How to Run for Local Office

My last post, from earlier today, was an attempt to encourage you to run for local office — mostly the St. Louis Board of Aldermen. As I wrote the piece I realized the learning curve is quite high for first time candidates and local political groups such as the City Democrats are not about helping other get elected to office — they themselves are waiting in line until someone moves up the food chain, retires, or dies. So how do we improve our knowledge so that more are encouraged to seek office? Well, we start with a Google search.

In doing so I found an excellent site devoted to educating and training grassroots candidates:

Root Camp™ is a grassroots educational and training resource program supported by Grassroots For America, in conjunction with Latinos for America and is designed to help educate, empower and engage everyday citizens to be active in and influence community involvement in the political process on a local, regional and national level. By using Root Camp’s open-source tools and resources we can ultimately provide every citizen activist with the tools they need and we can do it in a time, energy and financial friendly manner.

Conceived as a grassroots training resource “seeding” program, Root Camp™ networks with grassroots leaders and organizers and works to connect them through out the progressive community and local political party activism. Root Camp™ is also a place where activists can find information useful in navigating the sometimes intimidating roads of political engagement.

The have produced some highly detailed materials including their Root Camp™ Training 101 and Root Camp™ Training 201. Both are excellent resources and will give you a good understanding of how to get started and what to do as you get closer to election day. The have additional materials in their tools and resources section.

I also found an interesting site called Creative America which is training creative types to seek office. They don’t offer much in the way of online resources but the site and concept is interesting. From that site I ran across a quote from the commencement address given last year at Stanford University by Apple CEO Steve Jobs:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

A good message from both Jobs and Brand. As Jobs said, “don’t be trapped by dogma.” And as people tell you it is foolish to run for office just smile and and know that perhaps we’d all benefit if more people were foolish enough to follow their heart.

I found a few additional resources such as the GrassrootsPedia and a book, which I have not read, called How to Run for Local Office.

Start with the open-source materials from Root Camp™ above first. Once you’ve consumed and understood that move on to other sources such as books. In the meantime I will work on putting together specifics applicable to our local situation as a supplement to the materials linked here.

• St. Louis Board of Election
• Missouri Ethics Commission; Be sure to view the materials in the Brochures and General Info section on some how-to info for reporting.