Our program is designed to offer people new easier, much more direct ways to get involved in the political process. This will have value to people who are already active, but who may be looking for ways to engage more meaningfully. It will also have value for some of the millions of people who have turned off to politics entirely, bringing them back into the conversation.

The decline in political participation has become a well-worn cliché. Millions of people have gotten turned off to politics and become cynical and apathetic about the state of our democracy. Ironically, to the extent that our democracy really is in a sorry state, it's precisely because so many people are so turned off to political participation. Almost half the people don't even bother to vote, or have too little information to vote intelligently. Barely more than 10% of the total population consistently tries to actively exercise some influence by occasionally writing to a legislator or an editor, and even a smaller percentage regularly attend rallies, post to political blogs, sign petitions, and/or contribute their time or their material resources to a cause or a candidate.

We think that some of the sources for the public’s disengagement from politics can be found in the problems we’ve been laying out – the fact that people feel excluded from meaningful influence on the government, the sorry state of public policy dialogue, and the lack of a small group community structure for people to plug into. Another central but much less discussed reason that most people don’t get more involved in the political process is that the actual experience of volunteering for a political organization, cause, or campaign is often incredibly frustrating and mind-numbingly repetitive. You have to be extremely motivated to do it, because very few really enjoy the process.

What do you end up doing when you volunteer for a political campaign, and why is it so unpleasant? All issue or candidate campaigns have some office work that needs doing, and a variety of miscellaneous jobs, but the vast majority of the work needed is in outreach. Outreach to raise money. Outreach to recruit more volunteers. Outreach to publicize an event. Outreach to get people to vote a particular way or get their elected representatives to vote a particular way. Whether you are hosting a party in your home, passing out fliers, phone banking, or canvassing, “outreach” essentially means talking to a lot of people you don’t know, most of whom don’t particularly want to talk to you, and trying to persuade them to do something they don’t really want to do, or at least hadn’t planned on doing.

Generally speaking, 80-90% of the people you contact don’t want to talk to you. On the phone, many simply hang up. In person, many simply close the door. To tolerate the work well, you have to adjust to rejection on this scale, and that’s a difficult challenge for many people.

In order to reach a large enough number of people, especially given the high rejection rate, you need to hone your pitch down to a few informative but succinct sentences. In most campaigns, this has been done for you and you are simply asked to read or memorize a “script.” You might be able to venture beyond the mantra of your presentation with some of the few people who respond to you positively, actually engaging in a spontaneous conversation. But your “interaction” with the vast majority of the people you contact will consist almost entirely of your recitation of the speech and one of several responses by them that you will dutifully record.

Outreach work is basically sales work, and some people both excel at and enjoy sales. Unfortunately, most people don’t do it well and don’t like it.

It’s also questionable whether this way of conducting political campaigns improves or worsens the health of our democracy. In the short term, this kind of slash and burn approach is effective in bringing in volunteers, money, and voters. But what is the effect on the people who reject the “interaction?” To what extent is their negativity about politics reinforced and driven deeper by these formulaic intrusions? And what impact does this work have on the people doing it? How many people move away from politics altogether because of the emotional hardship of this form of participation?

For these reasons, among others, one of our goals in creating Activist Solutions is to provide new ways for people to become politically active. We want to give people an opportunity to be creative and thoughtful, instead of merely being foot soldiers, repeating the same actions over and over again. We want to give them a different challenge: rather than trying to recruit people to join a pre-existing campaign, we ask them to collaborate with like-minded people to define the goals and direction of a potential future campaign. We want to establish a different kind of dialogue environment, one where strangers can meet and interact more productively, without coercion and with far less burn out. Most people feel good when they are stretching to do difficult, at times demanding, but clearly meaningful work. But it has to be work that offers rewards that make it worthwhile. Most people want to know that they count as individuals and as team members, and they want their contributions to be recognized and appreciated.