Colorado Education Advocates Unveil New Tactic

By Tim Hoover of the Denver Post….

Supporters of an initiative that would ask voters in November to raise taxes for education are using an online, grassroots strategy to gather signatures that could revolutionize the petition process.

“It is the first time that I have seen this kind of tactic,” said veteran ballot-issue consultant Rick Reiter. “I’m watching it closely because I could learn a lot.”

Great Education Colorado Action is the political arm of Great Education Colorado, a group that urges more spending on education, and it has sent e-mails to supporters and turned to social networking to jump-start a signature-gathering drive for Initiative 25.

That proposal would, for five years, raise state sales taxes from 2.9 percent to 3 percent and hike the state’s income tax from 4.63 percent to 5 percent. If voters approved it, the proposal would generate an estimated $3 billion for K-12 and higher education.

Supporters say the tax hikes are needed to offset three years of deep cuts to education spending.

Critics say Coloradans are in no mood for a tax increase and the proposal would kill jobs during an economic recovery. Republicans have been the most vocal critics, but many Democrats have been silent on the proposal, and Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, has repeatedly said Coloradans have “no appetite” for a tax increase.

The initiative filed by state Sen. Rollie Heath, D-Boulder, doesn’t have the support so far of the state’s major business or education groups. That means the six-figure sums that are usually required to hire companies to conduct petition drives may not be forthcoming.

So supporters are trying a strategy that uses social network websites to ask people to sign the petitions. Supporters have set up a website that allows people to download petitions and then volunteer to gather signatures.

The kit includes instructions on how to gather 50 signatures to fill each petition and even how to properly staple the pages. It instructs volunteers to seek out a notary after gathering the signatures and then to return the signed petitions to supporters in Denver.

Every petition must bear an individual number, and the website where they can be downloaded assigns each one a unique number.

“The conventional wisdom is you need a lot of money to get something on the ballot,” said Lisa Weil, spokeswoman for Great Education Colorado. “Well, we don’t have that. What we’ve got is tens of thousands of education supporters who care about schools and affordable higher education.”

Instead of standing outside a supermarket, Weil said, volunteers can seek signatures on a more personal level. This closer-knit connection also will allow volunteers to better educate others about funding cuts for schools and colleges.

The hurdle to get an initiative on the ballot isn’t small. Supporters will have to gather the valid signatures of 86,105 registered Colorado voters, a benchmark that usually means circulators aim for as many as twice that number of signatures just to be safe.

“I think that the structure of what they’re doing has potential here,” said Reiter, the consultant, “but like all these things, when you need 11,000 people engaged in it, the management and the direct contact with those people will dictate whether this works or not.”

He added: “Hopefully 11,000 people have staplers. Because if you don’t staple it right, you’re done.”

Does Greenpeace Cause More Harm than Good?

The effort to shut down Chicago’s two coal plants literally climbed to new levels on Tuesday, as eight activists from environmental watchdog group Greenpeace scaled the smokestack of the coal-fired Fisk Generating Station power plant.

The activists spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday morning hanging from the 450-foot high smokestack, while painting the phrase “Quit Coal” in giant letters.  The eight were later arrested and charged with felony criminal damage to property.

Eight more Greenpeace activists worked to halt the approach of a coal barge at the city’s other major power plant. The activists dropped off a bridge near the Crawford coal plant, and unfurled a banner with “We Can Stop Coal” written in both English in Spanish.

While the scene was hectic at Fisk, it was nothing compared to the chaos at Crawford.  Traffic was backed up for miles. Dozens of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances lined the street, where ornery officers barked at the press to stay on one side of the street. Meanwhile, the activists dangled below the bridge, preventing a coal barge from passing for hours.

The action was part of an ongoing campaign led by Greenpeace and other national and local environmental groups, focused on cleaning up air pollution by replacing both of Chicago’s coal plants with clean energy.

According to Greenpeace, coal fired power plants kill between 13,000 and 34,000 people a year.  That staggering figure includes the 42 Chicagoans who die as a result of pollution from Fisk and Crawford.  And according to a report from the Clean Air Task Force, residents are at risk for heart disease, cancer, and respiratory illness because of pollution from these plants.

“Some may question these aggressive tactics,” said SparkLight Communications President Joseph LaMountain.  “But Greenpeace has carved a unique niche with their ability to draw the spotlight onto issues they care about.  This is critical for the success of any movement and their actions, no matter how outlandish you may find them, have been essential to the environmental community’s success.”

Does a “Slut Walk” Help or Hurt the Cause?

Grassroots activists in want to redefine the word “slut.”

The movement to protest the culture of victim-blaming began in Toronto where the first SlutWalk was organized to protest a police officer’s comment that to avoid being sexually assaulted women should not dress like “sluts.”

These marches have since been organized around the world and one will hit the streets of Hamilton, Ontario in two weeks.  But will the walks achieve their goal, or simply reinforce negative stereotypes?

“The word slut is used to make women feel uncomfortable about how they’re presented to the world and to shame (them), and make them feel they need to police their bodies and police their sexualities in the way they express themselves,” said SlutWalk founder Nikki Wilson, 22, who is from Hamilton.

“We want the word slut to represent a person who is confident in their sexuality, somebody who likes sex and isn’t afraid of talking about that, who isn’t afraid of expressing that.”

According to SlutWalk Hamilton’s Facebook page, more than 800 people are planning on attending the march, which will begin at City Hall at 2 p.m. and then go into Hess Village and end at the Central Police Station.

“These marches have been a great success and they definitely send a message,” said Sparklight President Joseph LaMountain.  “But I question the wisdom of wearing fishnet stockings and other provocative clothing.  While sex generates media coverage and awareness, it could also reinforce some of the negative connotations the group is trying to eliminate.”

SlutWalk organizers could take a lesson from the gay and lesbian community.  They’ve sought to tone down some of the more outrageous behavior in an effort to “normalize” homosexuals in the eyes of the general public.  Over time, this strategy has contributed to increased acceptance of same-sex relationships in American society.

Retired MD Collects 5,800 Petition Signatures

A campaign to restore funding to a palliative care community service on the Upper North Shore has received a big response reports Tracey Findlay in the Hornsby and Upper North Shore Advocate.

Retired Wahroonga doctor Yvonne McMaster has collected 5800 signatures since launching the campaign in March. She intends to present the petition to Parliament House. Dr McMaster said she had been encouraged by the community response.

“I am now pretty confident we will get at least 10,000 signatures. I have had lots of replies and offers of help,” she said.

As reported in the Advocate in March, Dr McMaster is protesting against “a rationing of services” for the terminally ill after palliative care community funding was cut by $1.2 million by the then Northern Sydney and Central Coast Area Health Service in 2009.

The Zombie of Public Awareness Campaigns

According to the National Institutes of Health, 20 percent of Americans sleep less than six hours each night.  This can lead to mistakes in the workplaces, costing American businesses billions of dollars each year.

That’s why the Better Sleep Council (BSC), a trade association representing the mattress industry, declared May as national “Stop Zombieitis!” awareness month.

The BSC sought to use social networks to identify and educate those who complain of the symptoms of “zombieitis” – feeling like death, exhaustion, irritability, and a slow gait.

“Linking sleep deprivation to zombies is a clever idea, especially for a social media campaign,” said Sparklight President Joseph LaMountain.  “Millions are sleep deprived and zombies are a popular online meme, so this was a great opportunity for BSC to reach a wide audience with its messages.”

But that hasn’t really happened.  The campaign website was not intuitive and took several visits to understand.  Their three YouTube videos were seen fewer than 700 times while the “Stop Zombieitis” Facebook group counted fewer than 600 friends and hardly any engagement with members.

“What the BSC discovered is that it takes more than just a clever idea for an awareness campaign to work,” LaMountain said.  “Putting a couple videos online, creating a Facebook page, and hoping that your video goes viral is not the best strategy.”

As representatives of the mattress industry, the BSC could have aggressively reached consumers through retail outlets, manufacturers lists of customers and delivery trucks.  They could have used targeted online advertising (Facebook and Google AdWords) and reached out to niche “horror” blogs to gain traction.

“Social media is a great tool for reaching people,” LaMountain said, “but it’s not enough to simply post your content online and wait for the masses to arrive.  It has to be part of a comprehensive marketing and communications plan if it’s going to work.”

Obama Works to Rebuild Grassroots Army

As reported by Ken Thomas of the Associated Press and published on May 16, 2011….

President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is barely a month old, but Camille Gervasio and other volunteers nationwide already are hard at work.

“Are you with us? Are you in?” Gervasio asks into her iPhone, dialing through a call sheet resting on her laptop to line up supporters for an election 18 months away.

In call centers like this one on the eighth floor of an office building, the president’s backers are trying to take advantage of a head start over the still-forming Republican field and the benefits of incumbency to rebuild a grassroots effort that mobilized millions of voters in 2008.

Obama’s campaign has pledged to reach out to every voter it was in contact with during his first run, a herculean 50-state organizational effort to reconnect with its supporters — some of them now disillusioned with the president because of his policies — while giving it an early indication of any vulnerabilities among critical constituent groups.

Without having to focus on a primary opponent, Obama’s campaign also is spending much of its time and money trying to build foundations of support early in battleground states like Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Ohio that backed Obama last time but have since elected Republican governors, weakening state Democratic Party operations.

“Every single day we have to go scratch and claw for those votes,” Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, said recently in a video outlining Obama’s strategy. He argued that Obama’s team must “act like an insurgent campaign” to win re-election.

In some ways, Obama’s first campaign never folded.

Newt’s Presidential Launching Pad?

Newt Gingrich has been out of office for more than a decade. But he’s running for President? This National Journal article by Alex Roarty teh web of groups around Newt, and how he may use them in a 2012 White House bid…

He’s a 67-year-old with jowls and has a résumé that includes three wives and nearly 20 years in one of the nation’s least favorite institutions. He hasn’t held elective office in more than a decade. He’s been around so long that he defined the face of the last Republican revolution (in 1994). To reach the White House, he must overcome a field of fresher faces with larger political bases—not to mention more than a century of history that says there’s no path down Pennsylvania Avenue from the House of Representatives to the White House.

But for all of his drawbacks, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who on Thursday became the first major Republican figure to formally declare his interest in the GOP presidential nomination, still possesses something his foes can’t match: a network of businesses, political action committees, and media contacts that provide him relationships across the conservative movement. He owns or chairs five notable groups, which alternatively showcase his fundraising muscle or connection to the party’s grassroots activists. His 2012 candidacy, which faces significant challenges, could turn on whether he can mobilize that network into a formidable asset.

Topless Protestors Irk Authorities, Generate Media

From the May 7th online edition of New York magazine…

You may or may not be aware that a new revolution is heating up in eastern Ukraine, where women’s rights group Femen has been staging protests against the country’s widespread sex tourism and prostitution, inspiring fear in Ukrainian authorities.

The group was profiled by Der Spiegel this week, and the profile’s been making the rounds on the Internet. The German weekly reports “Some travel agencies offer “Romantic Tours” of eastern Ukraine. In Kiev, pimps will call the hotel rooms of foreign guests and offer to sell them “a good time with a girl.”

According to a survey, 70 percent of students in the capital have been approached by a foreigner offering them money for sex. It’s a country that even Google automatically associates with “dating agencies” and “women.”

“We understand that the root causes for many of the problems in Ukraine run very deep,” says Victor, one of Femen’s few male members. “That’s why we take the concept of prostitution one step further: The entire Ukraine is a brothel.”

Led by 26 year-old Anna Hutsol, the grassroots organization has been meeting in a dimly-lit cellar bar in the center of Kiev, earning the ire of authorities, and getting banned on Facebook for uploading “pornography.”

It might sound like fun, but it’s pretty serious, too: “Ukrainian security forces have become increasingly interested in Femen,” Spiegel reports. “Men from the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU forced their way into Anna’s apartment at night. They held ‘preventative talks’ and threatened to ‘break the arms and legs’ of the Femen chief.”

Also, they’re topless.

“Yes,” sighs Hutsol. “We’re different from classic feminists. In order to gain a voice, they had to become like men. But we want a real women’s revolution. Our naked protests are part of the fight for women’s liberation. We have the right to use our bodies as weapons. I think men like women’s breasts.”

The popularity of Spiegel‘s accompanying slideshow seems to justify their methods.

Tea Party Grassroots Threatens the GOP on Debt Ceiling

From the May 9th edition of National Journal…

Tea party activists have taken some lumps lately, but they’re not going down without a fight.

With TV ads, petitions and grassroots lobbying, tea party organizers are gearing up to send an absolutist message to Capitol Hill: Don’t raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances.

Tea party activists have already clashed publicly with some of the 87 GOP freshmen they helped elect last year, and they’re warning that Republicans who don’t keep their fiscal promises will pay a political price.

“We will remove as many incumbents as we can that do not do the job they were hired to do,” Darla Dawald, national director of the tea party group Patriot Action Network, said in an e-mail. “We are watching every member of Congress, their votes, position and language.”

Another conservative activist group, Grassfire Nation, is gathering signatures from its 1.8 million members on a petition opposing “any increase in the legal federal debt limit,” to be delivered by hand in the coming weeks to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A Grassfire Nation poll found that close to 80 percent of its members opposed raising the debt ceiling, even if conditions such as spending cuts or caps were attached.

“It’s no secret that the tea party movement’s unhappy,” said Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express. “You’re seeing people on a local level really upset with their congressmen and women.”

Reps. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., Tom Price, R-Ga., and David Schweikert, R-Ariz., are among the House Republicans who have fielded flak from conservative bloggers, demonstrators, or town hall hecklers upset that Congress isn’t acting faster to bring down the deficit.

Citzen Action Stops Cincinnati Pools from Closing

Soapbox Cincinnati writer Matt Cunningham reports how citizens were able to band together to keep their community pools open during tough budgetary times.

The pools will open.  That’s the news the Cincinnati Recreation Commission (CRC) announced in April, when a combination of public, private and community efforts motivated Cincinnati City Council to re-allocate funds to help open 19 city swimming pools this summer.

The story is likely familiar to anyone who follows the city’s news media: near-historic budget problems in the city forced City Council to move for sweeping cuts, including closure of the city’s pools.

This provoked a grassroots movement from the city’s neighborhoods, many of which began petition and fundraising drives to open their pools. As momentum grew across the city, additional sponsorship came in from larger community donors.

Enough had been raised by an April 15 deadline – and enough supporters had raised their voices – that city council voted to provide $600,000 to support the pools, with donations covering the slightly more than $200,000 needed to foot the rest of the bill.

While moving that much money – especially five months after the city budget first came out – drew protest from fiscally conservative voices in the city, the story of the Cincinnati pools raises a bigger question, one that goes beyond the dollars, and transcends one department’s effort to keep some of its services available to the community.

Could the drive that opened the pools be a model for how things can get done in Cincinnati?

“This is the first time I’m aware of the community taking such an active role,” said CRC Superintendent of Recreation Michael Thomas. “This is a very healthy thing for the community.”