By Ramón Pérez, [email protected]

Part Two of 2008 Latino Voter Turnout Plan is about creating your infrastructure. It’s like forming your own ball club—who will you choose to be on your winning team?

This team needs a plan-coordinator and the right amount of committed players to cover each duty required for a successful electoral campaign. This is where your start-up group from Part One [Jan. 5, 2007 issue of La Prensa, which can be viewed on line at www.laprensa1.com] begins to lay out the plan of action, on paper, including all the roles, responsibilities, information gathering, community meeting to recruit volunteers, and other related fixings that need to be covered leading right up to election day and afterwards.

Establishing a Plan: Choose a person to coordinate and manage your voter election plan. The coordinator can be responsible for acquiring your location, selecting the core planning group, and volunteers for the following duties: material coordinator, media coordinator, map coordinator, food coordinator, three to five precinct runners, and a volunteer coordinator. These are all very basic and standard but essential components in establishing a voter plan. Another thing to remember, one person can be responsible for more than one duty.

Host a Community Meeting: This where you utilize your list of contacts from Part One, where you were asked to start developing a community contact list of people and/or organizations to call or visit from your new and growing network of churches, Latino organizations, telephone book, student directory’s, and so forth.

This is where you utilize local newspapers, radio and TV stations to help your group(s) promote your first community meeting to recruit volunteers and start educating the Latino community about the relevance and significance of voter registration and turnout.

Select a meeting place that is neutral and centrally located for folks who travel from a farther distance. This is also the time and place to confirm target precincts, schedule volunteer trainings, develop communication plans, review and handout the local election process, identify tasks that still need to be completed, schedule some practice door knocking in targeted precincts, register new voters, and acknowledge the work of the volunteers.

Once again, if you or your group would like more individual assistance on this part, I would be more than happy to come out and review this section with you in more detail. Contact me at the above email address.

NEXT WEEK: Part III, Voter Education and Preparation.

2008 Latino Voter Turnout Plan: Part I of V
2008 Latino Voter Turnout Plan: Part II of V

2008 Latino Voter Turnout Plan: Part III of V
2008 Latino Voter Turnout Plan: Part IV of V

2008 Latino Voter Turnout Plan: Part V of V