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Building Local Coalitions - One E-Mail Address at a Time
Campaigns & Elections, Dec.-Jan. 2000

By Chris Lavin

In a small town in the San Francisco Bay Area this fall, a small issues campaign became part of the sea change occurring in politics throughout the country. During a debate broadcast on public access television - largely believed to be "throw-away" publicity by many political consultants - one of the panelists mentioned the Web address of the "No" side's Internet site.

An hour later, there were 38 visitors "live" on the Web site. In a city of 40,000, with roughly 4,000 active voters, that is not a bad turnout. Each had an opportunity to volunteer for the campaign from the Web site, and to donate money online.

A lot of attention has been paid to the Internet as a global communicator, and over the past several months, that attention has focused on the Internet's potential for building coalitions. Yet the Internet's strength is likely to turn out to be as a local communicator - a way for neighborhoods to build coalitions of their own that end up connecting to other coalitions of like-minded people to increase their political clout.

The main reason: It has never before been easier to organize around an issue and to keep people informed.

"It's so much easier to get involved now," said Mark Morodomi, past president of the Asian Bar Association of Sacramento, in California. "I have e-mail here from the African American community telling me about a Martin Luther King benefit, and it's gone out to the African Americans, Asian Americans, people at UC-Davis, the local politicians, the police department and more. And all that can be done with one e-mail."

Now that we live in an age when people e-mail each other -- even if they are sitting next to each other at work -- one of the greatest benefits is that the e-mail revolution is likely to reach even the people who feel disenchanted with the political system, and have "dropped out."

"Everyone wants good schools, a clean environment and a safe place to live," said Stacey Wells, former press secretary to Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. "The problem is that people have stopped believing that politicians can ensure that for them. I see the Internet as having tremendous potential to reach those people and bring them back into the system."

As Daniel Bennett and Pam Fielding point out in "The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the Political Landscape," which was released in September, more people going online can only mean a more participatory democracy.

While computers with Internet access are now in 60 percent of U.S. homes, minority groups and lower-income groups still lag behind. Yet few people doubt that those homes, too, will be wired over the next two decades, just as the telephone and television became ubiquitous fixtures in American households.

Yet right now it's still the elite -- and many in the elite are already involved in their communities.

In a study commissioned by the Mellman Group and reported in the New York Times, 25 percent of adults involved with social causes are Internet users. Yet 66 percent of that group told researchers they did not know how to get involved online. Obviously, the potential for online advocacy has not even begun to be tapped.

Technology is bound to improve, and more important, the fear of technology is bound to wane. While many of us work in offices where anyone over 50 years old is more than likely to shrug off the technology advances and proudly report, "I don't do e-mail," the next generation of advocates are as familiar with computers as they are with Cheerios.

Although you don't have to be young to embrace the technology. In York, Pennslyvania, the nonprofit South George Street Community Partnership is using PalmPilots to tap into the abilities of its residents. The group sent out elderly volunteers to electronically input names and addresses -- along with what skills people could bring to the community -- and a database was born.

"Overall, this partnership between computer technology and activism is going to give us a much better understanding of how to improve things in York," Armond Magnelli of the Enterprise Foundation, the group's technical support arm, told the Philanthropy News Network.

One e-mail address at a time.

Chris Lavin is a former editor of The Oakland (Calif.) Tribune, and now runs an Internet startup, e-Elections.com.