It’s happening all over the country.

In state after state, young people are proving they are fired up about the election and committed to bringing about real change. In Colorado, young people turned out in record numbers to cast their ballots in the February caucuses.

Mark admires young people who stand up for Colorado through community service and activism. As a young man, Mark worked to elect his father, Mo Udall to Congress. He later served as the Executive Director of Outward Bound, building character development and self-discovery in people of all ages and walks of life through outdoor challenges and experiences.

With your help, we can send someone to Washington who will elevate policy debates above partisan politics in order to find workable solutions to difficult political issues.

Join Udall Generation and help elect Mark Udall to the U.S. Senate!

Managing a statewide campaign is not easy. We rely on community leaders to provide us feedback on local issues as well as information about important community events. We need you to be our eyes, ears, and voice in your community to help us carry Mark’s message to every corner of the state.

Join Udall Generation and help elect Mark Udall to the U.S. Senate!

The election is just over three months away and we need your help now more than ever. We need you to stand up and work with us to elect Mark Udall to the U.S. Senate.

Over on Future Majority I just posted an article on Moving Beyond the Low-Hanging Fruit in Youth Organizing. Check it out.

Photo by cesarastudillo

Too often when we think about youth organizing we focus on the internet and college campuses. Young people in rural areas often have less access to high-speed internet and are not attending large universities. Rural youth are important for us to organize, yet many organizations feel like they don’t know where to find them.

After asking some of my social networks the question “Where do young people tend to congregate in rural communities?,” I received a lot of good responses from people from those communities. Here is the list of the most popular results.

• Local churches
• Large stores/Wal-mart
• 4-H clubs
• Local/County fairs
• Social events/fiestas
• High schools and school events
• Community college/trade schools
• Rodeos
• Dairy Queens/Local eateries
• Bookstores
• Athletic clubs
• Bars and taverns
• Tribal houses/community centers

The key here is that there are places where young people congregate in rural communities and that if you put the work in you will be able to reach them.

Another point that Sisto Abeyta of New Mexico made to me was that most of the communication that takes place in rural communities is done over the phone, which now also includes text messaging.

So now I open the question up to you. Where do you think are good places to find rural youth congregating? Also, what methods do you think would be effective in reaching out to rural youth? The floor is yours. Leave a comment.

Photo by ToniVC

Last Saturday a couple of us Arizona Young Democrats went up to Payson to meet with someone interested in forming a Young Democrats chapter in rural Mogollon Rim country. During our conversations she told us something about the communication habits of young people in rural areas: text messaging is king.

While most young people in rural areas ways to access the internet, the relative difficulty of getting online and the number of youth holding outdoors jobs makes text messaging the most effective way to communicate.

Facebook may be the best communication tool available for college students and young people living in urban and suburban areas, but it is important to also utilize SMS communication to reach rural areas.

What have your experiences been in organizing rural youth? What have you learned about how to communicate effectively outside major cities? Leave a comment and share.

This last Saturday in Nashville I held trainings on how to use the internet to collect vote pledges. As I promised, I will put some additional resources on here to supplement the training.

Remember that the peer-to-peer model involves contacting young voters where they live and where they hangout, and that the popularity of online social networks have made the internet a place where Millennials do both.

Another important point is that you start with your own social network. That is, the people you directly know online. Once you have reached out to them, ask them to spread the vote pledge through their own social network.

The Facebook portion of my training was based largely on a post I wrote earlier on Facebook Group Membership Building. Check it out if you want more information.

You can find more on creating good emails here. Remember to have the call to action in the first paragraph.

A more extensive discussion of blog outreach and getting people that have large audiences to spread your message is available on my Blogger Outreach 101 post.

If you have any questions or ideas about collecting vote pledges on the internet, leave a comment or send me an email and I will try to get back to you ASAP.

So after making the mistake of getting the slowest shipping possible, my copy of Michael Connery’s (of Future Majority) Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority finally came yesterday. I read it cover-to-cover as soon as it hit my hands. I just want to say that every person that is a leader in YDA should read this book.

It is important that as leaders of progressive youth organizations we know the history of the movement, in order to learn what has worked and what has failed, as well as the knowledge of how we came to be what we are now. As I wrote in an earlier post, one of the advantages of the youth movement was its ability to innovate and learn from trial and error. Youth to Power gives a great analysis of the past successes and failures of our movement.

Specifically valuable for leaders in YDA is the chapter on Rebuilding the Democratic Youth Brand. This chapter extensively covers YDA and CDA, and many of you were part of that history.

Some of the most interesting points are on the use of the internet and mobile technology, the role of music and culture in engaging youth, and the comparison of the Conservation youth leadership pipeline to its weaker progressive counterpart.

In 2006 Paul Graham published an e-book entitled The Power of the Marginal. While originally intended for the tech community and entrepreneurs, the general point is applicable to almost every field, including politics. Graham suggests that his message in one sentence is “just try hacking something together.” In other words, be innovative and try new things. There are many disadvantages to approaching projects as an insider: “the selection of the wrong kind of people, the excessive scope, the inability to take risks, the need to seem serious, the weight of expectations, the power of vested interests, the undiscerning audience, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency of such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure.”

One of the strengths of the Young Democrats of America is that it is a chapter-based organization, with local chapters spread throughout the country. Chapters should be coming up with new ideas, new applications for tools, new methods, etc. In essence, be willing to take the risk of trying out a new idea, even though it may fail. Graham argues that the ability “to take risks is hugely valuable.” Every successful innovation has been a risk. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations dedicates an entire chapter to the power of failure. According to Shirky “failure is free, high-quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn’t.” If local chapters are innovating, acting on ideas, and sharing their successes and failures with other chapters and YDA, the organization benefits greatly. That is the advantage of being a local chapter: you have the power to try new things.

Don’t get stuck in the belief that you have to do things the way they have always been done or be afraid to try something because it has never been done before. Think about ideas that come from other areas and see if you can find a way to apply them to your goals. Read books that change the way you approach problems, books like Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, etc. Read blogs and articles from other disciplines, from psychology to marketing and anything in between. The most important thing is to not hide your failures, but to share them. The more we know about was hasn’t worked, the better we are able to come up with ideas that might work.

The YDA Winter Conference is a great opportunity for Young Democrats to get training on topics such as working with the media, chapter-building, peer-to-peer organizing, fundraising and many more! This is also an opportunity to meet and share ideas with fellow Young Democrats around the country and bring home to Arizona the best practices of other states.

Please click on the link below to make a donation to the Young Democrats of Arizona to help send members from across the state to this important conference.

https://secure.ydaz.org/page/contribute/YDAanaheim

Without your help some of our members that want to attend will not be able to afford the cost of travel and lodging. Please consider making an investment in our young political activists and organizers, because Arizona needs to show that an engaged youth community is not a fluke.

https://secure.ydaz.org/page/contribute/YDAanaheim

Las Vegas, NV-Three Democratic youth groups-Democrats Work, Young Voter PAC and Young Democrats of Nevada-are teaming up in Nevada to let young people know they need to caucus for Democrats on January 19th, but they don’t want it to be a one night stand.

“The lesson of Iowa and New Hampshire is that if you connect with young people in meaningful ways, they get involved,” said Thomas Bates, executive director of Democrats Work. “Our mission at Democrats Work is to engage young people in a new kind of politics - a politics of service - that blends community service and political action to make sure they stay involved after Saturday. Helping to turn out the youth vote on Saturday is the first step. With community service projects, Democrats will make sure that we don’t wait until November to engage young people again.”

Using a creative message to get young people’s attention and using non-traditional outreach in high school parking lots, bars and coffee shops, the three Democratic youth groups are hitting the streets to get their peers to the Nevada caucus and to provide opportunities all year long for them to stay involved in Democratic politics.

“Since August, the Young Democrats of Nevada have been aggressively educating young voters about the caucus process at high schools, colleges and communities around the state,” said Jason Fromoltz, President of the Young Democrats of Nevada. “We have seen firsthand the excitement among Nevada’s youth that has been generated by this campaign season and know that the youth vote will play a crucial role in deciding the winner of the Nevada Democratic Presidential Caucus.”

All three groups will remain active in Nevada after the caucus is over. Through community service programs, Young Democrat chapters and supporting candidates who target young people, the groups offer a wide range of activities young people in Nevada can do to have a “meaningful relationship with Democracy.” Research shows that with continued involvement more young people will show up for Democrats on Election Day in November.

“Young people showed up strong for Democrats in both Iowa and New Hampshire, now all eyes are on Nevada,” said Jane Fleming Kleeb, the executive director of the Young Voter PAC. “Nevada young people increased their voting in 2004 by 13% and we know if candidates and youth groups target young people they will turn out again.”

More About the Groups:
Leaders of the groups quoted in this release, and featured below, will be in Las Vegas and are available for interviews. Press is also welcome to come with the volunteers to bars and other spots around Las Vegas.

Democrats Work is a national organization that mobilizes Democratic volunteers to do community service projects. Last year, DW partnered with Democratic organizations and elected officials in Nevada to paint out graffiti in Las Vegas and build trails and cleanup parks in Reno. Democrats Work was founded by Bates and his college roommate, Jason Carter, who is the son of 2006 U.S. Senate candidate, Jack Carter, and a grandson of former President Jimmy Carter.

Young Voter PAC, a national group that helps Democrats win with the youth vote, is based on a simple idea…that politics is better off with more young people involved. The youth vote has emerged as a critical bloc of voters for Democrats in recent years and the Young Voter PAC helps Democratic candidates, state parties and allied groups with their youth vote strategies.

Young Democrats of Nevada is the official youth arm of the Nevada State Democratic Party. The Young Democrats is the largest youth political organization in the state of Nevada, comprised of chapters from schools and communities from around the state.

Join the Young Voter PAC Facebook Cause by Clicking Here