Interested in exploring being a Senate District Coordinator or Co-Coordinator in our Statewide Network? We provide all the tools you need and the level of effort is really not that great. Read on!

Coordinators Will be Asked to Perform These Functions

Participate in brief Zoom-based weekly coordinating meetings, Fridays at 3:30pm from Dec 4 – the second week of March. These are pretty fun and a great way to meet others who are active at the Roundhouse. In these sessions, you will also get support, be able to ask questions, and get more confident in your work.

Contact potential team members. Retake will get you started with contact info for other advocates in your district, but you can also begin by selecting friends, family, and members of groups you belong to who:

• Live in your District;
• Are strongly Democratic;
• Are likely concerned about social, climate, racial and economic justice; and
• Have at least a little bit of time to devote to this work.

Make it clear to the people you choose that this won’t require a lot of work. You do not have to be an expert on policy or legislation. Retake will provide scripts and bill summaries, but legislators will not expect you to have deep knowledge of the bills — the goal is to make sure they understand that you support specific issues/bills and why. With 10-20 or more constituents on the zoom, not everyone will need to talk and in prepping for the meeting, the Coordinator will help identify members best able to speak on specific issues. But remember, the intent, especially in the first Zoom with your Senator, is to listen to what s/he knows and supports, not to try to persuade.

Send updated list of your membership to Paul & Roxanne about once a week by sending an email to RetakeResponse@gmail.com and attaching a form provided by Retake with the new info.

Initiate contact with your Senator. Retake will provide contact info and a script which you can use if you want. Your goal will be to:

• Send the Senator a link to Retake’s Legislative Survey;
• Call or text the Senator to have an initial conversation about the Network and how we are organizing Zoom conversations with Senators and their constituents, stressing that only constituents will be on the zoom.
• Ask first about the Senators priorities, bills s/he will be sponsoring or strongly supporting;
• Ask if the Senator has reviewed and completed the survey and ask that s/he do so before the call so it can inform constituent questions;
• If s/he has completed the survey and you have seen the responses. You will see that s/he has identified bill that s/he needs more info on or doesn’t support. Ask if it would be ok to connect the Senator with someone who has information that might help clarify what the bill is about and address his/her concerns.
• Schedule a Zoom with the Senator (Retake has links to guides for using doodle and zoom in our 2021 Legislative Advocacy Tool Kit.

Convene one session with your team members to prep for your meeting with the Senator:

• Review Senator’s survey responses, if it has been completed and/or notes from the initial call. Identify areas where the Senator may need some better information and identify what bills you will want to discuss during your next Zoom (during our next Friday meeting we will focus on how to structure this call;
• Identify people eager to ask questions or offer alternative info.;
• Emphasize that the Senator will only have an hour and we want most of that time spent listening to him/her, as we want to find out what s/he thinks, knows, doesn’t know, or is wrong about, so that after the call we can connect him/her with someone who has the right info (CBO pushing the bill or bill Sponsor).
• We also want to know what bills s/he strongly supports and ask if s/he is comfortable speaking within the caucus and privately with committee chairs about that support.
• During this Team Zoom encourage members to:
  • Write letters to the editor (Toolkit has sample letters and contact info)
  • Recruit more members. This is an ongoing effort and hopefully all members will had a few others…this is a critical way to build the base;
  • Review our bills list and one-page summaries so they better understand the bills we support and how they benefit NM.

Participate in one or two Zoom conversations with your Senator before the session begins. Not everyone on the Zoom needs to speak about the bill(s), but if the Senator sees several, perhaps dozens, of constituents who share support for the bills, this will give you more influence. See above for what you will ask and what we are looking for.

First Zoom Call with Senator and Your Full Team

• Start by asking the Senator’s legislative priorities and take notes.
• Discuss Senator’s survey responses, if it has been completed and/or speak from your notes from the initial call.
• Discuss areas where the Senator may need some better information. If it is a simple misunderstanding of a bill, share your understanding and see if that seems to resonate, otherwise offer to connect the Senator with a person from a CBO sponsoring the bill;
• Ask for reasons why s/he either doesn’t support a bill or needs more info. Try to ferret out if the Senator is very likely to support the bill once all the info is in and the bill has been drafted or if s/he leaning more to opposition and find out why;
• Take good notes on what s/he thinks, knows, doesn’t know, or is wrong about, so that after the call we can connect him/her with someone who has the right info (CBO pushing the bill or bill Sponsor).
• We also want to know what bills s/he strongly supports and ask if s/he is comfortable speaking within the caucus and privately with committee chairs about that support.
• Ask if s/he would be amenable to another zoom call mid-session.

That is really the only responsibilities. Of course, we hope you will want to send emails and make calls when bills Retake supports are coming to a vote in committee or on a chamber floor.

As this Network evolves, we may jointly identify other strategies to implement.