President’s Message

We find ourselves more than a month into the new administration and already many of us are worried, angry, and overwhelmed by what we see every day on the news.

On Presidents’ Day, citizens from across the country, and many from our own caucus, marched in protest of the shocking policies and actions that have been taken in these first few weeks of this administration It is critical that our voices be heard and our numbers counted. It is equally important that our deeply held values and issues be clearly addressed by our words and the sheer quantity of our comments and contacts.

At our meeting in February, Joanne Bazarian, Myra Coble, and others shared some of the online resources that they are using to make their voices heard. In particular they mentioned Resist.bot and 5 Calls. I was curious so I did some research. I found an interesting article that led me to wonder “What kind of impact could our NWPC Fresno caucus have if we used some of these strategies to reach out to our representatives? And what if we targeted particular legislation or spoke out about our core NWPC issues?”

The article I found is from the online publication The Verge. Here is a brief overview of the short online article. I encourage you to read the entire article for yourself.

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Six Ways To Send A Message To Your Representatives

https://www.theverge.com/how-to/606200/government-senate-congress-contact-apps

USA.gov
This site lets you enter your address in order to find out who your federal, state, and local officials are.  Once you’ve got the list, you can click on each name to find out their party affiliation, main address, phone number, email address, web site, and contact info for Facebook and X. You can also click
on a button to immediately send an email.

Congress.gov
To find information about what’s going on in Congress, a good place to start is Congress.gov, where you can get a rundown of when every bill is introduced, passes the House, passes the Senate, goes to the President, and is finally signed — assuming it gets that far. You can see a summary of each
bill, and so much more.

GovTrack.us
A less formal educational source, and one not actually sponsored by the government, GovTrack asserts that “We’re tracking the activities of the United States Congress to help you be the best advocate for the issues you care about and to create a more open and accountable government.”

Democracy.io
Democracy.io is a basic web site that says it just wants to make it easier for people to send email to their representatives. You put in your address, and you are given a list of your federal representatives: your senators and your congressional representatives. You check the ones you want to contact, and you’re given a form where you can put in a title, a message, your name and contact info, and a drop-down list of the topic you’re writing about (which can vary, depending on the specific representative). And that’s it! No fuss, no muss.

5 Calls
The motto of the 5 Calls app is “Make your voice heard: Spend 5 minutes, make 5 calls.” Available for both iOS and Android phones, the purpose of this app is to make it easier to call your representative’s office, which it asserts is much more effective than emails or texts. Enter your address or zip code to find your representatives. You will see a list of the top issues of the day, which you can filter by topics such as gun safety, immigration, or reproductive rights. Once you choose a specific issue, you are provided with a brief backgrounder, together with a list of which representatives you should call.  Select a name, and you get a phone number to click on along with a complete script to read from.

Resist.bot
According to its description, Resist.bot lets you, turn “your texts into faxes, postal mail, or emails to your representatives in minutes.” In other words, the idea is to make it as simple as possible to send out your concerns. Resist.bot may work especially well for those who are more comfortable texting than making a phone call or writing an email.

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I encourage all of us to explore these online resources (and any others you may find) and maybe try one or two of them out. If we want to make our voices heard we can’t march and carry signs every day, but what we can do any day is call, fax, email, etc. We can commend our reps when they stand up for the things we support. But, by the same token we can remind our representatives that we are watching and listening and we will not support the destruction of our democracy.

Now is the time for us to take constructive action. These resources give us an easy way to stand up for our rights and our country. Let’s challenge ourselves to not stand by quietly as chaos reigns.
 
In Unity and with Conviction,

Lynn