Latest Action Items

North Shore Indivisible is committed to taking ACTION to bring about the change we want to see.

What follows is a list of ACTIONS individuals can take to engage in the political process.

If you completed an action, post something in the comments. What did the staffer say when you called? Did you get a person, voicemail? Did you receive any response? Tell us about it.

If you experience any technical difficulties on this page, please submit an incident ticket.

Introduction to Phone Banking

Posted on by Sonny Cohen
Phone Banking Wisconsin

You are invited to a short online introduction and orientation to phone banking this Thursday, September 24 at 7PM.

Join with others on our Zoom call when Kathleen Long provides a 20 minute orientation to our North Shore Indivisible community and answers your questions. This is NOT training. This is to familiarize you with the phone banking experience.

Attend the Zoom call here (no registration required):
Computer Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81096777835
Or call in:
(312) 626-6799
Meeting # 810 9677 7835

If you don’t need orientation, phone bank training and phone banking occurs a number of times each week:

Register for training here.

Sign up to participate in phone calling sessions here.

With just six weeks (40 days) until the general election, we’re committed to getting out the vote. Your phone calling effort is strongly encouraged. Our introduction & orientation is intended to provide you with a degree of comfort to try something you may have never done before. Please tune in and learn about phone banking.

Phone Banking

Posted on by Sonny Cohen
Phone Banking

Join our calling crews to turn MI & WI BLUE. We make phone banking easy by being with you every step of the way to answer questions/assist with tech issues during the call & we debrief after the shift.

  • Michigan Mondays, 1-3 pm
  • Underwood Tuesdays, 6-8 pm
  • Wisconsin Wednesdays, 6-8 pm
  • Many call lists allow us to phone bank at times convenient for us. Typically the OpenVPN (Open Virtual Phone Bank)  links where we access our phone lists/scripts are open Mon – Friday 9am – 8pm, Saturday 9am – 7pm and Sundays 12 – 7pm
  • Volunteer recruiting Thursdays, 1-3 pm

Sign up here:

https://secure.everyaction.com/p/zElg5VU15EOKvvLQ52tMsg2

Watch this short phone banking testimonial:

 

Join the Michigan and Wisconsin Voter Registration Project Texting Team

Posted on by Sonny Cohen
Rust Belt Rising

Help us flip Michigan and Wisconsin blue, one text at a time! Sign up to be part of the Texting Team that will send text messages to unregistered likely Democratic voters in MI and WI and get them registered to vote. People receive an application in the mail, a text reminder and a phone call to support them through the process.

Sign Up Here

The Indivisible Chicago Alliance is partnering with rust Belt Rising and Civitech/Register2Vote to find these targeted voters in both states and reach out to them with a mailing, phone calls and texts. Our goal is to send 400,000 texts to potential MI and WI voters — two texts to 100,000 targeted voters in each state. Considering that Trump won MI by 10,704 and WI by 22,278 votes, this project has the potential of having significant impact on the outcome in November.

We will be using a texting platform called Spoke, which many different campaigns and organizations use for peer-to-peer texting. Our first Zoom info session and training will be on August 19 from 6-7:30 pm and August 22 from 10-11:30 am. Once you sign up here, you will get an invitation to sign up for them as well as for textbanking sessions on Zoom.

*** Text banking is easy – you use a web-based texting platform on your laptop or desktop computer to send pre-loaded scripts that have been written for you so you don’t have to guess at what to say.

*** Text banking is private – the texting platform uses phone numbers in the areas we’re texting into, with no connection at all to your own phone number.

***Text banking is fast – you can reach out to hundreds of voters in minutes and have dozens of meaningful conversations an hour.

***Text banking is fun – while you’re texting, the chat software we use lets you get your questions answered by volunteer moderators, get progress reports on the campaign, and talk to other volunteer texters!

*** And most of all, text banking really works! Research showing that it can increase candidate name recognition by up to 20% and boost voter support by as much as 9.5%. That’s the kind of thing that wins elections!

Join us and make a difference! Sign up to text people about completing their voter registration so that they will be ready to vote in November and help us flip MI and WI blue!

By signing up on this form, you are committing to attending a Texting Team training session and to text voters in MI and/or WI at least two hours a week during this program this will run from mid-August through September.

Questions? Please contact Laura Tanner at laura.tanner2.0@gmail.com

Sign up here.

Laura Tanner, Co-Founder and Co-Leader, Indivisible Evanston
Texting Coordinator, Michigan and Wisconsin Voter Registration Project
laura.tanner2.0@gmail.com

Bear Witness in Brownsville, Texas

Posted on by Sonny Cohen
Peaceful Communities

Thousands of college-age revelers are about to descend upon the beautiful beaches on South Padre Island, Texas for their spring break. Just down the road, I will be standing vigil at the Mexican border in Brownsville, witnessing how our government is treating people who are trying to claim asylum as they flee violence in their home countries.

I leave tomorrow and plan on staying three weeks. I’ll try to post some reports on the Peaceful Communities Facebook page while I am down there, but before I go I wanted to invite anyone who would like to observe firsthand what is going on to come down while I’m there. I’ll be happy to show you around and help you understand what you are seeing.

If you come, you’ll definitely want to walk across the bridge into Matamoros, Mexico. It’s safe and it’s an easy walk. The asylum seekers are camped out in tents right outside the border bridge, and they are very friendly to visitors. Bring your passport.

If you want, you can volunteer to prepare food that is being brought each day to feed more than 1,000 people in the camp. You can also, if you like, volunteer to help serve the evening meal.

You might also want to sit in on the immigration courts at the border. Visitors are allowed at preliminary hearings but not at the hearings where final decisions about asylum are made. Even so, you will be able to see how masses of people are processed into a system that in almost all cases will eventually result in their being deported.

If you’re willing to wake up very early, you can join us at the airport to watch as people are loaded onto airplanes – in darkness – to be flown back to the countries they fled. Our government has been trying to hide the planes from us so we can’t photograph what is going on, so we think it is important to show up so they know we are still watching.

And of course, you will want to stand with us on the American side of the border and hold a sign, showing that we are witnessing all that is going on. Volunteers have maintained a daily presences for more than five weeks, and we hope to keep it going.

There are plenty of hotel rooms and B&Bs to stay in, and the weather should be springtime beautiful.

So think about stopping by. I think you will find it worthwhile. I would certainly enjoy the company. And our vigil may just help save lives.

Lee Goodman
Peaceful Communities, Inc.Peace
Lee@PeacefulCommunities.org

Volunteer – Democratic National Convention Host Committee

Posted on by Sonny Cohen

Volunteers are important to the Milwaukee 2020 Host Committee and the convention.

During the Democratic National Convention, which will be held from July 13 to 16, 2020, and in the weeks leading up to the event, the host committee will welcome thousands of guests and delegates to Milwaukee and the surrounding region. Some of them will be visiting the city for the first time, and our volunteer team will be the first smiles they encounter and a friendly source of information.

Our volunteers will serve as Milwaukee 2020 Host Committee ambassadors, joining a history-making team that welcomes and delivers a positive experience to thousands of visitors from around the country and world, inspiring them to plan return trips to Milwaukee.

Sign up to Volunteer here

Learn more about the volunteer effort here.

Witness: MPP (Migrant Protection Protocols)

Posted on by Sonny Cohen

Large numbers of Central Americans are no longer appearing at our border seeking a better life. The government of Mexico, under pressure from President Trump, is keeping most of them from getting here. Mexico has reinforced both its southern border and its border with the U.S.

Nonetheless, thousands of people have made it to our border. Instead of following our prior practice of letting them into the U.S. while we consider their requests for asylum, we are forcing them to wait in Mexico.

The conditions on the Mexican side of our border are awful. Neither our government nor the Mexican government is providing adequate food, shelter, or medicine to the asylum seekers. Fresh water, bathing facilities, and toilets are in short supply. Diseases spread quickly through the tent-camps where people are concentrated. The only life-support many of these desperate people get comes from American volunteers who walk over the bridge from the U.S. each day carrying food and supplies that have been donated.

We worked with activists from around the country to bring attention to the immigrant children’s prisons, and we had great success. Several of those horrible places were closed, and the children were freed. Because people showed up at city council meetings and objected, San Antonio, Texas, Universal City, Texas, and Marietta, Georgia have recently refused to allow immigrant children’s prisons to open there, and our fellow activists are working right now to prevent such prisons from opening in other towns. Citizen involvement works!

Starting on January 12, we will begin a new effort. This time we are not only focusing on individual detention facilities. We will be calling for reversal of the Trump policies that force asylum seekers to remain in Mexico. We hope to maintain a regular presence in Brownsville, Texas, at the border crossing that leads into Matamoros, Mexico, where thousands of immigrants are stranded. Once again, we will be bringing attention to a problem that might otherwise fall out of the public consciousness as other news stories emerge.

If you think you might want to stand witness at the border for a few hours or a few days, you can get more information here:

https://tinyurl.com/tlnctgk?fbclid=IwAR2ABsAl13rhjI9jW9D0VBm7GklOJ9G8cdY7L1cJaAXLXBadyyVmxSQMvcQ

Or you can just contact me through the website I will try to answer any questions you have. We will need people not just on January 12, but for as long as it takes to restore decency to our country’s treatment of migrants.

Contributions to help this effort can be made online at:

http://www.peacefulcommunities.org/contribute/

or you can send a check to Peaceful Communities, Inc., PO Box 2324, Northbrook, IL 60065. Contributions are not tax deductible.

Thanks to everyone who has gone to the border, who will go, and who is supporting this effort in any way.

Lee Goodman
Peaceful Communities, Inc.

Ways You Can Become/Stay Involved

Posted on by Sonny Cohen

Let the countdown begin! 305 days until Election Day on November 3rd. We all signed up in January, 2017 to resist Trump’s agenda and fight for our democracy. Everything we’ve done has had an impact. It’s been an exhausting journey but let’s not give up now. There is still so much more to do. Below are some of the ways you can stay involved along with links to websites to continue getting information.

  • Chicago Women’s March – https://www.womensmarchchicago.org/
    • Saturday, 1/18/20 in Grant Park, 11am to 1pm
  • Help Flip Wisconsin Blue – https://northshoreindivisible.com/flip-wisconsin/
    • Letter writing campaigns
    • Register voters in Milwaukee
    • Canvass
  • Deputy Voter Registration Training – https://tenthdems.org/events/
    • 1/8/20 – Northbrook Library, 7 to 8:30pm (for Cook County residents)
    • 1/15/20 – Lake County Central Permit Facility (2nd Floor Conference Room), 500 W. Winchester Road, Libertyville, 6pm (for Lake County residents)
    • 1/22/20 – County Building (10th Floor – Assembly Room), 18 N. County Street, Waukegan, 2pm (for Lake County residents)
  • Volunteer to help re-elect:
    • Dick Durbin (D-IL) contact Chicago Office 312.353.4952
    • US Rep. Brad Schneider, Deerfield (D-IL-10) contact Lincolnshire Office 847.383.4870
    • US Rep. Sean Casten, Palatine (D-IL-6) campaign contact Phone 630.534.3018
    • Lauren Underwood, Naperville (D-IL-14) campaign contact Phone West Chicago 630. 549.2190
    • IL State Sen. Julie Morrison (29th Dist) campaign contact Deerfield Phone 847.945.5200
    • IL State Rep. Bob Morgan (58th Dist) campaign contact Highland Park Ph. 847.282.0577

CCAN-HRA still meets regularly and all are welcome to attend. If you would like to be notified of our meetings, please let us know and we will add you to our HRA email list. Most of you have hung in there over the past arduous three years and we are so grateful for your willingness to stay involved. However, we also respect those who no longer wish to stay active. Just let us know and we’ll remove your name from the CCAN email list.

We have the opportunity to flip the White House and YES, even the Senate this November! If we do this together, our activism will have a better chance at succeeding. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get back to work!!

CCAN-HRA

Human Rights Alliance Committee

Joni Reed

847-948-7333 (h)

847-558-5826 (c)

joni.reed@comcast.net

Wisconsin Actions You Can Take Between Now and January 16, 2020

Posted on by Sonny Cohen
Help us WIN WISCONSIN!  We have several initiatives going on that you may want to consider:
1. Registering voters in Milwaukee.  This commitment is during the week, during business hours. Attached is information (click for PDF) about the program.  Laura Kushner, our Wisconsin Initiative Campaign Manager has been up to Milwaukee herself a few times to register voters, so reach out to her if you have any questions about the process.
2. Letter writing campaigns.  You are welcome to write letters on your own at home. Attached is a ‘how to’ sheet on what to do.  You are also welcome to come and join our monthly letter writing parties at the Vernon Area Library in Lincolnshire.  our next party is January 16 at 7:00 PM. We will be in the Youth Services Room.  Come and join us!
3. There is canvassing going on in Kenosha on Jan. 11.  If you are interested you should contact Nancy Bruski at nancysbruski@gmail.com .  Note that there are more canvassing opportunities coming up later in the winter and spring.  If you are on the email list you will receive emails about them from North Shore Indivisible.

Get involved in the fight for Medicare for All on Dec 4 at 7 PM CST

Posted on by Sonny Cohen

Get involved in the fight for Medicare for All on Dec 4 at 8 PM ET.

Our friends at Public Citizen have invited Congressional champions to share insights about how local resolutions efforts, like the recently passed resolution in Los Angeles, can support the growing momentum for Medicare for All in Congress. Make sure to RSVP to learn more from the activists and policymakers who pushed those resolutions across the finish line, and to get organizing updates from across the country.