The Joy of Organizing
We had our first successful campus Green Party meeting on Thursday night, and I have to admit that I found it kind of invigorating. By nature, I’m fairly disorganized and I tend to avoid people, but I was at the top of my facilitating form. I was including as many people in conversation as possible; leading discussion to help people come up with new ideas; and by keeping a good balance between on-topic work, and off-topic social chatter. The best part was the energy of the other folks there: they seemed really pumped by the idea of organizing social events, and getting students to vote Green.
I’m really glad that I stuck with the organizing. The first few events that we put together weren’t too encouraging. We got lots of interest, but that didn’t seem to translate to getting volunteers to share the workload. I credit the Make Poverty History event with the turnaround. Four of the six people at the meeting volunteered at the MPH table, and another signed up at the event. I guess the moral of the story is that by asking people to volunteer, you get more volunteers. By asking people to help out, you build a relationship and make them feel like they have have something to contribute.
The trick now, of course, is to turn our proto-success at Carleton University into something larger. We need an active Green Party club on every university, college, and high school campus in Canada.
