Join us at our next canvass on Saturday, Feb. 27!

Happy February!

It’s officially the month of Valentine’s Day, and a great time to work towards all love being treated equally in the eyes of the law, and in the hearts of our neighbors.

In January, one year after Vote for Equality kicked off its door-to-door canvassing operation in L.A. County — in areas where over 50% of residents voted Yes on Prop. 8 — we hit the streets again. We’re continuing to listen to and identify voters’ core concerns, and learning how to open a conversation and move them to reconsider their opposition to marriage equality.

In just the past two weekends, 112 volunteer canvassers  talked to over 500 more voters! That makes for more than 5,900 in-person conversations that VFE has had with voters since the passage of Proposition 8 in November 2008.

We are starting to get more into the roots of homophobia in these conversations, and what can start to get people to open up and talk about the gay and lesbian people in their neighborhoods, as well as in their own lives.  Alongside relating our own personal stories about why marriage matters to us, and how the passage of Prop. 8 directly affected our lives, many conversations also see voters relating their stories about why marriage is important to them, and how it is equally important to the gay and lesbian people in their lives who they interact with every day.

We will be out talking to more voters in February, and as always — we really need more of you out there with us doing this work. It is helping us gain insight into the minds of voters, which will be crucial in helping us to run better, more effective campaigns in the future. We just need to be talking to voters on a much larger scale — and that’s where you come in.

VFE canvass training

Our next canvass is on Saturday, Feb. 27 in East Los Angeles. No experience is necessary; VFE has developed a full training, where we’ll help you develop a personal story, and roleplay conversations with voters before you head out to knock on doors with an experienced partner. VFE volunteers will have already created packets with everything you’ll need, from lists of registered voters, to maps to get to their houses, to scripts that have key messaging to help you navigate and track your conversations.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN-UP

East L.A. Canvass
Saturday, Feb. 27
10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Training location:
3583 Beswick St.
Los Angeles, CA  90023

Come to our fundraising training!

Also, on Valentine’s Day weekend, we are making a commitment to help keep this work ongoing. In the name of love, we will be coming together as a group to call people we know to ask them to invest in this work. The only way that VFE can keep doing this critical work on marriage is by raising enough money to keep our program going. And the best people to raise it are people like you who really, deeply care about seeing a day when all love is treated equally. We’ll provide you with a training that will make you an expert fundraiser, before you even get on the phones!

CLICK HERE TO SIGN-UP

Grassroots Fundraising Training & Phone Bank
Saturday, Feb. 13
11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
The Village @ L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center
1125 N McCadden Pl.
Los Angeles, CA  90038

Happy New Year from Vote for Equality!

Happy New Year!

And thanks to all of the volunteers who worked so hard last year with Vote for Equality, starting to change hearts and minds and build greater support for marriage equality in California.

Our goal for 2010: to have 10,000 in-person conversations with voters by the end of the year.

We’ll be hitting the streets again starting on Saturday, Jan. 23, with a canvass in South L.A. We will be talking to hundreds of voters on that day in our efforts to win back marriage equality, and we need your help to recruit canvassers and help organize the canvass.

See our calendar (at right)  for more information on how you can help recruit volunteers over the phone to join us at canvasses and other actions; recruit volunteers face-to-face in West Hollywood and South L.A., and help cut turf, create walking maps and assemble materials our canvassers will need when going door-to-door.

Most importantly, sign-up to join us in South L.A. on Saturday, Jan. 23. If we are going to be successful the next time that marriage equality is on the ballot in California, we must start to build a greater base of support now!

South L.A. Canvass
Saturday, Jan. 23
10:00 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.
Training location: Holy Faith Episcopal Church
260 N. Locust St.
Inglewood, CA

Sign-up to Canvass in South L.A. on Saturday, Jan. 23

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

Prop 8 Anniversary Rally & March TONIGHT

We are stinging today from the crushing defeat suffered last night, when Maine became the 32nd state to reject marriage for gay and lesbian couples at the ballot box. This loss is as hard as any other that our community has had to endure, and reopens the wounds that we in California suffered one year ago when voters here approved Prop. 8.

We take heart from all the hard work performed by  No on 1 campaign staff and volunteers,  as well as from the other victories that LGBT folks achieved last night — including a win in Washington state, where voters approved Ref. 71, which will protect “everything but marriage” domestic partner benefits. Likewise, voters in Kalamazoo, Michigan overwhelmingly approved an ordinance banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, and voters in many cities elected openly LGBT candidates for a number of offices, including several mayors.

But tonight, we will take to the streets in Los Angeles again, to both protest the negative result in Maine on marriage, and to mark the one-year anniversary of Prop 8’s passage.

TONIGHT: Where Were YOU When Equality Died?
Prop 8: One Year Later
A rally and march to protest the results of Maine’s marriage vote, and mark the one-year anniversary of Prop. 8.

According to the organizers, at the event “a New Orleans-style funeral, full of jazz and charisma, will lead us around the march route until we finish in front of “The Black Cat”/Le Bar Cito, where WE FOUGHT BACK against police raids even before Stonewall!”

Wednesday, Nov. 4
7 p.m. – 10 p.m.
Santa Monica Boulevard at Vermont Ave (Silver Lake)

Additional details HERE

In the wake of our defeat in Maine, we at Vote for Equality are continuing to do the hard work of having personal conversations with voters, telling our fellow Californians about the reality of our lives — so they won’t fall for the unkind, untrue defamatory stereotypes about gay people.  We have to help voters realize the simple truth:  that we are a lot like them; that we want to get married for the same reasons they do;  that when we fall in love, we want to make a long-term, serious commitment to the person we love — that we want to create families, and enjoy life, liberty, and happiness.

Our next canvass is on Saturday, Nov. 14^th from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m. in East Los Angeles — an area where we have a lot of work to do to move more voters to be with us. We hope you can join us to continue to do the work it is going to take for us to be victorious at the ballot.

SIGN-UP HERE to talk to voters in East L.A. on Nov. 14

East L.A. Canvass

Saturday, Nov. 14
10 a.m. – 3 pm.
Training Location:
Lorena Terrace Alegria School
611 S. Lorena St.
Los Angeles, CA  90038

Regina Clemente (far left, front row) in York County, Maine with No on 1 staff/volunteers

Maine is facing an anti-gay measure on the ballot Nov. 3 that is very similar to Prop. 8 in California. If Question 1 is approved by Maine voters on Nov. 3, it would strip away the civil marriage rights bestowed on LGBT couples earlier this year by Maine’s state legislature and signed into law by the Governor. The “Yes on 1″ campaign in Maine is being run by the exact same firm that helped pass Prop. 8 in California, and is spreading the very same lies about how extending civil marriage rights to LGBT families would affect what children are taught in schools.

Many of us here at Vote for Equality worked on the ground in the Prop. 8 campaign here in California. We know how devastating it was to have worked so hard, only to wake up on Nov. 4, 2008 and find that our fellow Californians had voted to strip away the freedom to marry for our LGBT families. With our side having lost marriage equality in all 31 states where  anti-gay marriage ballot measures have been voted on, a win in Maine would be a historic victory and get the ball moving in the right direction.

The entire staff of Vote for Equality — along with several VFE volunteers — have already, or will soon be traveling to Maine to work on the field efforts for Protect Maine Equality’s “No on 1″ campaign. We’ll be publishing field reports from Maine from a number of VFE folks, chronicling their efforts to help ID supportive voters, have conversations with voters in door-to-door canvasses, and Get Out the Vote.

Our first VFE Blog from Maine is penned by Regina Clemente,  Project Director of Vote for Equality.

Ogunquit In-Person Recruitment Team

Friday, Oct. 2
On the ground in Maine, with the goal of getting enough volunteers involved in York County to make the county produce at least 40,000 No votes to keep marriage legal! Tonight’s main action: bar recruitment in Ogunquit — the “Castro” district of Maine. Only three gay bars to work, though, so let’s hope people are ready to help out!

Saturday, Oct. 3
Just participated in a Maine canvass! It rained the entire time, but it was great! I talked to a man who had visible gun paraphernalia in his garage, and who started the conversation by saying that he thinks being gay is immoral. But, after several questions asking why he felt that way; hearing my story about my long term relationship with my former girlfriend; and getting him to think about how he would want his grandkids to be treated — regardless of whether they are gay or straight — he moved to saying he would seriously consider voting No on 1. It was a really great conversation! Most other voters I spoke with had already made up their minds, and several refused to talk about the issue… Off to a second canvass in a more rural area of Maine, in someone’s art studio in the forest!

Sunday, Oct. 4
Going to start to get Maine voters to vote early through absentee ballot — or by committing to go vote at their local townhall starting on the 15th. Maine makes voting very easy, but that still doesn’t mean that more than 50% of all voters will turn out in this off-year election. That’s why our job is to get all supporters in the bag as early as possible. Then we can focus on less likely and undecided voters. But not until our nearly 100,000 supportive IDs are accounted for! Which means we have to get a lot more people volunteering to turn out these voters!

No on 1 Coaches Training

Thursday, Oct. 8
The York County team has now trained 8 new phone bank leaders, so we can have early vote phone banks up and running in multiple parts of the County. And the team at University of New England, Biddeford is growing daily — and will be having their second on-campus student phone bank this weekend! Also, it seems like the rain has stopped for a few days, which is good for in-person volunteer recruitment (IPVR), but now we need to find where all the locals are! We had good luck at the post office this week, but need more locations to hit up to get more people invovled.

Volunteer Recruitment Phone Bank

Saturday, Oct. 10
The York team just finished another canvass  — this time solely devoted to getting our strong supporters to vote early, so we can focus on other voters! And to ask them to volunteer to talk to voters at their doorsteps. More Ogunquit bar IPVR tonight to get the gays out to help! And tomorrow, we have three early vote phone banks up and running — including one at Stonewall Kitchen, home of the famous jams!

Monday, Oct. 11
I am leaving Maine today, but going home to Vote for Equality where we will be making calls to voters from L.A. every Sunday and every day of Election Week! Join us — this is the best chance we’ve ever had to keep marriage legal through a ballot initiative, because of the great groundwork that has been done, and also due to the fact that Maine is a lot smaller than California! But while there may not be that many people, we still have a turn out a ton of them if we’re going to win this thing!
–Regina Clemente

CLICK HERE to SIGN-UP for a Maine Phone Bank in Hollywood

DETAILS:

Sunday, Oct. 25 (10am-2pm) @ The Village (1125 N. McCadden PL, Hollywood)
Sunday, Nov. 1 (11am-3pm) @ The Village
Monday, Nov. 2 (10:30am-1:30pm) @ The Village
Monday, Nov. 2 (2:30pm-5:30pm) @ The Village

Election Day:
Tuesday, Nov. 3 (10:30am-1:30pm) @ The Village
Tuesday, Nov. 3 (2:30pm-5:30pm) @ The Village

York County Field Team & Volunteers