Staten Island Voter Pwer Campaign

I am currently looking for full time organizing positions in New York. Until that happens, however, I’m doing some part time electoral organizing in Staten Island. Make the Road New York, the organization I also did my internship with, has an office in Port Richmond, a neighborhood on the north shore of the island with a high percentage of latinos. We’re mostly focused on getting out the vote: getting more Latinos to the polls. The campaign in general is oriented towards the congressional race. Staten Island (NY-13) has had the distinction of being the only congressional district in New York city to be sending a Republican to the House of Representatives. We’re working indirectly to change that.

So, our work is to try and turn people out for the Sept 9th primaries, and then for the general election in November. That has involved a lot of door to door canvassing, using public voting lists to find active Latino voters in the area, and then going to them, encouraging them to vote, and asking a few questions about general issues so we can get a sense of whether or not they could be members of the organization, or whether we want to follow up with them. More recently we’ve been trying to get people out to a community meeting that we want to have before the congressional primaries. The idea is to begin to get recognition now, to begin to bring people together, and to begin to get a core of volunteers and members from the neighborhood to work with us. Because, after all, the idea is to get people out to vote, but to also begin to build a base in the neighborhood, one where Make the Road has no organizing efforts.

After the primary on the 9th we’ll do a few other events, but hopefully begin to integrate people into our efforts. I’d personally like to see people wanting to confront some of the areas most pressing issues—immigration and crime being the two largest. I’d like to see some people get involved with the organization, and begin to think about how to get people in Port Richmond together, to build power.

That’s a brief overview of the campaign. I’ll fill in the details here and there in my next posts.