GPCA Coordinating Committee Candidate Bio (Two-Year Term)

Sean Michael Dodd

Solano County

*ACTIVIST BACKGROUND*

In the fall of 2010, I became politically active, attending Napa County
Green Party meetings and soon joining the Coordinating Committee.  As a new
committee member, I quickly assessed the need to increase our local
membership and more publicly promote our 10 Key Values. Analyzing
voter-registration records and recent election trends, I produced a detailed
report on Green registrations by demographic and recommended new ways of
growing our party locally and running election campaigns and ballot
initiatives.   I was soon voted into one of the two Co-Coordinator
positions.  For the 2010 election, I authored and published Napa Greens'
consensus positions on the ballot initiatives.  I also wrote published
opinion pieces about the BP oil disaster.  In the space of a few months, I
involved myself on local issues ranging from medical marijuana clinics to
non-genetically modified organisms, to social justice issues surrounding the
lethal use of force by local law enforcement.  As a new Co-Coordinator, I
became our spokesperson on the issue of local police shootings, advocating
for the creation of a police-review commission in Napa, to be modeled on
similar citizen-run oversight bodies in other Bay Area cities like Berkeley,
San Francisco, and San Jose.  Over a two-month period, I had several opinion
articles published on the need for independent investigations of police
shootings and I appeared in media interviews, both on the radio and in the
newspapers.  Working collaboratively with other members of the Coordinating
Committee, I led a team of volunteers to assemble a panel of expert speakers
for a community forum on the topic of police review commissions, held in
Napa on January 24th.  I coordinated all logistics and the media campaign
for that event, and I moderated the expert-panel discussion.  The event was
hugely successful, drawing a large turnout and significant media coverage.  We
have since followed up by petitioning by petitioning the City Council to
take up the issue of citizen oversight of police activities, and much of our
advocacy on this initiative has been based on issues of diversity, social
justice, and grassroots democracy.  In addition to these activities, I have
also recruited an experienced and highly dedicated student organizer for our
coordinating committee, and I have reached out to our local registered
Greens by phone and house visits, reconnecting with our base and trying to
get our local members involved in our projects.  I have also helped our
small local party reconnect with our membership by scheduling a 2011
calendar of bimonthly meetings and events at our main library in downtown
Napa.



*
*

*STATEMENT OF PURPOSE*

I believe that the events of history are finally beginning to catch up with
the progressive vision of the Green Party, and that we are now living
through an historical moment of unparalleled potential for promoting the
values of our party and gaining a foothold in the political sphere.  I am
fully committed to the goals of Green 2012, and in a very real sense the
goals I have been working on at the local level run parallel to the
state-level goals of the Green 2012 initiative.  I believe that the Green
Party is not at all a 'third' party, but rather 'the first party for a new
beginning.'  As Greens, we must not only organize, fundraise, grow our
membership, and run candidates for office, but we must also reestablish
ourselves through effective activist campaigns and media strategies, and we
must seek to reform the electoral system in ways which provide upcoming
parties like ours a fairer chance of success in politics.  At the top of our
electoral-reform agenda should be a statewide ballot initiative to amend the
California State Constitution, making ranked-choice voting the statewide
standards in all elections.  Such an initiative could run in tandem with a
voter-registration drive, so that at the same time we collect signatures for
the initiative, we also register new Green voters.  The initiative could
also serve to re-energize our local chapters county by county.  It could
serve as a rallying point for all county councils to engage themselves on
voter registration and ballot signatures.  In addition to running candidates
in elections, we also need to ensure that there are local Green parties
registered and active in every county, and we should place special emphasis
on establishing a presence at all college campuses, actively recruiting
young Greens.  As someone with years of professional experience in project
management and outreach programs, I would bring to this position a useful
skill set in areas of community organizing, event coordination, media
strategies, and public speaking.  I am also fully bilingual in Spanish, at a
mastery level, and I have years of experience working with the Latino
community through literacy and social service programs, as well as
performing medical and court interpreting services and producing
professional written translations, both from Spanish into English, and
English to Spanish.  I believe we need to create more opportunities to
increase diversity among our membership and to engage the many ethnic and
linguistic communities throughout California.  Thank you for considering me
as a candidate for this position.  It would be a great privilege to serve
the California Green Party in this capacity over the next two years, and I
would be deeply honored to be granted such an opportunity by the party.


Sincerely,


*Sean*