Shelly Jackson

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so grateful to be here.

Yeah, I love this question.

And yes, also shout out to the Vote Safe America team and the Pipeline Fund.

It's been so incredible to have this partnership.

Here in Arizona, a lot of the times when candidates are running for office, and probably all across the country as well, they're doing it with very little support.

They're going in, maybe excited to help their community, but don't know where to start and end up missing a lot of gaps along the way.

But aside from the logistical pieces of running for office, for women...

For people of color, there's also these pieces around funding, right?

Having a support system that are also super essential to making sure a candidate can win and that they also have the morale they need to move things along the way.

And so at Institute, though, we do a couple of things.

We help identify candidates.

So we are always on the search and we're always looking to find new people who want to get involved.

And sometimes just tapping people on the shoulder is needed.

A lot of the times people don't even see themselves as someone who can make change.

And even for myself, let me tell you,

I did not have on my bingo card that I was going to run for office.

Someone asked me and then they asked me again and again.

And so being able to have someone actually tap you on the shoulder is super essential.

So that's one of the things that we do is we just straight up ask people.