Do good by helping voters to get vaccinated against the still problematic Covid19 virus by volunteering to phone bank with San Francisco Rising! Although an average of 60% of Americans are supposedly vaccinated, this number varies a lot from one locality to another and/or demographic group to another, and our country needs to reach about 70% everywhere — i.e. “herd immunity” – by this summer for greatest public protection. For example, many fewer members of some low income or ethnic minority members appear to be vaccinated.

Phone banking for the VAX campaign of SF Rising is much easier than phone banking for political candidates, which the League does NOT officially support! Volunteers work from a script in 2 parts giving information on 1) making appointments to get vaccinated (https://myturn.ca.gov) and 2) resources for obtaining advice on pandemic-related issues arising in the workplace (https://www.dir.ca.gov/dosh/coronavirus/). SF Rising (https://www.sfrising.org) strives to help people of color make change through the ballot box, so was one of the large number of community organizations partnering with our state League in the unfortunately unsuccessful Prop. 15 Campaign last Nov. 3 to raise revenues for schools and communities.

Last Thursday (5/27/21) when I appeared via Zoom at 5 pm for a briefing from SF Rising coordinator Aileen, I was impressed to see 5 other volunteers – all young people, who increased to a dozen by 7:15 pm when phone banking ended with a de-brief on our experiences. Although we did not use an auto-dialer and entered phone numbers of voters manually, the script on our computer program was easy to follow and record our results on. We left messages on answering machines of most people we phoned but those who answered were polite and seemed appreciative of our efforts.

It’s a great feeling to know that one is making a contribution, even when it’s as small as helping a group like SF Rising remove wrong numbers from its database – and every so often hearing the gratitude in another human being’s voice acknowledging your phone banking for a good cause!

–Ruby MacDonald, President