A Conversation: Mark Mansour, Anthony Flaccavento and Meredith Dean

Today's podcast is a fascinating and uplifting discussion with Anthony Flaccavento and Meredith Dean of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. Anthony and Meredith talk about how they have build bridges to rural America and the effects of their activities in Virginia and elsewhere toward rebuilding the Democratic party brand. You won't want to miss this one.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome back to America Structured Politics. Today I'm thrilled to have with me Anthony Flaccavento and Meredith Dean. Anthony is a farmer near Abingdon, Virginia, and the co-founder and executive director of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative. Prior to launching the initiative, Anthony worked in rural community development for more than 30 years. He's the author of Building a Healthy Economy from the Bottom Up, and was the 2018 Democratic nominee for Congress in Virginia's 9th Congressional District. Meredith Dean brings 40 years of experience in community and political organizing, nonprofit management, and higher education to her present work as the National Director of Community Works. A lifelong Democrat, Meredith served as chair of her local Democratic Committee, the field director for a 2018 Virginia congressional campaign, and the founding director of a nonprofit dedicated to energizing, educating, and empowering Appalachian communities to actively engage in democracy. Welcome to both of you and thrilled to have you on.

unknown 0:57

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

We are too.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Very glad. Well, let's kick into some questions. Let me start with you, Meredith. How and why did you become involved with Community Works?

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Wow. Well, I live in rural Appalachian, Virginia, about 50 miles away from my family's home place of seven generations, now eight, with my son being born and raised here. And my county has never voted Democrat, even for JFK or FDR. So for the first 15 years of my career, I did community organizing on a regional level around issues of poverty, racism, violence against women and children. And then I had my own child. And so for the next 15 years or so, I sat side by side with my conservative Republican neighbors watching our children grow up together from like uh wiggles and giggles on the preschool playground to high school basketball tournaments. And I also worked with some of those neighbors to uh start a nonprofit to uh work on health and wellness for the kids in our schools. And then came 2016, and I call it the Great Estrangement of 2016, because suddenly at that point, you know, we'd we'd been okay, and we just kind of avoided talking about national politics, but suddenly it was in our face, all our faces, and it did not feel as comfortable being there together. So at that point, I decided I needed to get involved in electoral organizing, got involved with Anthony's 2018 campaign. Um, you know, that was a great experience, but despite doing everything right on an electoral level, we we still lost. And so for me, that meant um, you know, kind of pulling back and saying, wait a second, we're I'm not reaching these neighbors either. Um, and and what can we do about that? So I became the chair of my local democratic committee here. Um and through that process, I started encouraging folks to do community works types activities because I was still in conversation with Anthony, and he'll tell you about what he was doing during that time. Um but at the same time that this was going on, and Anthony was starting to talk about something called Community Works, um, I also listened to a podcast by Michael Moore, and it was called A Blue Dot in a Red Sea. And one of the episodes was Need Help, Call a Democrat. And I just, I love that. I was like, that says it all for me. That's what we used to be seen as in rural communities. That's you know, the way I want us to be seen again. So when uh Ruby under Anthony started community works, I was all in that you know, I want to apply to be the national director. And uh kind of things went from there.

SPEAKER_01 3:50

Anthony, you want to supplement that? I'll only add to it that um when when I got Ruby going, it was also kind of an outgrowth of the 2018 congressional campaign. Meredith was my field director. Uh as Meredith said, we we just did a lot of stuff right. We had a hundred town hall meetings with thousands of people. Senator Tim Kane and Mark Warner both said they thought it was one of the best congressional campaigns they'd ever seen. But we we lost badly. I mean, we got we got stomped by a tough ground. So at the end of that process, we were all kind of deflated, but at the same time there was a lot of energy. A lot of in fact, a lot of people that were involved in the campaign have become involved in Ruby. But fundamentally, I wanted to find out why Democrats were in this position of uh such a steep hill to climb in most rural communities. And so that's why we started Ruby, and then Community Works became our primary way of rebuilding trust. You know from past conversations we've had, Mark, that Ruby does a lot of different things trying to change the politics of our country. But but Community Works is our kind of flagship for rebuilding trust starting at the local level.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

Let's get to the nuts and bolts. How does the program operate in local communities?

SPEAKER_00 5:23

Um it's all locally led. Uh we work with uh uh initial just people that are interested. Many times those folks come from Democratic committees, uh, and then we ask them to form a local leadership team, a volunteer leadership team of at least five people who understand the both the Ruby approach and the community works approach in uh particular. And then from there, the whole strategy is to work side by side with neighbors to address concrete local needs. So it's not about persuasion or get out the vote, it's about building solid relationships and trust by listening, engaging, volunteering for service, and just being part of the solution at a local level.

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Anything to add, Anthony? No, I think that's got it. Meredith's heaven nailed, that's for sure. Um we've talked about some of the things that didn't go right. What has gone right? What sorts of successes have you seen on the ground over the last several years?

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Um Well, we collaborate with local groups. So one of the things has just been the way in which all these local civic groups, uh uh veterans groups, churches, uh, other nonprofits have really embraced the program. Once we reach out and we say, hey, we're here, we have a solid base of uh volunteers, starting with uh volunteers from the Democratic Committee, but you know, going way beyond that. And uh we're here to help. And so people have really embraced that, and it's meant that we've been able to pull off all sorts of things from providing essentials like uh food and hygiene drive, um firewood delivery, diaper drives, to actually helping with community infrastructure. Um, we've done some home repair and restoration projects, road and river cleanups, hurricane and flood relief, community gardens, all the way to doing more educational type events, like we've done a STEM summer camp and IT and tax prep assistance and suicide prevention classes. Um is we've we've been able to reach out to a lot of different people based on what their passion is and where their interests are and bring them into you know this community effort and also this primarily democratic run effort. Um but but in ways they might not have been able to before. One of the things I learned as a Democratic committee chair was people would say, you know, I just never felt like I had anything to offer the committee because I really didn't want to come go canvassing and, you know, come up like my quarter mile driveway and talk to me about my political when they had no idea what they were, um, or make those, you know, blind phone calls. Um, but now they could help clean up the road, they could put on a community works t-shirt, they could wear a vest that said uh, you know, the County Democratic Committee, get a sign. And so they were having this very positive impact for uh Democrats in the community, but in a different way, and a way that felt good and and safe and um, you know, happy. Happy, a happy place for them.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

That's a heck of a lot of activity in a couple of years. That that leads me to another question for Anthony. If you were running this race again this year, how do you think you'd do?

SPEAKER_01 8:58

Oh, thanks a lot, Mark. Um I I would lose, but not as badly for a couple of reasons. One is that the the landscape um for Republicans and community works is actually playing a small role in this in parts, but throughout rural America, we know from now several polls, including one just out from Fox News, that Trump's base is leaving him. Um the rural vote for Trump was plus 20. His his rating was plus 20 at the beginning of his second term. It's now minus 14 among rural voters, even among rural white voters exclusively. He's it's dropped a lot. So Republicans who've just been cruising, like the fellow who who is the congressman in the 9th district for a generation now, they're up against the wall. That's one thing. Second thing is I've learned a lot, even though Meredith and I both feel like we did a lot right in the campaign. I think one of the things I would do if I was running again is I would try to set up community works type activities in every county in the 9th district. Because it's good for the community, it energizes Democrats, and it starts building these bonds across ideology. I think I would still lose, uh, but I think the margins would be smaller and we'd be heading in a better direction. With any luck by 2028, you could probably win. Maybe something like that. We have some good candidates running this time, one of whom is a farmer, a fifth-generation woman farmer from Bedford County. And I think she's in it for the long haul. If she wins the primary in a couple of months, I think she will whittle away at his margin. She's got the right approach and the right attitude.

SPEAKER_02 10:48

And this year, with those sorts of margins in the rural communities, I think that she she would probably have a chance. Because I I I personally foresee a bloodbath for the Republicans.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Yeah, that's that's kind of what I foresee, although I hesitate to say that out loud because it's it sounds a little bit like we're jinxing ourselves. I'll tell you one thing that we did see in well, there's there's two things that um have been uh really, really encouraging from community works. One comes out of the survey, and the survey which really detailed uh just how much uh ideas are shifting. But before I get into that, I was I thought maybe Meredith could address just how this approach of nonpolitical concrete activities is energizing the Democratic committees themselves, often in places where the Democratic committees have barely, barely been hanging on.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

So we had uh one community where they were very hesitant to take this on. Uh there were four Democratic volunteers who did everything. They they were co-chairs of the committee. Uh and then uh they said, okay, we'll try this. Maybe we can bring some more people in. And in their for their first event, they had uh brought in like 25 people or something to be part of that. It was just packing up uh food for school kids to take home on the weekends. Then, because of that, there was a whole bunch of energy and buzz created in the commun uh in the committee, and they ended up um organize me, organizing an event for Senator Tim Kane, and they all showed up wearing their community works t-shirts, and they got to talk to him about um rural broadband and other issues directly affecting them because of our our uh you know rural location. Uh and out of that, then uh a young man got involved, 23 years old. He became the youngest chair in Virginia, uh, and now he's working for Tim Kane. So it kind of went from you know, four people doing everything to all this new energy uh to actually bringing in folks who became very much involved in the electoral part of the committee as well as doing the community works activities. We had one committee go from um five people at the beginning to over a hundred volunteers, and many of those have then ended up uh also doing electoral organizing for the campaigns.

SPEAKER_02 13:26

You know, it just leaves me thinking: if we had programs like this in every district in the country, where would we be?

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Absolutely, Mark. I mean that that is the question that we keep asking, and that's part of why we're trying to grow community works really quickly. We had we started with four pilot counties in Virginia, added two more in Georgia. Those six counties are what our study was based on. But since then, uh Meredith has been able to bring on uh another, I think, nine. I think we're up to 15 counties in six or seven States. That's good, but we'd like to be in a couple hundred counties. And in fact, with the results of the study being so strong, we feel we're we're interested now in also trying to kind of concentrate some of the community works chapters into clusters where they might have more collective impact on the politics in a congressional district or a state or a legislative district. So but yeah, we we're with you 100 percent. We feel like this is exactly what every rural county democratic committee in every rural county in the country needs.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

I want listeners to to think through this. You are doing work that the DNC could not even conceive of doing. They they just can't. They've demonstrated that they can't do this sort of thing. They can't do this sort of organizing. They're good at collecting money, they're good at funneling money to corporate democrats, but they're not good at building the bridges that need to be built between the rural and urban communities to create this sort of dynamic that would lead to the victories on behalf of on on uh victories by Democrats on behalf of the party. Meredith, if you were gonna say something, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Oh, yeah, I just wanted to give uh Anthony a sort of hot off the presses update. We had a new uh chapter come on today, so now we're up to eight states.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Congrats. Fantastic. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

I also wanted to say that uh we were able to speak at the Utah State Convention, uh, and Anthony did a training there. I was able to speak about community works, and uh those folks are very interested in the possibility of uh, you know, endorsing at the state level what we're doing, which would go a long ways towards just you know building those clusters of community works chapters. Um well, especially in Utah. But we what we want, what Anthony, we're how many are we aiming for by the by next year?

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Like a hundred, something like that. Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. So with the DNC, I will tell you that that Ken Martin is very aware of Ruby and Community Works. That's good. And rhetorically, he is very supportive of both. In fact, he he said to me when I met with him the very first time, he said, this community works sounds like something we should have in every county, every rural county in the country. Well, that's encouraging. It is encouraging. The the challenges between because I think I'm I'm quite confident Ken genuinely believes that. But but translating that into action at the national level, there seem to be so many, I don't know if it's inertia, I don't know if it's stumbling blocks. It just it's really slow going. But at the state level, as Meredith says, we've got Utah, we have really strong interests from the head of the Maryland State Democratic Party. We're going to be working on cultivating already good ties we have with folks in Georgia and Texas. So we're kind of I'm sorry?

SPEAKER_00 17:07

I'm sorry, and Wisconsin.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

We're thinking now that the strategy to really accelerate the the creation of community works on a much, much larger scale is probably state level. Continued work with the local folks at local chapters always. That's what Meredith does all the time. But if we can get a couple of state uh leaders to come on board with it, and that begins to really accelerate the adoption of community works, then a quicker wholesale strategy. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

You know, as far as Ken Martin goes in the in the in the party, I I I think he probably is well-intentioned. I think the problem is that the party is obsessed with electing candidates without doing the spade work necessary to make those candidates successful.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

Right.

SPEAKER_02 17:53

And it's left to people like you to do the work.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

It's isn't it something how it really at least since uh Bush II, but really since before that, Democrats have had this general attitude that yeah, yeah, we we know we need to cultivate relationships, we know we need to build trust, but we don't have time. The situation's too urgent, the stakes are too high, and we've had this kind of threat mentality that's only gotten worse and worse, of course, with Trump, that keeps us from doing this long-term work. And what we say at Ruby is, you know, folks, we've got to do both. We we've got to start investing in the long-term work of rebuilding trust and rekindling relationships in these places. And that shouldn't prevent us from also fighting the the immediate battles and the legislative battles. So that's uh that's our approach to this. Again, I I'll say that the study that Nick Jacobs did, and Nick designed the surveys with with input from Meredith and others, are uh they're really striking because what they essentially come down to is that uh in the Community Works counties, the four in Virginia and the two in Georgia, in just two years, residents in those counties uh shifted their perceptions about both political parties, shifted their view of um of Democrats. Uh as um Nick put it, they were less likely to view members of the opposing party with hostility or coldness. That's Republicans viewing towards Democrats. They were more likely They were more likely to make a judgment about whether a politician or a party is good or bad based on what they were experiencing locally rather than big national trends and social media. These are these are amazing things to have happen in just two years. And so it is a long-term process, but we thought it might be 10 years before we saw these kinds of results, not two years. So we think now is the time to invest in this.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

You know, you talked about the threat mentality. I think that people who are who are suffused with that mentality would do well to remember that every threat brings with it an opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

So I wanted to say a little bit about uh how it's working from the ground up, because like you said, you know, we're always working at it from all the different angles. And one of the things we've seen locally uh is that we do have new people stepping up to run for office because of this. There are people that had never been involved politically, civically, in any way. They they volunteered through their church in their community. Uh and then they started to go to town council meetings, to school board meetings, to board of supervisors because they were reaching out to try to get partners uh on board for the different projects they were doing for community works. And of course, they started listening and getting mad and speaking up and then realizing for the first time that they actually could have some voice in their community. And out of that, we have people that uh have been asked to fill out a school board term, have been have actually now run for office and won, have been asked to run for office, have joined their electoral board. Um, but you know, we're seeing on the local level that already this is really making a difference in in terms of um both the kinds of candidates that are stepping up and also the can't the the elected people themselves, they're seeing this and they're like, wow, you know, these people are winning because they actually are expressing concern about local issues, about their communities, uh you know, not always just focusing on the partisan battles. Our catchphrase is that well, politicians in Washington are uh, you know. Fighting partisan battles, we're here on the ground finding common ground.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Leads me to another question. I mean, you've you've talked about things that that have happened. Have there been any unexpected outcomes, things that you didn't plan on that happened that surprised you?

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Uh yeah. I mean, again, our original goal was to change rural the people in rural communities, their views towards Democrats and uh both the big D Democrats, but also us as, you know, local, local Democrats. Uh, and so we certainly uh the survey tells us that we're we're getting somewhere with that. But I think what I didn't expect is that it would also change people who are Democrats' views towards their own communities because I think lots of people have felt alienated, isolated, even maybe afraid because of their political beliefs, uh, and so have kind of stood apart from their community. We've got people who have lived, you know, in rural places their whole lives or 20 to 30 years, and yet they still feel like outsiders. And because of community works, they've gone from helping, seeing themselves as helping from the outside to them becoming very vitally involved, you know, in community activities and civic life from the inside. Um, that's been a really wonderful thing to watch. Um the other thing I think is there were some folks, again, who've sort of grown up in rural areas but had certain views towards their neighbors. Uh we had one place where our committee was uh starting out working with a Baptist church to do food distribution, and they were very worried about what those Baptists, you know, were going to think of them as local Democrats, and they were very slow to sort of let that be known or speak to that party, even though in our rural areas, pretty much everybody knows everybody else's politics. But um, you know, they finally got to the point after two years where they feel like, wow, you know, this is a really good exchange, and and folks uh feel positive about each other. And one woman on, you know, from that Democratic Committee said, wow, you know, the Baptists aren't so bad after all. And it was like this, you know, huge revelation. Uh, and I didn't expect it to go that way.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Yeah, and this is like almost political training, too, Mark. It's not the intention because it's all non-political work. But in politics now, for people who are recognizing that we have a big problem with rural and working class people, they'll say, you know what? We've got to meet people where they're at, and we've got to respect them and listen to them. But for a lot of Democrats, including in rural areas, that's that's quite a stretch because fundamentally they think these people are messed up, they're dangerous, they're crazy. But through community works, they get a whole nother view of a big chunk of their neighbors. And so I bet that some of those same people that are doing community works are now more effective when they're engaging with their neighbors, whether on social media or person-to-person or at the door, because fundamentally they've relearned that respect. And that's gotta make them much more effective political advocates, too.

SPEAKER_02 25:21

That's encouraging. Um, let me ask you a lot of the listeners here are politically active, and I think some of them are gonna wonder how they could get involved with something like this. What what would your suggestion be as to how they could get involved?

SPEAKER_00 25:35

Well, the the best first step uh would be first to go to the Ruby website and uh check out Ruby in general, and then also specifically the Community Works page, and on there we have all our chapters listed with local contact information so folks could tap into something already going on. Um they also I would encourage folks to come to our monthly introductory session. It's Building Trust with Community Works. It happens every fourth Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time. Um and you can again sign up by going to the Ruby website. And and that in that introductory session, then we I kind of go through the whole who, what, and why, but also specifically what our strategy is, like building a strong local leadership team, reaching out to potential partners and collaborators in the community, jump starting first projects, recruiting and nurturing volunteers. Those are all resources that we have to offer once folks sign on as a local chapter.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Offer the website URL for listeners.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Uh ruralurbanbridge.org.

SPEAKER_02 26:47

Ruralurbanbridge.org. Okay, good.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Um it's really easy to navigate and to find community works and this uh monthly meeting that Meredith's talking about.

SPEAKER_02 26:58

So for those of you who are listening in, give it a shot. Um do you do anything online?

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Well, the introductory session that I'm talking about is by Zoom.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

It's by Zoom, that's great. So people can participate then.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

Yeah, from all over the country. That's what how we're fabulous. Right now I was doing a little map, and we've got people from, you know, the southeastern part of Georgia, all the way up to uh Bellingham, Washington, right at the uh Canadian border, uh and everywhere in between.

SPEAKER_02 27:29

So I know I'm gonna join in for one of these.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Oh, that's great. I was gonna say also when when it's right, when the time's right and when it's necessary, Meredith does travel to the communities to help really solidify things and do a more in-depth training. Not every one that starts, not every chapter, but it's something she's done periodically. And sometimes that in-person, especially if you have several local counties interested, can really jumpstart it. But the rest is primarily done virtually, which is easy for everybody.

SPEAKER_02 28:01

Let me backpedal a bit. I should have started with this, but there's no time like the present. Um talk about the origins of rural urban bridge, Anthony.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

Um two things converged. One, as I said, was um uh a real all-out effort in the 2018 congressional campaign in the Virginia's ninth, um, leading to a loss and me not wanting to drop the momentum and the energy that was there. And then the second thing was I'd lived in this area for 40 years, but I was still a little bit perplexed and overwhelmed by just how much animosity or at least uh mistrust there was of Democrats. I heard literally scores of times from people, I like you. I'd like to vote for a farmer for Congress, but I could never vote for a Democrat. So what I did in response to that was I just started looking around for more information. I started reading books. And I read Kathy Kramer's The Politics of Resentment and Arlie Hookshild's Strangers in Their Own Land, and Erica Edelson's The Beyond Contempt. And I found emails for those three women, those three very brilliant women, emailed each one and said, I'm this guy. We should work together. And we started having Zoom calls uh right about uh when COVID was breaking, right at the end of 2020, 2021. Those three gals and I started Zooming to discuss what we might do to address this polarization and divide, and that steadily led to our monthly briefings, to our first trainings on understanding and overcoming the divide. Throughout 2021, we just operated as a voluntary organization. And then in 2022, we incorporated and started raising a few bucks.

SPEAKER_02 29:57

Are there any other policy initiatives you want to talk about that people could find on the site?

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Sure. I would love to do that. So two things I'll mention once one is directly policy and the other is indirectly policy. Directly policy, we are working on a um uh uh update of our uh uh rural New Deal. We are gonna be uh going back to some of the rural leaders and uh both thought leaders and practitioners that uh uh helped us develop the Rural New Deal with Progressive Democrats of America back in 2023 and update it to account for some new issues like data centers and some new opportunities. But the Rural New Deal, even without the update, is still, in our view, the best overall, most grounded but but really far-reaching policy platform out there for rural. There's other good ones. Rural Democracy Initiative has a terrific platform uh called the Rural Policy Action Blueprint. Um the Patriotic Millionaires have a four-point tax-based platform. So there's good ones out there, but the Rural New Deal is one we highly recommend. We get candidates who run on elements, et cetera. So that's one. Second is kind of not just policy, but sort of strategy. Meredith worked with me and with a woman named Kathy Frederickson from the Georgia Democratic Party Rural Caucus, and we developed something called the Building Rural Foundations Plan. Building Rural Foundations Plan. And it's terrific. It's a pretty concise document. It is written for the leadership of the Democratic Party, the DNC, and other leading Democrats, and it lays out four clear uh steps to rebuilding uh connections and uh winning back, basically, rural voters. It starts with community engagement, including community works. It also looks at public policy, like some of these rural policy platforms I've discussed, and it addresses things like investment in rural democratic committees. So it's a very clear, straightforward thing. That's been submitted to the DNC and currently has 15 State Democratic Party rural caucuses or councils in support. That's the same thing. Yeah, we're working to get more. We have several additional State Party caucuses interested, and we're hoping to have a resolution before the DNC at their August meeting in Texas that will make this the policy of the DNC to adopt this rural plan. We don't know if it would be great if that happened. Wouldn't it be? So we're we're pretty excited about it.

SPEAKER_02 32:56

Let me ask you do you ever encounter any overt hostility, no matter how hard you try to dispel it?

SPEAKER_01 33:04

Meredith, you can go first.

SPEAKER_00 33:05

Uh yeah. Uh no, I don't I don't think, you know, I think with our community works, uh, and I'm speaking for our different local chapters, uh, people have just really found a very uh welcoming uh sense of yes, this is so many people on the ground that actually, you know, just living are really looking for this, are really excited about this. And that's again across kind of the political spectrum. Um I think it's only when we get on this national level that there's, you know, the the kind of hostility that we are all experiencing. But on the on the ground in our communities, people want to uh work together. People want to trust each other, people want to rebuild those relationships that really have been damaged, like the ones I was talking about with my uh, you know, my son, the parents of my son's friends, uh have really been damaged since 2016. But uh, you know, we we we ultimately we want to work together for the good of our kids and the goods good of our communities.

SPEAKER_02 34:12

Folks, this works. It really works. Um let me ask you, is there any place on the website where people can engage with you to get tips on how to do this themselves?

SPEAKER_00 34:23

I would suggest that they come to the uh introductory sessions.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

Zoom sessions. Okay, good to know. Yeah, um, if you want to go back, folks, in the um in the recording, you'll have the um um uh the URL website. You want to read it again, Meredith, just so people can have it.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

All right, it's ruralurbanbridge.org and then slash communityworks will take you directly to our page.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

I'll just add, Mark, that you know, there are people doing it on their own. There's some Democratic committees that are doing things on their own without any connection with us. There's some other groups. And we applaud that. We think that's great. Yeah. The difference is that what Community Works offers is now three years of experience on how to do this and do it well. A peer learning group that Meredith coordinates that gets bigger all the time, people sharing lessons, good and bad. And we offer funds to support this, you know, modest amount of funds, but important funds. So we offer kind of a structure and support in a way that most others wouldn't have. So that's that's probably what sets it apart. That's great.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

People are seeing it as, you know, this that they're part of starting this movement and they're excited about that. So I think to to join in and be part of that uh makes it the community works very appealing to me anyway. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_02 35:44

It's awfully fulfilling for anybody who gets involved with it, I'm sure.

unknown 35:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:47

Any final thoughts from each of you?

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Only that this is the best time. This window we're in right now, excuse me, is the best shot Democrats and people on the left more broadly have had at rebuilding connections and bringing into the base working class folks and rural people. The the horrors of Trump, the complete betrayals of farmers and coal miners and working class people gives us a chance that we just haven't had. Community works and Ruby are all about helping Democrats take that chance.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

I'm gonna leave it there. That's a mic drop. That was great.

SPEAKER_02 36:34

It is a mic drop. Yeah. I want to thank you both for coming on. I'm gonna spread this out far and wide. I hope a lot of people will listen to it and get ideas from it and um log on to the site and uh try to get involved. So with that, um stay on for me uh until everything uploads. And um we will see you again at another episode of America's Fractured Politics. Thank you both.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

Thanks so much, Mark. Can't wait.