What is UU the Vote? If you have attended a rally, written a letter to an elected official, registered a voter, or supported a partner organization, you have already been doing the work of UU the Vote. It is a collaborative and distributed effort by individual Unitarian Universalists, committees in our congregations, our ministers, State Action Networks, advocacy groups, the national association, Love Resists, Side with Love, and multiple partner organizations representing and organizing frontline communities.
Mark your calendar for UUFH’s UU the Vote Watch Party!
Click HERE for more information.
UU the Vote is not about abandoning the justice ministries you’ve been doing and switching to work on voting rights and democracy defense. Nor is it only facilitating voter registration drives or get-out-the-vote campaigns in our congregations or broader communities. UU the Vote is about integrating electoral engagement into our strategies for change so that we are advancing our vision of a just world and beloved community in every arena available to us.
UU the Vote is convincing our neighbors to #VoteLove because no one should ever be fired for coming out. It is recruiting climate activists to become climate voters. It is bringing electrical cords to the precincts where registrars will purposefully leave voting machines unplugged. It is offering our buildings to community groups in need of a space to launch their canvassing operations. It is being a faithful and courageous presence to counter white supremacists who intend to intimidate. It is hosting candidate forums, phone banks, fundraisers, cross-state mobilization weekends, and much more.
Starting January 12, 2020, and beyond, UU the Vote will be supporting congregations to form volunteer teams (or empower current justice leaders) to lead the work in ways that make sense for your community.
We will specifically be supporting these teams to lead in the following areas of electoral engagement work:
● Mobilizing voters
● Challenging voter suppression
● Holding values-based conversations to persuade our neighbors on the issues that matter
● Opening the doors of our congregations to the activities of frontline communities and justice partners
● Providing the spiritual sustenance and movement chaplaincy to ground our faith and respond to the injustices we confront through the work
The UU the Vote team at the UUA will roll out tools, trainings, and support to equip each of us with the skills and analysis to participate, to amplify the good work happening on the ground, to connect UUs to each other and to partners, and to coordinate moments of convergence. As a distributed effort, we’ll establish online and on-the-ground communities of practice for UUs to coordinate with each other to unleash our potential and to scale up in strategic locations across the country.