Door-to-Door Masterplan Outreach
June 2021 - August 2021
Bringing community input to local MasterPlans
The Montgomery County Planning Board sought representative data about the needs of Fairland-Briggs Chaney residents. That’s where we come in.
At the core of our approach is the belief that real community engagement, which meets people where they are — quite literally at their doors — is the best tool to shape local government’s work.
We collected the stories of renters in Fairland-Briggs Chaney by:
Knocking on 4,125 doors — twice over — and talking with over 600 renters in English, Spanish, French, and Amharic.
Distributing 5,700 multilingual flyers with a shortlink to a survey about desires and concerns on Fairland-Briggs Chaney
And with every conversation, we connected renters to services and organizations to meet their needs: everything from rent relief assistance, to West African cultural organizations, to ESOL classes.
The best part of this project? We hired local community members from the Fairland-Briggs Chaney area to staff the project, as they hold the most expertise about their home, language, and community.
COVID Outreaach
March 2020 - Present
Making Information accessible in the Covid ERA
In Montgomery County, MD, we reached our communities most at-risk of COVID and eviction by leaving our mutli-lingual flyers in the doorhandles of over 22,600 apartments. People who received a flyer could either type in URLs listed on our flyers or call us for help.
In more detail, we—
Translated applications for rent relief, unemployment, SNAP, and utility assistance, and distributed info in Amharic, Spanish, English, French, Vietnamese, and Mandarin.
Operated a multi-lingual call center to walk people through emergency assistance applications for rent relief, unemployment, SNAP, and utility assistance.
our staff spoke Amharic, French, Spanish, and English
Referred our community members to organizations such as CASA and Manna that best met their immediate needs.
We are grateful to our 117 volunteers who made emergency COVID relief more accessible.
The People’s Podcast
May 2019 - March 2020
Sharing the people’s stories with local government
At every doorstep, we ask residents to record their stories with us. And we leave a business card or doorhanger with info on local services that are generally helpful for community members and the contact info of their representatives.
We turn those recorded doorstep conversations into private podcasts for representatives and government officials to listen to. That way, our government is hearing every constituent’s issues and hopes from the mouths of constituents themselves.
Of course, there is other information we collect from constituents. Community groups a constituent is involved in, their name, email, phone number, and address are all data we collect. But we keep any identifiable information like names and contact info hidden from everyone but government officials that constituents request they want services from. For example, if a resident requests rental assistance, we would connect them with a local government agency that can help them. We use two applications, EveryAction and StreetTeam, to store and collect constituent information.
We make good use of constituent voices. We search for ideas for local reform, perceived impact of policy change, and common hopes and issues communities in Maryland have.
Interacting regularly with residents also allows us to reach out to constituents who may be interested in testifying on policy that will affect, or has affected, their lives. By meeting constituents at their doorsteps, we make it more comfortable for constituents to reach out to their representatives for help, and for representatives to reach out to constituents for help.
The Doorstep conversation
We start most of our conversations with constituents in a similar open-ended way. As a conversation progresses, we ask new questions of constituents based on what they tell us. Here’s a sample:
Constituent (C): Hello.
Door Knocker (DK): Hi! I’m working with your state and local representatives. I’m here to ask you what concerns you have for your representatives on the issues you care about. What’s happening in your community and is there anything you think should change?
C: Hmm, wait a minute let me think about it.
DK: No worries, I have some buzzwords in case you need your brain triggered.
C: Ooh, I got an idea!
Most constituents have something to say, but don’t share it unless…
Unless you have a way to trigger their memory. We’ve all been “put on the spot” before. Even though we have problems, it can be hard to think of them when someone asks us all of the sudden at our doorstep. That’s why we wear our buzzword shirts, to make it easier for constituents to communicate their issues.
to answer resident’s issues, representatives create a video response to our podcast
Here is Delegate Lorig Charkoudian’s response to her Silver Spring residents who spoke about education issues on one of our February 2020 podcasts. Everyday Canvassing emails and texts representative’s video responses back to residents so they can learn what their reps have to say about their concerns.