over the past year!

Because of the thousands of hours that over eight hundred volunteers and coalition partners put into the seventeen canvasses we organized in 2009 — developing our script, prepping canvass turf, maps and materials, learning about past campaigns’ messages, and recruiting new volunteers to join our movement,

• Vote for Equality knocked on over 21,000 doors in Los Angeles County, across incredibly diverse neighborhoods in Northeast L.A., South L.A. and East L.A., with the help of coalition partners including Equality California, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, Equal Roots, Love Honor Cherish, the Jordan/Rustin Coalition and HONOR PAC
• Engaged over 5,500 voters in personal, open-ended conversations about their feelings regarding marriage for gay and lesbian couples
• Through active listening, telling our fellow Californians our personal stories, and getting them to think about the gay and lesbian people in their life — as well as responding directly to their concerns and dilemmas — we have begun to move over 500 previously unsupportive voters to our side
• While we still need to move many more thousands of voters to be with us, we have moved an average of 38% of all of the previously unsupportive or undecided voters with whom we had contact — which is extremely encouraging

Additionally, through these conversations, we have already learned invaluable lessons about how to more effectively engage voters in new ways that get them to reconsider their views of LGBT individuals, and our relationships.

On Wednesday night, Nov. 18, VFE will be “Continuing the Conversation” we started through our canvasses this year in an interactive session, where we’ll look back at all of the work we have done, make a presentation of some of the key data we have culled from tracking what voters said in our conversations, and gather feedback from our fleet of canvassers on what these conversations with voters have taught us.

We’ll also be kicking off our newest experiment: applying what we have learned going door-to-door, to engage our friends and family in conversations about marriage equality over the holidays.

If you have talked to voters at a VFE canvass this year, we hope you will join us, to share your stories, and help us take our next steps to change the hearts and minds of voters we know.

Wednesday, Nov. 18 (6:30 p.m – 9:00 p.m.)
McDonald/Wright Building (L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center)
1625 N. Schrader Blvd, Los Angeles, 90028

SIGN-UP HERE to attend CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

In this video, Jay has a conversation with a voter in South L.A. who voted in favor of Prop. 8, but by the end of the conversation, says that she will vote in favor of marriage equality the next time it’s on the ballot.

A canvasser describes his conversation with a voter during the debrief