Nation-Building >> A report on the February Dean meetup in New York City & Portland, Oregon | return to front page

David Nir has sent in this report from New York:

We had a very good turn-out (around 15 people) at the NYC Dean meetup last night. (The meeting lasted about an hour.) A broad range of people from Manhattan, Brooklyn & Queens showed up, and everyone seemed enthusiastic about doing work on behalf of the candidate. Since we currently lack any guidance from the campaign, we discussed ideas that we could work on ourselves. We have already:
* Planned a meeting for next week (Wednesday, Feb. 12th, 7pm, location TBA).
* Created a Yahoo group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewYorkforDean/links).

Our near-term goals are to:
* Raise awareness about Dean through targeted literature handouts.
* Create a "New York for Dean" website (possibly with a group blog feature).

And our longer-term ideas:
* Prepare for petitioning for Dean to get on the ballot (NY has the toughest ballot-access laws in the nation).
* Develop hand-out DVDs with Dean's speeches as a supplement to standard printed literature (if this can be done cheaply enough & without running a-foul of copyright laws).

We discussed other ideas as well, so I hope my fellow meetup-ers will forgive me for leaving anything out. We encourage anyone in the area who is interested in Dean to join the Yahoo group (which will put you on our mailing list) & come to the next meeting. Also, we would love to hear ideas from other meetups about things we can do for the campaign.

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Portland's meetup for Dean was well attended, with 5 persons confirmed on the meetup.org site, and 9 showing up for the Dean event! A good group of experienced campaign workers. The host of the event had contacted the Dean campaign, and, with another volunteer having a VCR/TV, two videos were shown: Dean on Meet the Press, and a Dean bio/campaign clip. Ideas generated for future action included:

* A letter-writing, leaflet dropping, campaign
*Having Dean available in a video conference-call for one of the future meetups
*Creating a Yahoo store for Dean-related political nostalgia
*Working with Vancouver, WA Dean-supporters, for their early primary

The group decided that a first priority was getting more people involved with the campaign. The Portland group will likely be meeting at the Eco-Trust next month.

* A Oregon for Howard Dean 2004 Yahoo group has also been formed (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oregon_for_howard_dean_2004).