Although I had received an incredibly supportive welcome from campaign organizers at the San Francisco office, I was happy to move to the simpler tasks of the grassroots campaign, for which I felt much more qualified.
I have been working primarily out of an office in San Rafael, run by two members of Green Core who recently graduated college. I spend my time phone banking, meeting with volunteers and attending rallies in the surrounding area.
San Rafael, being sunny, beautiful, and inhabited by a fair few crunchy, eco-friendly people, is of course not a bad place to be working on an environmental campaign.
Having a fear of phones that makes me avoid calls even with my closest friends, I never thought of myself as a prime candidate for phone banking. Despite my hesitation, it has become one of my favorite activities. Most people don’t pick up, and many that do are clearly not in the mood to talk. The rare person though who seems truly enthusiastic makes up for all the disappointments, and I often find myself full of adrenaline after a successful phone banking session. There is also a camaraderie with the other phone bankers, as you chat together while phones ring.
Obviously phone banking is laborious and slow, but there is a feeling of accomplishment that I found lacking in other activities, a sense of reaching real, live voters (who can otherwise seem almost like mythical creatures, as you discuss them at length but never actually meet them).
I enjoy rallies tremendously, but from the outside of a campaign, I honestly thought they served more as moral boosters for the volunteers rather than influencing voters. My opinion was changed late one night, as I sat phone banking. After only the first few sentences of my “schpiel,” the man on the phone interrupted me, asking if this was the proposition he had seen all the people waving signs for the previous weekend. Having been at the rally he was referring to, I could tell him honestly that it was.
“That’s ok then,” he told me. “We’re voting no. We don’t support big oil. You can call someone else now.”
– Evi Steyer
Tom Steyer is co-Chair, with former Secretary of State George Shultz, of the campaign to oppose Proposition 23 in California, an initiative that would undercut California’s commitment to clean energy.
Evi Steyer is one of Tom and Kat’s four children. She graduated from San Francisco’s University High School in 2010 and is taking a year off to volunteer on the Prop 23 campaign and travel, before starting Yale in the fall of 2011.
They are writing a regular father-daughter, intra-generational blog to share concerns and fears, as well as ideas and hopes about the future of California’s environment.