Description: We created this site so we'd have a forum to talk about the Fund for the Public Interest and more broadly, the value of canvassing. For the last 30 years, we’ve been working to improve our society--in particular, by hiring canvassers to knock on the doors of anyone who will listen and ask them to join us in improving America. We’ve learned that canvassing works & a whole lot more about making an impact. We hope this site provides you with additional information about what works and what doesn’t when
In June, on a bright and cloudless Saturday morning in Alhambra, my friend and I pulled up to a small grassy wedge of a public park to help canvass for Planned Parenthood.
Our job, the organizer informed us, was easy: We would pass out leaflets to as many houses as possible, and if we came face to face with any residents, we would give some basic information about the services Planned Parenthood provides. Armed with pamphlets, water bottles and sunscreen, we set out to do something that feels increasingly archaic in today’s political environment: talk to strangers, face to face, on their own front porches. And about politics, no less.
Politics has gotten less personal, but that doesn’t mean that people have gotten less political. Social media allows us to interact politically without seeing each other’s faces. In some ways, this had made politics more vitriolic: we now can engage in ferocious debates with Twitter icons, launch ad hominem attacks on Facebook avatars and post meaner and nastier comments than we would probably ever have the guts to say to another person’s face.