By Pam Poindexter
Tonight we had 15 people attend GAI’s first official Blue Power Hour via Zoom. Even though this weekly event is scheduled at the same time as our old postcarding action hour, in the interest of making this event more inclusive, the GAI core team decided to give it a more general title — thus GAI’s Blue Power Hour. For the past 2 weeks we’ve made postcard packages available for pick up, so when we posted it in our newsletter and social media we said “Bring postcards and letters to write, petitions to sign, your phone for texting, or just yourself to share some social time”. We were hoping to attract people whether they wanted to an activity or just enjoy some company.
I am aware of only 4 people who were actively writing postcards during the call. Another person said she brought them, but got so involved in the discussion, didn’t touch them. While we did not do that much postcarding during the call, I consider it a huge success. It was a very good discussion, which flowed from the topic of the isolation resulting from the Coronavirus, to politics, to social issues. The call provided a good opportunity to connect, see how people are doing and enhance relationships. Most of the people on the call are very active doing postcarding, texting or other activist work at other times during the week, so I do not feel the urge to push actual postcarding during the call. I also took note of some people who were not on the call, whom I think would enjoy it, so plan on reaching out to them directly just before the next one. I’m hoping that as people observe others postcarding or texting, it will catch on, but as I said before, we don’t want to make it a requirement during these challenging times.
I hope this is helpful. If you have any suggestions or best practice from other groups to share, I’d love to hear them.
Thanks for all the amazing work you guys do!
Pam Poindexter
Greater Andover Indivisible