The Next Generation Will Blow You Away

Just a few thoughts to add to Alex's great roundup of our roadtrip down to RootsCampDC.

Alex and I only overlapped on a few sessions. Mostly I stuck to young voter workshops, and they straight-up blew me away. In the last few years, there's been a lot of really great entrepreneurial activity from Progressives under 30. If the sessions I sat in on were any indication, we can expect a lot more before November 2008.

Highlights:

Jefferson Smith and the Oregon Bus Project Staff: Jefferson Smith is a man who knows how to run a meeting. Even better, he knows the value of making politics fun and relevant to young people, and his groups is working hard to bring more progressives into the fold, and better train the one's who are already participating.

I sat in on 2 sessions lead by Jefferson. The first was Fun Politics, in which I presented Music for America's organizing tactics and philosophy. Co-presenters were Justin Krebs and David Alpert from Living Liberally, and Lanya Shapiro of Traction. Two models were presented for how to make politics fun - the first was presented by Jefferson and Justin/David, and I'll call it creating fun political events. They spoke about creating events with fun components to draw new people into the progressive movement and make the experience of volunteering more enjoyable (creating communities and cultural/"fun" events from scratch. My part of the presentation focused on a different model - politicizing existing cultural scenes/communities and events.

There was a lot of good discussion about tactics and strategies that could make politics more fun/relevant to younger voters. I'm hopeful that a lot of young staffers came out of that meeting with some good "outside the box" ideas for organizing their peers. You can read the notes from the session online here.

The second session I sat in on led by Jefferson was a brainstorming/curriculum workshop for the Bus Projects' -er, project- PolitiCorps. PolitiCorps is a training program designed to give college students hands-on knowledge of campaign best practices - everything from fundraising and canvassing 101 to dealing with vendors, the press, making politics fun, new media, etc.

Longterm training/mentoring and career advice (for campaign staff, policy researchers, journalists, etc.) is a huge hole in progressive infrastructure that is just now beginning to be filled by groups like Campus Progress, DMI Scholars, the Roosevelt Institution and others. The curriculum we brainstormed during this meeting was nothing short of inspiring, and it will be a huge asset to progressives if the Bus Project can launch and scale the program.

Campus Organizing: Led by a 19 year old name James Hannoway who led the youth outreach for Minnesota DFL, this was a great session on how to organize a campus. James discussed great DIY tactics like building a voter file using FaceBook and Excel, and creative outreach efforts like "the debt rock," a giant styrofoam rock labeled debt that students could volunteer to be "crushed by" on their campus, and debt on a stick - which they handed out at the state fair (where, of course, everything comes on a stick). Notes from the session are here.

Hannoway himself blew me away. He delivered one of the best presentations of the conference with poise well above his 19 years of age. Lookout for him in the future.

These were the standouts. Other great sessions I attended included one on reaching young voters of color by Biko Baker of The League, YouTube and campaigns, and Young Voter session with just about every young voter person at the event. Honestly, there were far too many great sessions to go to them all. I missed out on the youth/polling session (though probably not much new info to be had there) and Peter Leyden and Simon Rosenberg talking about generational shifts and the Democratic Party. Because we left early to drive back to NYC at a reasonable hour, I also missed sessions on "how to start a PAC" by the folks at Next Generation Democrats, organizing high-school students, and a session on text messaging, which, to be honest, is a tactic that I still have a lot of doubts about. Last but not least, we missed the final session by Zack Exley, titled only "The Revolution."

It was a great conference all and all. The best I've been to in a while, so thanks to Roz and Zack for putting the event together.