Millennials Changing America

Note: The following entry is part of an on-going series of content that I am producing as part of the Millennials Changing America tour. The tour, which is taking place between October and December of 2008, is traveling to over 30 cities throughout the US and attempting to collect as many on-the-ground stories about millennials-in-action as possible.

White Wine, White Supremacy, and late night cell phone connections.

My conversation with Anima LaVoy, founder and executive director of Swing Semester, has been somewhat long in the making. After missing an opportunity to meet with her in Washington, DC and Cincinnati, Ohio, and after an eventual realization that our paths will again just miss crossing in Seattle, and then again later back in the East Coast, Anima and I finally connected late last evening. For her, working in Cincinnati, it was just about 11 and she had been leaving a series of planning meetings. "I just had a couple of glasses of white wine," she explained. "This is a really honest opportunity for an interview."

On my end, passing through North Dakota, I was just returning to the motel from a truck stop diner where an old man told me about his son receiving two life sentences back in the 80s for being at a meeting that sounded like it was somehow related to a militia movement and a domestic terror plot ("ideas that were popular at the time"); how, despite serving in the military, he tells young people not to join as it is soiled with corruption (along with the church - an opinion he hesitantly held, as he is a God-fearing man); and how the Aryan Nation has some pretty good ideas, though people just have a hard time hearing "the truth." It was nearing midnight, I was ready to pass out, but, in addition to near-misses country-wide, Anima and I had finally connected after nearly 20 rounds of phone tag.

"Quakers, Universalist Unitarians and Jews are on the cutting edge."

Despite growing up in Washington, DC, where her mother worked in politics, Anima, now 27, would find that she didn't much care for the subject until 2003. "I had realized that I was dissatisfied with the Bush Administration and I wanted to do something." She grew passionate, angry, and driven, but she hadn't really paid much attention to the political landscape until that moment. She was soon exposed to the concept of the swing state: "It was from that vantage point that I would see myself in Indiana and realize that as a liberal white Christian, my vote didn't really mean much. I was really seething about Bush at that point, but I wasn't quite sure what to do."

After some research into the mechanics of the modern swing state phenomenon, Anima rallied hard, gathered her friends, folks from her school, and in related networks (she notes how lucky she was to be connected with Quaker school networks, as, half tongue-in-cheek, she claims that "Quakers, Universalist Unitarians, and Jews are on the cutting edge [of progressive political organizing]"), and she fired up as many people as she could to move to Ohio and work for progressive political advocacy groups and organizations. She worked to find statewide host families for the newly change-oriented, and she hooked them up with jobs at organizations like the NAACP, ACT, and other organizations peripherally interested in a Kerry win. In working as a collective force with these organizations, this politically progressive born-again organized efforts which led to the knocking on 140,000 doors.

Sort of like Mary Poppins, only politically-driven and less creepy.

Looking back on the makeshift, yet effective 2004 experience, Anima worked hard to grow the organization for the 2008 Presidential race. She had been quite excited by the progress made in her initial organizational attempts, where Swing Semester had maintained 100% canvasser retention-rate — a nearly unheard of number, and she hoped to enhance Swing Semester's impact on participants and, of course, the election.

This year, Swing Semester is operating in Cincinnati and Denver, and this time around, participation in the program is tuition-based (though there are scholarships and subsidized tuition available). Further, participants can leverage participation in the program for substantial college credit. The program provides a syllabus that confronts a lot of the questions that incoming workers have about political philosophy, a passion of Anima's. "Our syllabus brings together some of the works of George Lakoff, Ken Wilbur, Eric Liu, Nick Hanaur, and others and it gets people discussing, and reaching to understand the context of their work." The one issue that they center their attentions on as a collective, Anima explains, is food. "We realized that if you really get how political food is, and how related it is to social justice, the economy, healthcare, etc., you see that you become political three times a day."

"In 2004," she explains, "Swing Semester was kind of scrappy, but it was totally mobilizing. This year it's a full time experience. Students can get academic credit and we've got 40 members this year, aged 19-26," which is nearly a 200% increase from the last time. "It's totally exciting."

I asked Anima if she is at all interested in figuring out how to sustain the momentum that she was building, and to look beyond thriving on the every-four-year engagement model:

"Do you know how Mary Poppins just came in out of nowhere and would then leave? And she didn't really screw anyone in that process... She just helped and left? That's how what we're doing feels right now."

"Sometimes you just gotta say, 'What the f**k, make your move.'" -Joel Goodsen

Anima went into the 2004 election knowing relatively nothing about the electoral process, and she came out a substantial organizer. She was able to do so, in part, because her energy inspires awe, and, her enthusiasm is infectious. Her impact was also made possible because, as she explains, she stopped finding excuses to not get involved. "I just had to do it," she explains. "And I had to explain to other people who were working at jobs they were otherwise dissatisfied with that they did too. I had to sell the idea of doing the right thing over doing what feels necessary, like taking a job that doesn't feel right, or whatever." And it was from that jumping point (and the series of convince-others-to-jump-too points that followed thereafter) that Swing Semester was born, reared, and sustained.