Everyday Canvassing

The Montgomery County Planning Department, a government-affiliated organization responsible for land-use and infrastructural design in Montgomery County, sought representative data about the needs of Gaithersburg, Shady Grove, Rockville, Clarksburg, and University Boulevard residents. In particular, there was historically a lack of input from community members that rented their homes. That's where we came in. At the core of our approach is the belief that real community engagement, which meets people where they are - quite literally at their doors - is an excellent tool to shape local government's work. We collected the stories of renters in the aforementioned areas by: Knocking on about 8,000 doors and talking with over 700 renters in English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Korean, and Amharic. Distributing 8,000 multilingual flyers with a short website link to a survey about desires and concerns. And with every conversation, we connected renters to services and organizations to meet their needs: everything from rent relief assistance, to Chinese cultural organizations, to English as a second language classes. The bulk of interviewees shared contact information for follow-up, which we followed through on with thousands of calls to engage residents in further planning and community projects. This is continued work that we have conducted prior with Montgomery Planning. A report based on our outreach for the Fairland Briggs Chaney Master Plan from 2022 can be found at: httpsmontgomeryplanningorgplannin...

For the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and the Montgomery County Collaboration Council for Children, Youth, and Families (MCCC) we developed infrastructure and facilitated the first iteration of community member policy and program creation in their organizations. For DEP, we co-created the Climate Justice Co-Creation Initiative, where we developed a team of community based organizations and individual stipended community members to co-develop policy and program solutions to climate-related issues in Montgomery County, MD. The Climate Justice Co-Creation Initiative will focus on climate change mitigation and prevention strategies over the next several years with growing involvement and decision-making from individuals most directly impacted by climate-related challenges. As for MCCC, we began and finished the Out of School Time focus groups, while beginning the Community Needs Assessment for Children, Youth, and Families. Out of School Time was a pilot project with MCCC where we recruited low income community members through canvassing to take part in suggesting the next generation of out of school programming and policy development. The focus groups evolved in our work with the Community Needs Assessment, where we stipended recurring focus groups with the same group of thirty people. We divided these thirty people in three groups of ten. Each group of ten attended five to seven meetings and the groupings were based on geography and age. We called each group a cohort. About half of this work occurred in November and December 2023, with the other half of the work occurring in the first half of 2024. Each cohort originally focused on getting to know one another and identifying mutual challenges their families and children were experiencing. The cohorts culminated in late spring of 2024. A multi-media website detailing the recommendations and findings of the cohort participants, titled "Community Change Agents," will be released in late 2024.

Along with our project specific accomplishments, we always work to connect community members with public resources, engage in open-ended conversations around how our community could improve, and introduce community members to one-another. For example, outside of county master planning efforts like Fairland and Briggs Chaney master plan and the University Boulevard sector plan, we have canvassed people in White Oak, Downtown Silver Spring, Gaithersburg, Long Branch, Rockville, Montgomery Village, Aspen Hill, Wheaton, Germantown, Takoma Park, Fairland, Burtonsville, Clarksburg, and more. In 2023, we knocked and left flyers at about 20,000 doors to have conversations one-on-one with residents. We also navigated people through accessing resources and introduced them to resources at food distribution events in community settings like churches, parks, and private rental properties with residents of mostly low and moderate incomes. This year, we added Emmanuel Walker and Angela Rivera as permanent part-time members of our team. Emmanuel and Angela's work is having conversations with residents at food distribution events and connecting government to community members in their efforts to improve budgeting and programming. We also added Tino Fragale, our former Board President, as our second full-time Co-Executive Director. Our work building relationships with our community residents door-by-door is mostly powered by a group of about 221 volunteers. All our staff also work on government contracted projects as well. So the expenses recorded for Emmanuel, Angela, Harold, Tino, and Mady's wages are divided amongst the projects done in collaboration with government. These volunteers are organized by our Co-Executive Director who are at the moment are our only two full-time staff member paid year-round. Also, because our volunteers are walking, talking, and connecting with community members for usually 3 - 4 hours, we host "family meals" after we knock doors. Sitting down, eating, and reflecting on the experiences we've had talking with people at doors and bonding allows our volunteer operation to remain well-attended and consistent. Sharing food is therefore also critical to our success building up the level of civic engagement in our community and is a mission-related expense. All printing has been used to share resources or inspire conversations door-to-door.

Extending a contract with Manna Food from 2022, we continued distributing information about where to get emergency food in our community. With the thousands of doors we knocked in 2023, we also informed and shared info about calling Manna Food to reserve free boxes of groceries. Our team personally made calls and deliveries to hundreds of families who could not transport themselves to food distribution locations.