Graham Platner

For no reason, just because- Outside pack getting involved in a local school board race in Sullivan.

Local school board race.

Yeah, technically in Franklin, but yeah, we have an RSU, so a regional school unit.

Got it.

And it was this moment for myself and a few other people where we watched this happen and it only happened because it was no organizing versus a little bit of organizing.

They had people to knock doors and this guy had himself.

It's a small town school board race.

And there was no apparatus to support him.

There was no way of like getting people to knock doors for him.

He was calling around almost like frantic, understanding what was happening like with a week until the election.

And there really wasn't anything that existed.

And so a number of us, we'd already formed like kind of a small community organizing group, but we use this as kind of an example of

we understood that if we don't have people who can make signs and put them up, if we don't have people who can knock doors, who can make phone calls in their communities, talking to their neighbors, people that they trust, or people who would trust them, if we don't build that, then we're gonna lose this kind of fight.

And so we just started to build it.

And we reached out to folks and we got a number of the other larger statewide groups.

We reached out to local democratic committee.

We reached out to, frankly, just a lot of individuals who we knew kind of had, who were worked up about this.

Because every, like a ton of people are angry.

But again, there was no mechanism.

And we kind of, we realized that, especially right now after Trump's reelection,