Seeking Volunteers

To collaborate on an event in your community when I arrive on the walk.  (See Schedule WTFOD-Walk-Events-Dates.pdf)

Our highest, immediate, and critical priority is assembling a team of volunteers of different ethnic backgrounds and skills to join and support the walk in various ways. Help is needed with walk logistics, coordinating all website responses, coordinating our traveling team effort plus RV driving and support, social media, volunteer and event organizing, speechwriting and more. (See below for specifics.)

Be Part of the Traveling Walk Support Team

If you can join Rick on the road for a few days or a few weeks, he could use your help to do the following:

-  Go ahead of him and contact the local papers and radio stations

-  Arrange for speaking venues, or help with other logistics.

-  Drive the RV or tow car

-  Take pictures of Rick talking with people in towns along the way

[Start by emailing Rick to work out the details.]  

In addition, as we approach and enter communities, towns and cities along the way, you are invited to join us, walk with us, and plan events in your community that will help all of us support local, state, and national efforts to fix our democracy, and jumpstart efforts if not otherwise already in progress. As noted elsewhere on this website, it's a long walk, that will begin in Los Angeles and finish more than 3,000 miles and in January 2025 with an event at the steps of our Capitol in D.C. Lots of support is needed for this effort.

The Walking to Fix Our Democracy support RV.

Purpose for the Walk

The walk will pass through states where I and my team have, in advance, done our best to identify, contact, and establish relationships with local activist leadership, including state chapters of national organizations working on democracy reforms (i.e., Common Cause, The League of Women Voters, Represent US, American Promise, Take Back Our Republic, and others).

The walk will have several purposes:

• to raise awareness about the need, and ways, to fix our democracy and avoid autocracy;
• to link up with, celebrate, and support state and local activist efforts along the route;
• to encourage short walks for the same purpose on specific, coordinated dates in communities across America; and
• to encourage candidates for Congress to make fixing our democracy their lead issue in order to unlock progress on every other important issue affecting us all.

Our team will make the case that fixing our democracy first is the best way to avoid autocracy, plus the quickest and most effective way to unlock progress on: living wages, climate change; health care; education; infrastructure; voting rights; financial protections; consumer protections; and much, much more.

Walk Participants

We’ll invite notable individuals with broad perspective to join us on parts of the walk as we meet up with local activist leaders and enter their city or town for events and speeches. Our goal will be to inspire individual citizens to realize that we can all make a difference by working together, becoming better informed, identifying and supporting candidates who will lead to fix our democracy, and by getting involved in nonpartisan reform efforts within our own states. If I and others can walk across America, they too can effectively walk and advocate within their own community and state.

We’ll spread word of our efforts and the issues we highlight via regular daily updates on both social media as well as via local, state and national media and also gather video material that could result in a subsequent documentary if a volunteer is able to make that happen.

In addition to my own effort to walk the entire way to DC accompanied by our team, I’ll provide a small Class C RV (but it needs an organizer/RV driver) to travel with and support us that will sleep at least 3 people separately, a walk website explaining why we are walking and the “fixes” supported, plus a way to receive donations from potential supporters, a personal hotspot internet connection (in-so-far as possible), a daily video update of both our walk’s progress plus stories of those we meet along the way and how they relate to the need for democracy improvements, plus a series of “One more reason to Fix Our Democracy” podcasts.

Volunteer Opportunities

• Social media creation and dissemination. This person will need to be involved daily with the walk and responsible for identifying, capturing, and disseminating media opportunities en-route. The walk and its purpose could also provide an excellent opportunity for a documentary if the involved person is able to generate interest for it with the right parties. They’ll likely need to travel with the van unless they have their own transportation. Being able to drive the van as needed is a plus.
• Team Organizer/RV driver to travel with the walk and be in charge of coordination among the other team members and volunteers, orienting notable visitors, and organizing and supporting those who choose to meet and walk with us in greater numbers as we approach cities and towns where events can be scheduled, plus be able to drive and maintain the RV.
• Advance person working out ahead of the walk by a few to several days. Someone with their own vehicle to be an linking up with and involving local and state activists and homes where I and team members might stay overnight, identifying and setting up speaking engagements, events to participate in, and meeting notable individuals who might join the walk for a day or so and bringing them to and from where we are walking, etc.
• Someone skilled in monitoring and coordinating daily, all responses to our website -created with NationBuilder - whether for various volunteer tasks, wanting to join us at various points for walking, setting up walks or other events in their community, providing overnight lodging for our walk support team, or handling any and all other contact requests, comments and more. This person would not have to travel with the walk support team, but would need to be in close daily collaboration with key team members.
• National media person also skilled in state and local media and responsible for regularly identifying and acting on media opportunities and maximizing them to promote the purposes of the walk. This person would not necessarily need to travel with the walk team, but would need to be in regular contact with me and the team, especially with the social media person. This person could be someone with broad experience who is now retired, or someone with that experience and responsibility now with an activist and supportive national nonprofit, or someone younger but now working with national media for a supportive non-profit. Whoever fits would know who and how to contact key individuals within a wide range of national media organizations and how to create and push out effective media releases.
• An experienced speechwriter to research and work up drafts of speeches in coordination with me. This person would not necessarily need to travel with our walk team, provided we remain in good, regular, communication.
• Note: There may be other opportunities as things progress.

The walk and these tasks can provide exciting opportunities for both younger and/or retired volunteers as well as for many nonprofits to link our walk team efforts to their own programs and goals to fix our democracy, and possibly jumpstart a few careers for passionate younger volunteers.

Our political process and representative democracy is badly in need of “fixing,” the stakes are high, and this walk can certainly be an effective and important part of that work. If you'd like to be part of this effort, please indicate your interest as appropriate on this website, but please also email me with details of your background, interest, and abilities, along with complete contact information. If you'd like to speak with me first, my own contact information is below.

Thanks!

RICK
Rick Hubbard
South Burlington, VT 05403
Contact me