Democrats Work Calls on DNC to Reorganize Around Service

Thomas Bates and Jason Carter of Democrats Work have an opinion piece in Roll Call today calling on the DNC to reorganize itself in part around the principles of community service during the "off season:"

From Roll Call (subscription only):

In 2006, a decade after the initial inspiration and still believing this idea was too good to keep on the shelf, we began building a new service-based approach to politics. We launched Democrats Work to help connect Democratic volunteers with service projects in their neighborhoods.

In just two years, we mobilized thousands of volunteers to work at food banks, plant trees and help with disaster recovery at over 140 events in a dozen states. These volunteers work proudly and visibly as Democrats, just as church members or employees of the local bank do under the banner of their organizations. Along with groups like Blue Tiger Democrats and Obama Works and candidates like Tom Perriello in Virginia and Charlie Brown in California, we have tried in our own plucky and underfunded ways to make community service a cornerstone of political activism.

The time to take these efforts to scale is now. The place to do it is within the DNC.

The piece goes on to (rightly, I think) note that new technologies that facilitate local organizing, and millions of new supporter brought in by the Obama campaign, make the time ripe to engage in such a drastic reorganization of the DNC away from "fundraising and attack ads," and put the focus back on being of real service to the community:

We believe the Democratic Party could be the largest source of volunteers in the country. Call it the audacity of scope. With over 10 million people engaged by the Obama campaign and DNC and millions more activated by local campaigns and organizations, Democrats can support community organizations of all stripes – nonprofit, municipal, religious – with an unprecedented volunteer army. This is not about politicizing service but about elevating politics and changing the way the Party relates to our communities.

Online tools provided by the DNC and the Obama campaign – through the Party Builder platform and My.BarackObama.com – have empowered the grassroots to organize service events. To harness and sustain that energy, the DNC needs a new Office of Community Service and dedicated staff to coordinate a truly national effort, working with state and local parties and training on-the-ground organizers to strengthen our communities year-round. Moreover, the Party should provide scholarships to students who are organizing on campus and fellowships to uber-volunteers who have become the precinct captains of the 21st century. The Party also should marshal its resources and volunteers to assist relief organizations that continue to rebuild places like New Orleans and are ready for the next emergency.

These efforts would transform our communities: food banks filled with donations and volunteers, after-school programs packed with tutors, neglected streets cleaned up. We would “keep the band together” year-round, ending the boom-and-bust cycle of political volunteer mobilization and management. And we would continue to grow the ranks of committed volunteers. Over half of the volunteers mobilized for community service by Democrats Work had never done any traditional “political” volunteering but embraced the opportunity to engage in electoral activities this fall.

Really good stuff. And something that I think would be inspiring to a lot of Millennials. It presents an interesting model to compare, or perhaps compliment, the independent nonprofit model proposed by Winograd and Hais as a potential way to keep (young) Obama supporters involved beyond the election.