What’s tall, loud, and loves to cause trouble?
In the relatively new phenomena known as the “Netroots” there are a plethora of wonderful writers and activist working to change the world. One of the best out there is my wonderful trouble making friend, Sarah Burris.
Sarah has worked with numerous campaigns from presidential to city council races. She says she likes the smaller campaigns the best and prefers the Red-States. Recently, she worked for Skyline Public Works where she helped state based youth organizations connect with major funders across the country and develop better networking opportunities.
In 2008 Sarah was named one of the five Rock the Vote Rock the Trail Reporters and traveled the country during the 2008 Elections covering the campaign from the youth perspective. She’s reported from both conventions and debates and followed candidates on youth tours through their states. Sarah was also one of the first recipients ever of the Democracy for America Netroots Nation scholarship and was named by the New Leader’s Council as one of the 40 Emerging Leaders Under 40. She is a founding blogger at Everyday Citizen, a long time writer and researcher for Wiretap Magazine, one of the great minds behind Future Majority, and a new partner at Mixed Media. Sarah’s writing focus has been rural politics, young progressive democracy, and youth specific legislation.
Sarah hails from Oklahoma where she grew up watching Murphy Brown, then the X-files, then the West Wing.
So I went from worshiping liberal media, to not trusting the government, then finding the solution with a democratic administration, it was a great childhood.
Sarah left Oklahoma and went to Kansas University for college, where she majored in English. Sarah comes from a family of writers. Her aunt now owns a newspaper; her uncle is a publisher of mostly non-fiction art books, history books; her father edited a sports magazine; and her grandmother use to write the bar exam in Oklahoma with the bar association.
The political bug first bit Sarah when her aunt ran for her 7th term as President of the school board in the last election her opponent said she should not be elected because she did not attend church, her aunt lost that election.
Thus the entrance of the right wing into my life.
While Sarah was in college the Iraq war started, before the war she had voted for Gore, volunteered to register voters for the YD’s when Sebelius was running, but for the most part it was what she describes as “casual volunteerism”. Sarah’s love for activism was sparked the night the bombing campaign started she was on spring break in New Orleans.
We were having an amazing dinner and a huge crowd of people came walking silently down the street with candles toward St. Peters Basilica, I was the only person at the table, indeed within the four tables around us who knew that it was a response to the bombing in Iraq. When I came back Howard Dean was running for office and I got involved in the local efforts of his campaign and started looking for internships to do in politics. I interned for Nancy Boyda and by June she had hired me as her finance person.
Sarah left KU to work full time on the campaign. After the campaign finished Sarah went back to KU and graduated as soon as she could by taking 24 hours in one semester and she was accepted as one of thirty into EMILY’s List Campaign Corps. They then sent her to California where she was the first staff on the ground to work on Debra Bowen’s Secretary of State campaign. While working on the campaign Sarah used social networking sites to target voters and developed online outreach strategies.
She (Debra Brown) was a state Senator in LA running for a statewide – she ended up being the only woman in a state wide office being elected! The one thing I worked hard on was connecting her with the Netroots.
She was the classic person for the blogger community, the whole thing about decertifying electronic voting machines – her mantra was the reason she was running was Florida and Ohio. She started doing op-eds, volunteers started talking about her on Daily Kos, I wrote a few blogs about her – then after the election I urged her to do better outreach on social networks, developed a strategic plan for her about online outreach. At the same time I had been experimenting with Boyda’s second campaign in 2006 and targeting people in areas of the district with her Myspace page.
MySpace tends to be more about non-college youth – more rural youth use Myspace – so I tried to use it to target those areas.
Through the next several years while Boyda was in office I ended up using the Myspace page to continue outreach, promote articles, photos, etc.
I still believe that the internet can be a good component of campaigns, not merely for a presence, but you can actually use it for finance, field, and communications. The kind of voter registration, early voting, and GOTV you can do all online with a good team is amazing. Its not just about campaigns. Non-profits can do outreach that they might not ordinarily do online, and businesses can build trust, loyalty, and a brand all online.
Sarah is very passionate about the use of social networking sites and blogs in political activism. Her passion is what makes her one of the best. Sarah has inspired many, like myself, to work for a change and use social networking tools for online outreach and organizing.
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