[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so finally, before Anna, we're going to have Rebecca Bartorski. She is a Medford resident, a scientist at Tufts, a mom, and an active member of Our Web Medford, which has been doing some really exciting work. They worked with the community to develop a people's platform for Medford last year, and they elected a slate of awesome progressives at the city council and school committee. So they're making a change to happen at Medford, and Rebecca's gonna tell us a little bit about her excitement for this new chapter organizing in Medford.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's so great to see so many familiar faces out supporting Anna and also showing up for transparency in our state government. I'm so excited about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll tell you a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm a Medford resident and I also work in Medford. So I'm all Medford all the time now. I moved here about three years ago. So I'll tell you a little bit how the group that I'm part of, which is Our Revolution Medford, used a training that Anna developed while thinking to develop something of our own, which is called the People's Platform, and how based on that platform we built a movement which was able to take, as Jared said, all the open seats in the City Council A series of self-guided workshops, which we held over the course of about two months, they're about getting residents engaged, not just in supporting political candidates, but also in coming together and putting together a platform of their ideas, and then supporting candidates, or becoming candidates. So it's about creating a movement that is able to survive between elections, because it has this sort of grassroots base. And then once it does get candidates elected, it makes the work of those progressive candidates easier because they have a movement behind them and they also have political allies. So it's a very well thought out strategy and it really works. So I'll give you a taste of what the questions that we discussed in our groups during these trainings were. Who do we want to see represented more in our local government? So this is a really interesting question. People of color, women, renters, newcomers. That was just the start of our discussion. And then on our first meeting, we developed a mission statement that we could go around and use to talk to people to join our campaign. So after an hour, we already had this and it was really great. Who are the groups in our city with whom we can build a coalition? And there were so many great groups at that point that I learned about. Just to name a few, Medford People Power, Tufts Housing League, Safe Medford, and some of these I was learning about for the first time, so that was our second meeting. And then, like, what are our top issues? So what's important to the people in the room and also important to the people that we want to join our campaign? So I'm gonna read these out so I get them right. Increase in affordable housing turned out to be our top issue. It's a big, big problem and something we need to work a lot on. protecting the environment, upholding immigrant and labor rights, and increasing funding for public education. And at the end of these trainings, the people in our group, and actually this was not me, it was people like Jess and Charlotte and Zach and all of these people we might know, they wrote up a document which is called the People's Platform. They have all these bold ideas explaining why they're important to members of our community and to us. And they got people to sign on. We got residents and community members and candidates and elected officials, and there were a whole lot of them who were excited about it. We gathered together a slate of progressive candidates that were excited about these ideas, and we knocked on doors, and we held signs in the rain, and we got all of the open seats in the city. political force in Medford. It was exciting, it was empowering, and it's really just the beginning. So the foundation we built during those incorruptibles trainings, I think, had a lot to do with our success and why we were able to sustain the movement beyond the election. And someone like Anna, who's really taken the time to sit down and think through that process, what gets people out, what gets people interested, what makes people feel like their voices are heard, like they could one day, you know, run for office or get up like this in front of a room full of strangers and talk about what's important to them. That's not something a lot of our representatives have thought through, and that's really, I think, what we need in the State House right now. So I'm so excited to support Anna. I know she'll do a great job.