Moulding the Grassroots

As Obamanology goes, the term "grassroots" is pretty prominent. The idea is that the campaign will extend every tentacle of its organisation into every community in the United States. As I detailed in a previous post, that is the primary purpose of the team building and one-on-ones I have been busy with. However, the grassroots can not be allowed grow wildly with no direction. Any organisational expert would see the need for the training of volunteers to create some sort of uniformity.

In order to do this, today the campaign in Albuquerque held a city-wide training event attended by over 200 volunteers. The sole purpose: to mould the grassroots into effective agents of the campaign.

The training resembled an off-site corporate training day, consisting of various seminars from 10AM to 6PM, all held in lecture theatres and classrooms of the University of New Mexico Law School. Upon registration, each participant received a 36-page training guide detailing the Obama campaign's organisational structure, its methods of attracting volunteers to the movement and how then to organise one's fellow volunteers. It even gives pointers on how to tell "your story" like I have been doing since I got here.

In fact, part of the training was a session in which people who had inspirational stories as to why they were volunteering for the Obama campaign came forward and recounted them to the audience. Despite my cynicism towards the whole idea of recounting one's life story, I actually did find some of the stories touching. One lady in her late 60s told of how she had to work two jobs to pay for her healthcare and prescriptions. Later on, a teenager got up and said she was volunteering for Obama so that he would bring her cousin back from Afghanistan.

To be quite honest, I was bowled over by the efficiency of the Obama machine. It is truly an amazing feat how it has been able to transform the myriad of disparate groups of people that support the Senator's candidacy into a unified army of volunteers that is motivated to fight for his presidential bid and above all the intangible goal of 'change'.