(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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"People are eager to connect in a meaningful way." - NC Elections [1]
['Gwen Frisbie-Fulton', 'Posted On January']
Date: 2022-01-26
Calling strangers and asking them to talk about politics doesn’t sound like it would work, but this is exactly what Down Home’s Deep Canvassing team has been doing thousands of times over this year– with proven results.
There’s a stereotype about rural folks being suspicious of outsiders and our deep canvassers are proving it wrong. Tabatha Davis, a Down Home member and deep canvasser who lives out in the country herself, says that the further out she goes to knock on a door, the more eager people seem to be to talk. “You just have to show them you aren’t trying to sell them something or get them to do anything,” she says. “You can show them that you are there to listen because you are a lot like them and care.”
Neko Schmidt makes deep canvassing calls from his basement that doubles as his art studio. Sometimes his kids join him, keeping him company as he works. “Sure some folks just hang up on you,” he explains. “But on a good night you will get three or four really good conversations where you feel like the person is really heard.”
“Often you will talk to someone who doesn’t think their opinion matters because they are not educated about politics or they don’t see themselves particularly interested in politics. Once you tell them these politics impact them and by that fact alone their opinion matters, they start to open up.”
“It helps that I’m actually very curious,” he adds.
This sentiment is echoed by everyone on the Down Home Deep Canvassing team. Each seems eager to share that they do this work to impact political change, but also are open to how the work can and does change them. When this curiosity and openness comes across in the conversation, it can be transformative.
Elena Peterson, another member of the team, shares a recent conversation she had with a nurse in a long term care facility who was against vaccine mandates and hadn’t gotten vaccinated herself. She was looking at being fired over this choice.
“In a non-deep canvassing context, I might have thrown my hands up and said I don’t know how to have a conversation about this!” admits Elena. But instead she shared about her own mother who works in healthcare and feels overburdened and not listened to. “This really resonated [with her] and she talked about how much she cared about her job and the relationships she had there.”
“A lot of her hesitancy around the vaccine was based in her sense that she felt abandoned by the government during the course of the pandemic and that she felt she was giving so much with no support at all,” explains Elena. “The vaccine was one more example of higher ups making things scarier and more difficult for her.”
“I thought vaccines would be this impenetrable thing we couldn’t talk through, but it wasn’t. [I told her that] to me government works best when it’s a reflection of the people it serves, and this really resonated with her. No new facts were shared, there was no groundbreaking, no lightbulb – but we did reorient over this conversation.”
[END]
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[1] Url:
https://downhomenc.org/2022/01/26/people-are-eager-to-connect-in-a-meaningful-way/
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