OGR Organizing Coordinator

OGR: Organizing Coordinator (Maya Sullivan)

To my successor,

Congratulations on being hired as the Organizing Coordinator for the 2017-2018 school year. I hope you enjoy your time working here as much as I have.

This last year the position of Organizing Coordinator has been shared by Sidney Orr, the General Manager, and myself. Sidney was OC from September 2016-January 2017, and I was OC from February 2017-June 2017. This means that the institutional knowledge to complete your job effectively is shared between the two of us. Sidney can comment extensively on the voter registration drive and Huskies on the Hill, and I have included all the information I believe you will need about recruitment for Engage UW and voter institutionalization in your transition documents and on the Google Drive.

The Organizing Coordinator can very well be the most intimidating position in the office. You will be required to begin work setting up the voter registration drive three weeks before anyone else is in the office. You have to coordinate and manage volunteers from other organizations. You also have to begin recruiting your own volunteers for Engage UW. The Organizing Coordinator is a very forward facing position; you serve as the liaison between 45,000 students on campus and the OGR.

You also have some of the broadest set of tasks of anyone in the office. You will have to plan large scale events and campaigns, manage volunteers, serve as a liaison between the office and many other groups both on and off campus. This position is challenging but it is also rewarding. I think as long as you are passionate about political engagement and working with the general public, which I’m sure you already are considering you have been hired, you will be extremely successful in this position.

Best,

Evan Ulman

Organizing Coordinator, February-June 2017

Voter Registration Drive 

Your first responsibility will be executing the voter registration drive, much of which has been planned for you already. So far we have planned:

• To hand out voter registration forms at IFC’s and Panhellenic’s new member orientation sessions
• To distribute voter registration forms to every dorm room on campus
• To have a table at the Midnight Carnival during Dawg Daze

I would recommend, if you are available, attending the Voter Registration Summit hosted by the Washington Bus and the Washington Student Association of June 10 at UW Bothell. Sidney has gone through the voter registration drive before and did a wonderful job with it; she will likely be your best resource.

Get Out the Vote

After the voter registration drive is completed, you need to begin the Get Out the Vote campaign. That’s right, now that hundreds of students are now eligible and registered to vote for the first time, you now need to encourage them to actually use that right. Last year, we had an event called Rock the Vote because we had the money in our budget to do a large scale event in collaboration with Rainy Dawg Radio for GOTV. I don’t know if we’ll have the budget to do so again, so I assume that the GOTV campaign will be as extensive as you plan it to be.

Engage UW

Engage UW is the grassroots volunteering force behind the Office of Government Relations. It is a committee for students who are interested in civic engagement, political advocacy, and fostering an environment of increased political participation on campus. You are there to help the members of Engage UW realize their potential in the OGR, ASUW, and campus as a whole and, in tern, Engage UW is there to help you work on OGR events and projects, plan future projects such as the voter registration institutionalization plan, and manage social media accounts.

As the OGR Organizing Coordinator, it is your job to manage the offices various social media accounts and the office’s website. It is important to keep the website updated with the office’s current legislative agendas, events, and employees. You will have to update the tab on our website with our current employees to include yourself. Since managing so many accounts can be overwhelming, I would suggest delegating the management of accounts to members of Engage UW who are interested in managing social media or are pursuing a future in PR.

I have included a very detailed circular on how to promote, recruit, and retain members for Engage UW within the Google Drive. I have included all of the steps that I found to be effective in recruiting volunteers. This will also help you avoid some of the mistakes that I made early on. I hope that it will be of great help to you.

Once you have the committee assembled, Engage UW should meet once a week. Make sure you have a prepared slide show for every meeting recapping the week and introducing what projects the committee will be working on next. Also give the committee members a chance to add their own slides to the end of the power point. This is a good opportunity for them to advertise events and projects that their communities are working on to other members. After all, members of Engage UW are also an important resource for each other.

It was Sidney’s intention to set each Engage UW member up with an OGR mentor, choses from among you, Allegra, Tyler, Kate, and Alex. She hoped that this would raise retention rates of members of Engage UW and ensure that the members are getting the access to the OGR that they need to grow. I never attempted to do this because my coworkers never exhibited great interest in it, but that does not mean it is a bad idea. Those who are interested in lobbying more directly in Olympia should be paired up with the Director of Legislative Affairs. Those who want to lobby on the county and city level should be paired up with the Local Legislative Liaison. Those who are interested in policy research and strategy should be paired up with the General Manager. Those who are interested in on-campus civic engagement efforts should be paired up with you or the Legislative Programming Director. If you believe that this is something you would like to organize, I would encourage you to pursue it.

None of the things I’ve outlined have to be followed by you by any means. The great thing about this position is that there is a lot of room for you to make it your own. The most important thing to remember about chairing the Engage UW committee is that you are always providing committee members with opportunities to grow. Talk to members of the office every week about projects Engage UW to work on. The worst thing you can do is leave your committee with nothing to do. Engage UW is an amazing resource for this office and many current ASUW employees have found their passion for this organization by beginning as members of Engage UW.

Huskies on the Hill

Huskies on the Hill is the OGR’s annual lobby day in which we bus students down to Olympia to meet and lobby legislators about issues relating to higher ed. This is a great opportunity to introduce legislators to student stories about how challenges in the accessibility and affordability of college affect residents of their districts. You will mostly help the LPC and GM plan some of the details of this event. For you, it is most important that you build support and excitement for this event on campus and encourage Engage UW to attend.

Spark Idea-thon/Administrative Reception

Spark resembles the Legislative Reception we have in the Spring. This year, however, LPC Kate Graham has made a number of changes to make the administrative reception more interactive. Luckily, the responsibility for this event does not rest predominantly on you, but will mostly be directed by the LPC, with the help of you and Engage UW.

Spark is an event where the OGR invites members of the Administration and the UW student body to break into teams and formulate ideas about how to improve certain aspects of university life. The topics will be decided beforehand to facilitate better discussion between students and administrators. This year, Provost Jerry Baldasty has promised that the top three ideas which impose little or no cost to the university will be implemented, no questions asked. The idea behind this event if for UW students to meet with administrators to engage in discussions about how the administrators are providing for the students and to voice any concerns the students may have.

This event is typically attended by most ASUW employees, but it is critical that you and Engage UW put in the work to encourage students from all communities, especially ones that are disadvantaged on campus, to Spark so that administrators are engaging with students that reflect all groups on campus. You can do this by calling on members of Engage to reach out to their own communities, attending the meetings of various RSO’s on campus, and by enlisting the help of the Diversity Commissions within ASUW.

Voter Institutionalization Plan

This might be the most important but also least rewarding part of the job: preparing for next year’s voter registration drive. Although a different Organizing Coordinator will be running the voter registration drive, the work you put in now to establish a solid framework for the drive is crucial. One of the main challenges you will face is implementing the next step of the Vote Institutionalization Plan. This plan is essentially the culmination of everything we want to see happen eventually. We’re working towards a campus where the students are engaged because we as a university place institutional value behind civics.

The Voter Institutionalization Plan was created by the Organizing Coordinator for 2015-2016, Josh Mackintosh. Both Sidney and myself have begun to scrutinize and edit this plan so that it has a chance of becoming apart of university policy. However, the goal of a truly institutionalized voter registration on campus is still a ways out. That is why it will be your responsibility, after executing the voter registration plan for the fall of 2017, to reflect on your experiences and begin to draft solutions as to how to make this process easier for next year.

A copy of the Voter Institutionalization Plan can be found in your Google Drive account. I have instructed Engage UW to help me begin editing the original document, and so there may be multiple drafts available. This past year, the largest step we made on the voter registration institutionalization plan was teaming up with Housing and Food Services during move in. We were allowed to put voter registration forms in all of the dorms and set up collection tables in the lobbies. This year, RAs will be collecting the forms, making move in much more efficient and helping us reach many of the incoming freshmen. Next year’s Voter Registration Institutionalization will also hopefully include the addition of working with the administration. More info on that in the plan.

The Washington Student Association 

The Washington Student Association is a statewide network of college campuses which collaborate on lobbying for shared interests in Olympia. Alex Wirth, the Director for 2016-2017, describes the WSA as being like the United Nations of student lobbying groups across Washington state. The UW is a member of the WSA, and the ASUW and GPSS are represented individually at the General Assembly. The UW pays the most dues along with Washington State University, capped at $15,000 per year, due in the Fall and in the Spring. The UW has 9 votes in the General Assembly and is generally one of the most influential players for obvious reasons.

The WSA provides many benefits for the ASUW and OGR. For one, lobbying with student lobbyists from campuses across the state increases our informal influence in the legislature. Many legislators will not take students from the UW as seriously as students from WSU or Western or wherever else. Part of this has to do with alumni rivalries, another part has to due with whether students at a particular campus actually live and vote in a legislator’s district. The WSA also helps us pool resources and provides us office space in Olympia. It is of my opinion that the WSA provides the ASUW enough benefits to outweigh the annual $15,000 in dues.

However, the UW is not currently paying anything in dues. When we were back up to register for the STAR system earlier this year, we failed to collect the over 8,100 signatures required. As such, while the UW is still a full voting member of the WSA, we are not contributing our fair share of dues and the WSA is currently operating on an emergency budget.

Alex and I have begun to search for other ways to find funding for the WSA. One such solution has been USEED, which is a similar model to GoFundMe. We would rely on voluntary donations from the student body to raise our required dues. I do not believe that this is a permanent solution. You may or may not be tasked with helping run the USEED campaign next year. As such, it has been my goal to get the WSA back on the STAR system. It will be your job to help make that a reality. It will be difficult; we will not have the help of WashPIRG this year. I have begun talking with the Director of Internal Policy, Bo Goodrich, about finding a way to lower the number of required signatures required to get back on the STAR system. But this is no guarantee that your job will be easier.

Getting back on the STAR system will require a massive signature gathering effort. I would recommend that you recruit for Engage UW very early on in the year and have those volunteers help you with the process. I would also recommend placing your most effective and willing volunteers in positions within the WSA-UW chapter, which currently exists in name only. Rebuilding an effective WSA-UW chapter will be necessary to share the burden between yourself and other stakeholders. A new president will have been elected by the time you are hired. You should encourage that individual to help take some of the responsibility off of you during the signature drive, especially considering how you cannot use your office ours to canvas for this effort.

Website/Social Media

I have begun to revitalize our website/social media accounts. Previously, the office’s online presence was poor. I’ve begun meeting with OComm to redesign our logo and graphic design. But I’ve only started this process, and it will be up to you to finish building the website and to keep all of our social media accounts updated. I would recommend passing off some of these responsibilities to Engage UW volunteers. Appoint one to help you with social media, another with the website, and so on. This gives some of the volunteers more agency in the OGR as well as makes it less work for you.

In Conclusion

In addition to these three key factors, it is also your job to assist the other members of the office on whatever projects they are working on. Make sure you are constantly communicating with the Director of Legislative Affairs and the Local Legislative Liaison to find out what projects you and Engage can work on.

Some of the main issues I faced this past year were ranging from miscommunication in the office and coordinating efforts to combatting the lack of civic engagement on our campus. Furthermore, you will find that there may be institutional impediments to completing your job effectively. Always feel free to ask me for assistance if you run into trouble communicating with other members of the office, ASUW, or the university administration as a whole.

This means you will need to act as the conduit between students (yes, the entire student body) and the Director of Legislative Affairs in Olympia. The best way to affect positive change is to use the power behind student stories when talking with legislators and it’s your job to get him those stories.

I hope these transition documents helps you in getting up to speed. I would recommend looking through your Google Drive; there are a lot of documents available there which you might find useful.

Best of luck,

Evan Ulman

1) UWNetID/Email:

Username: asuwogr1

Password: asuwRocks!

2) Twitter

Username: ASUW_OGR

Password: asuwogr!

3) Instagram:

Username: asuw_ogr

Password: asuwogr!

4) Website: www.ogr.asuw.org/wp-admin

Username: asuwogr1

Password: asuwRocks!

5) ASUW Computers

Username: asuwogr1

Password: ogrogr

6) HUB Reservations

Username: asuwogra@uw.edu

Password: ogra14

7) RSO Print Code (for Resource Center): asuwogr-gov

8) SAO Copier Code: 1245

9) USEED Account

Username: asuwogr1@uw.edu

Password: DT2-wcz-CJX-vv3

• Promptly answer emails and slack messages
• Attend weekly staff meetings
• Prepare for and host Engage UW meetings
• Work on projects with other members of the office
• If time permits, work on your own civic engagement projects

Quarterly Goals

Fall:

• Voter Registration Drive
• Get Out the Vote
• Legislative Reception
• Engage UW (Begin Recruiting)
• USEED/WSA-UW signature drive

Winter:

• Engage UW (Weekly meetings)
• Lobby Day
• General lobbying projects
• Husky Stories (Talk to the Director of Internal Policy)

Spring

• Engage UW (Continued meetings)
• Administrative Reception
• Voter Institutionalization Plan
  • Begin meeting with HFS and Administration
  • Create a comprehensive plan for next year’s drive

Contacts/Meetings

In the Fall, the OC must attend weekly staff meetings and Legislative programming meetings. In the Winter and Spring, your only weekly meeting obligation will be the OGR’s weekly staff meetings. You will also be expected to hold weekly Engage UW meetings once the committee is assembled.

Loose ends

Engage UW is the grassroots volunteering force behind the Office of Government Relations. It is a committee for students who are interested in civic engagement, political advocacy, and fostering an environment of increased political participation on campus. You are there to help the members of Engage UW realize their potential in the OGR, ASUW, and campus as a whole and, in tern, Engage UW is there to help you work on OGR events and projects, plan future projects such as the voter registration institutionalization plan, and manage social media accounts.

Outreach