Building a local email list as an organizing strategy begins where all the most effective organizing does – in relationship. For the Charlottesville Area Justice Coalition, I began by making a list in a spreadsheet of all the contacts I could think of that were 1) people I knew and 2) people I thought might be interested in connecting over local justice work.
We formed a small steering committee to oversee these efforts and spent two months simply growing an email list as we prepared for our first Zoom meeting for the Coalition in 2023.
We set a date for the first meeting and started spreading the word individually. Each person we met, we added to the email list. We then contacted many organizations who were also doing similar work and emailed or called them, explaining our goal and adding them to the list.
By the time we got to our first meeting, we had momentum and interest, which grew even more when we decided to have the group engage a low-threshold organizing campaign – advocating to our local jail to make phone calls free. We thought this was an issue that many individuals could support, and we’d worked hard to grow the list so that it included community groups, system actors, and local politicians – from abolitionists to strong system-supporters.
We wrote a petition and created a Google Form for people to sign, asked those on the Coalition list to send the petition around, and quickly got over 100 signatures. We then added those individuals to the list. We’ve now had twice-monthly meetings for over a year and continue to work to grow our list and engage it, most often by sending out a bi-weekly resources list as one way to meet a need (gathering justice-related resources and events). The email list continues to grow!
Author: Sam Heath is a narrative strategist with Equal Justice USA, a national nonprofit working to end the death penalty and promote restorative justice and community safety. He was a high school history teacher for ten years before this role.