Why You Don't Volunteer

TL:DR It's not just you. It's your options. Until now.

You care about democracy. You know it is in trouble, Very Big Trouble. You understand that if it collapses, and it could, everything else you care about collapses. Health care, climate, justice, your basic ability to live without some knuckle dragging moron making very important, very personal decisions about your life and the life of people you care about. You're smart, your're informed, you see the danger. You even say to yourself: I should do something. I wish I could do something. If only I could do something. But you don’t.

Why not?

Because the way volunteering works now is a mess. It's not your fault. You're busy. You have a job or you are working hard to get one. You have a family. You'd give time, but only if that time is not wasted on some pointless make-work. You want to spend your time and effort on the most important problem, with people you like and respect, in a way that fits your schedule, in a way that actually matters, that builds something that lasts. These are not unreasonable demands. It's just basic human motivation. If you are going to carve out then hand over hours of your life for free, it damn well better be worth it.

But if you want to spend your time saving US democracy, your options suck. You can wait around for some candidate campaign to show up and maybe they’ll let you phone bank. Yay. Almost all the institutions and campaigns that should be interested in your time and effort seem to focus on fundraising more than anything else. And their "calls to action" don't feel like they are really building much.

Meanwhile, the political class fetishizes this or that demographic that we "lost" and our salvation lies in engaging said demographic to “get us over the line.” This is not the way things work. The world is not going to be saved by some cross-tabbing data nerd pointing to some Other group. It will be saved by people in their own communities, talking to people they know, people who trust them. That’s where the power is. And that is where our democracy will be rebuilt or lost.

But "engage with your own community" is almost as abstract and BSey as engaging with some data nerd identified swing demographic. Fine. You're willing. But because you have no idea where or how to "engage with your community" in some useful way, you don’t volunteer. Instead, you panic donate to a campaign that bought your contact information from some other campaign. You doom scroll and stew in anxiety. And the underlying problem keeps getting worse.

Here's some truth, sibling: we can save US democracy. But it requires more than an array of candidate campaigns and each of us regularly freaking out every even year October about this newest end-of-the-world election. It requires building real networks of real people who keep showing up for one another, year after year. Something calm, manageable, continuous, and permanent. Something that belongs to us, not to consultants, candidates, pundits, or staff.

As grandma said, many hands make light work. But man do we need some hands, pronto. And those hands need to be deployed in a way that grows and compounds and spreads from one group to the next, yes and even one demographic to the next, until it is everywhere.

That is what Turnout Nation is trying to do. We give people work that actually fits with their lives. You aren't calling and texting strangers from a list. You aren't left in the cold when the campaign ends. It really matters if you show up because you have real responsibility. You build something, with a bunch of other cool people throughout the country. You increase voter turnout at scale, helping people help their friends to vote, proven to work an order of magnitude better than all other ways.

The reason you don't volunteer to save American democracy is because nobody gave you the right thing to do.

Now you have it.

P.S.

This whole thing is not code for asking for your money, we don't want it.

We want your commitment and a little bit of time.

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