Precinct Committee Person Roles, Responsibilities, and Training

I missed the on-line training I was going to do last Thursday, and it hasn’t been posted yet, so I changed direction a bit on today’s post: I have been working for awhile on the roles and responsibilities of Precinct Committee People and the training they need to be successful. I have learned so much from the National Democratic Training Committee, so I will reference them a lot in this post.

A lot of our friends and neighbors voted against their own interests in the last election. How can they be so disconnected?

Disconnection comes pretty easily. Most of us don’t know any of our local officials and politicians. Since Laramie County Democrats are so under-represented in government, it is almost impossible to know Laramie County Democratic activists on a personal basis. “Democrats” are those boogeymen that Facebook says we are.

The obvious solution to disconnection is connection! The role of the Precinct Committee Woman and Precinct Committee Man is to develop and relay a cohesive Democratic message to the voters and spur involvement block by block and county road by county road. The faces of the Laramie County Precinct Committee People are literally the face of the Party. Many of our precincts have no committee people at all, so it is no wonder that our candidates have a hard time getting traction. If you want to change the world, becoming a Laramie County Committee Person is the place to start. We need you!

The responsibilities of the successful committee person are clear: First, you organize. You can’t do it alone, but a precinct team of three or four is a powerful force.

Once you have your team, create a Democratic presence in your community. The pandemic really hurt Democrats, because it minimized our door-to-door, personal canvassing. However, the pandemic will pass (if we wear our masks, wash our hands, and get a vaccine when we can). When it does, you and your team can be trained and ready to knock on doors. We can use the VoteBuilder tool to learn a little bit about the doors you will knock on. We might want to start by talking to the Democrats in our precinct and find out what issues are important to them, so we know how to help. At the same time, we can work to get them active in the party, as well. There are, no doubt, talented activists out there that just don’t know where to start. We can also figure out which voters may not be registered and make sure they vote in the next election.

You can also organize activities to get to know the Democrats in your area. Picnics, pot-lucks, and pizza parties can go a long way toward community building. When you have more fun, you will make more connections. As you get to know your community better, opportunities for service work that will specifically impact your community will arise. When you identify those needs, we can all help out.

This precinct-level approach sounds like hard work and it is! Anytime you get an opportunity to change the world, there is hard work involved. Just as a football team wins on Friday night in the fall because of the work in the weight room in the dark of winter, our candidates will be winners in November of 2022 because of the action you take in 2021.

Make a difference today! Contact fieldteam@laramiecountydemocrats.org We can tell you if there are committee people in your precinct and help you make a plan to get involved. Training and support are available at the county, state, and national level—you won’t be alone. We truly need you!

We have talked a lot about the National Democratic Training Committee (traindemocrats.org). Training is a force-multiplier! We all know, based on life-experience, that training makes you a more effective leader. A Precinct Committee Person is truly a local leader. If you answer a few questions on the traindemocrats.org site, you will be given a training roadmap for a local leader. We all have a hard time fitting training for something like this into our busy schedule, and I confess that I am only part-way done with the training. These are all web-based, self-paced courses. There are a total of 22 courses. The suggested time to take them adds up to about 21 hours. Whew! Obviously, this is something that will require weeks to complete!

However, this is a good time to do it, if we can squeeze it in. We aren’t likely to be doing too much outside during a Wyoming January and February. It is worth at least getting far enough to develop your own road map.

We are planning local communications training starting in February, so there is a lot of training coming!