Team AOC Year in Review - Part One

 

Welcome to part one of our 2021 Year in Review email series highlighting some of our major accomplishments from the year.

As we get ready to wrap up 2021, we’re excited to highlight some of our movement’s major accomplishments from the year.

We can’t talk about this past year without talking about the climate and our work to move the needle forward on the Green New Deal. So that brings us to part one of this series focusing on our Green New Deal deep canvass program.

In order to win a Green New Deal, we know we need to organize and talk to people one-on-one about what it is, how it would impact them, and what they can do to help.

So we decided to lead by example starting in our own district and developed a program to train volunteers to phone bank, text bank, and canvas door-to-door to talk with voters about the Green New Deal and the proposed NRG fracked gas power plant planned in Astoria, Queens.*

* NRG is a Texas based energy company whose current power plant in the district is so dirty that the state is forcing it to shut down by 2023. But the company wanted to replace it with a fracked gas plant that would continue to pollute our community and climate just the same — instead of with a renewable energy option.

From January to October 2021, here’s what we accomplished:

• 619 volunteers trained in deep canvassing
• 68 door to door and phone bank events
• 162,225 phone calls
• 3,349 doors knocked
• Successfully stopped the NRG fracked gas power plant

Working with a coalition of local elected officials, community organizations, and activists, the pressure from our campaigning resulted in the NY Department of Environmental Conservation denying the permit for the power plant in a huge victory for our community and for environmental justice.

After Hurricane Ida devastated our community, we pivoted and used our weekly canvasses to share FEMA resources while drawing connections to the climate crisis, extreme weather, and the Green New Deal. We texted over 200,000 people with FEMA relief info.

Our conversations with voters focused on deep canvass techniques of sharing personal stories and finding common ground – and we tracked our persuasion efforts by asking voters to rank their favorability towards the GND on a 10-point scale, once at the start of the conversation and again at the end.

We learned valuable lessons about the efficacy of phone vs. in-person communication with voters, what scripts were most effective at persuading constituents, and the need to create more bilingual resources about the Green New Deal.

This was a big undertaking, Robert, but a worthwhile one. Most campaigns only organize around elections, but our campaign is different. We know that talking to voters only when it's time to vote is not enough to win the change we need. Transformative change and organizing isn’t just electoral.

It requires outside community organizing on and off election years. That is our path forward and that’s why we will continue to invest our resources into advocacy and deep organizing in 2022.

None of this would have been possible without your support and we’re so grateful for all of you.

Stay tuned for more highlights from 2021 to come.

Team AOC