I’m BreAnna Bemboom and I’m the field organizer for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in Minnesota.
I’ve been working on campaigns for nine years and I’m seeing an unprecedented amount of volunteer activism in this state. People are literally knocking down our door to get involved. Our volunteers are speaking up, and they’re insisting politicians listen to them.
"They want access to health care, economic justice, and social equity. And they’re not going to stop until they get it."
We had a really amazing opportunity recently to bring more than 40 of our 1200 volunteers to Detroit last month to attend Power of Pink – the largest Planned Parenthood volunteer training ever – to learn how to mobilize the hundreds of folks we have on the ground. They took time out of their lives – away from their jobs and their families – to join 2,000 other Planned Parenthood volunteers from around the country to learn how to most effectively organize their communities in 2018.
They are excited to use the skills they learned in Detroit to go home and lead phonebanks, knock on doors, and talk to their friends about the election.
One my favorite moments happened with a 19 year old volunteer, Jenna. She said she was going to Power of Pink in hopes of learning from the people there who were older than her, hoping they’d rub off on her and teach her something. As she was leaving, she told our crew that her biggest take away was that she didn’t need the older activists to rub off on her- that she had the power inside of herself to make change. That’s when I realized how powerful our activists are when they work together.
There’s a lot of momentum, but we’ve got to keep it going. It’s so important that we elect lawmakers who will fight for us and will represent all of us, especially these supporters and activists, fiercely and proudly. If you’re feeling fired up, even if you’ve never volunteered before, now is the time to take that step and get involved. With the Trump-Pence administration’s relentless attacks on health care, we have to elect champions in Congress who will stand up to these harmful policies and champions in Minnesota from the state legislature to the governor's office who will protect us here at home.
Join our movement by signing up to be a volunteer for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in Minnesota. I promise, it will be one of the best decisions you could make this year!
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