College students seem to hold a consistently menial place in political campaigns. Whether they are the number crunchers, the phone-bankers, the canvassers, the photocopy gurus, the pamphlet sorters or the espresso retrievers, the positions student campaign workers hold often lack prestige.
While such an experience-based hierarchy makes sense, some young people are finding it difficult to bridge the gap to higher level campaign positions.
Ward Goodenough, a Vermonter attending the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, knows how valuable training and experience can be for an aspiring politico. He worked for Democrat Matt Dunne’s gubernatorial campaign, usually in close contact with the candidate, and felt lucky to be able to shoulder real responsibilities.
“That was a great experience to be taken seriously, even at a junior level,” he said.
His stint as a campaign worker for Dunne inspired him to make that kind of training more accessible to college students and all young people.
“How could you take that experience of four or five months of getting to be schooled by someone who has been doing it for their whole life?” he said. “How do you take that kind of experience and condense it and open it up to people who might not normally have the opportunity to get to talk to a gubernatorial candidate for that period of time?”
This year, Goodenough decided to form a training organization — Begin Blue — to ease the transition for would-be college campaign workers. He hopes the workshops will help young, eager, politically-aware students unlock their intellectual potential.
“Our role is sharpening and honing people who have that raw potential,” he said.
He believes that with proper training, young people who already have aspirations for political campaign work can gain a better understanding of campaign structure and elevate themselves into more demanding roles.
“Part of what we are hoping is not just that people will come away with knowledge and skills and blueprints for what their next experience might be, but also to be able to come out with an attitude that, while they might start on a campaign in an early grunt role, they can see the long strategy, they can see where they can take on different roles as months go by,” he said.
Begin Blue hopes to start training by June of next year, but Goodenough and his staff have already begun work on developing a curriculum and expanding their network of potential trainees and candidates looking for campaign aides.
Goodenough hopes that Begin Blue will enrich potential trainees with experience as they move into real campaign jobs, but he also sees the program as an asset to the Democratic Party and to the future of progressive politics.
According to its mission statement, Begin Blue aims to create well-trained campaign staff for progressive candidates, to grant students meaningful labor, and to unearth the future leaders of the Democratic Party.
Despite the organization’s tendency towards a Democratic interest, Goodenough insists that Begin Blue does not limit itself to a single political ideology.
“We don’t have a litmus test, and we are not interested in shaping people’s beliefs. There is no interest in an ideological debate,” he said. “We are interested in making people more effective advocates of whatever issues they themselves are interested in.”
For more information go to BeginBlue.org.
