It is November 8th, which means we have now endured one year since the American presidential election. Most of us (not all) have survived it, but hardly unscathed. If you are thinking that you wish you could do more to make a better world, there are a host of ways you can, and I’m planning to talk about some of them soon. But I wanted to take this moment to encourage anyone interested in running for office, to run, and to point you to the blog where I chronicled my own successful run for local office.
I’ll note that I did have to work pretty hard to win, in terms of doing LOTS of community events in a short time period, which was fun but tiring. But that was mostly because I was sort of starting from scratch — I’d done plenty of community-supporting work in the years before, but it’d been on a global arts stage, rather than a local politics stage.
I knew that I wasn’t ‘known’ in my community, and I’d have to work hard to get my name out there. If you start more traditionally, with serving on local commissions, PTOs, etc., and just attending lots of community events and talking to people there, then you won’t be playing catch-up quite as much when you decide to run. In large part, it’s simply a matter of meeting the voters. Go out, smile, and shake some hands.