All of our Virginia candidates won their primaries AND our Quiet Evening at Home fundraiser brought in a whopping $1,065!! Thanks so much to everyone for helping out. Take a moment to just feel good today and celebrate. Kudos all around.

Tomorrow is our last day to send around the link to our Quiet night at home fundraiser so I am posting it here. Minutes follow below the fund-raiser. Please send this on to friends so we can move closer to our goal of $2,000.

Help Flip The Virginia State House and Senate Blue in November 2019 with a 

QUIET EVENING AT HOME 

Virginia Primary Day: Tuesday, June 11th

No need to fight for a scarce East Bay parking space. No need to dress up. 

Just contribute $20 or more at our Act Blue link that will directly fund the Virginia campaign efforts in State Senate District 7 and House of Delegates Districts 83 and 85. For your donation you’ll receive

• One teabag to take you comfortably through the evening of the primary
• An authorized, collectable and handmade button from our Indivisible Elmwood group
• Information regarding 3 important Virginia elections so you can understand the primary results

In order to receive your gifts, let us know you’ve contributed and the address to which you’d like our appreciation to be delivered.

MINUTES FROM THE MEETING

1. Bruce discussed the results of the Indivisible survey we participated in. Anyone who wants the handout with a summary should get in touch with him. Indivisible has decided not to endorse for the primary (which we supported). Bruce will be posting updates on Indivisible activities on Thursdays.
2. Bill updated us on about the East Bay Activist Alliance activities (several fundraisers, phone banks starting, texting as well). He’ll be posting update about activities– lots is going on and in the future there will be even more events.
3. Judy gave us an incredibly informative summary of the attempt to replace the sheriff in Alameda and reform the requirements statewide so we can find better candidates. She will posting her summary of the process. For those not at the meeting, reading her summary will give you an idea of what they are up to and how important it is.
4. We decided not to sponsor our own event for the June 15th spotlight on Impeachment. Instead everyone is encouraged to join in the action in Oakland at 1:00 at the Ron Dellums plaza. We will also be posting information about debate-watching parties (we suspect there will be many in the area) for June 26 and 27th.
5. We are going to extend our auction of political memorabilia and also take some of the items in person to some future fund-raisers so we can make sure to get as much $$ from the event as we can.
6. Everyone is encourage to write some postcards for Tony the Democrat’s new campaign in Florida.
7. Due to travel plans, out next meeting will be on Sunday July 14th. In the meantime, people will be posting action items so there will be lots to do (posting will be 3-4 times a week so be sure to check regularly).

1. Say no to fracking California by clicking on the National Resources Defense Council action page at act.nrdc.org and submitting a comment to the US Bureau of Land Management.
2. Spring cleaning? Donate your old shoes: https://soles4souls.org/get-involved/give-shoes/dropoff-locator/
3. Join us for our next meeting this coming Sunday, June 9th 4:30-5:45. Lots to do.

1. Log onto Andy’s post and copy the fundraiser links, send them to friends. Donations are starting to come in but we need to step up the flow to meet our goal.
2. Time to get writing! We have our wonderful new postcards. If you need some, let me know and I will leave you a stack on our front porch. Tony is busy with campaign #161 Kelly Smith in Florida. Let me know if you need addresses. AND FROM INVISIBLE:
3. Tell your MoC to vote for the Dream and Promise Act, and oppose any motion to recommit. H.R. 6, the Dream and Promise Act, will get a final vote in the House on Tuesday. The Republicans are certain to offer a “motion to recommit” before the final vote, which is a last-minute, bad-faith procedural maneuver to try to split the Democratic caucus and sabotage the bill. Democrats need to hold strong, reject the motion to recommit, and pass H.R. 6!
4. Show up for a day of action on June 15th to demand an impeachment inquiry. Robert Mueller made it clear in his remarks last week: if Trump is going to be held accountable, Congress is going to have to meet its obligation as a co-equal branch of government. That’s why we’re joining with MoveOn and other partners for a June 15 day of action to demand an impeachment inquiry—if Congress doesn’t hold him accountable for his abuses of power, no one will.
5. Demand that your MoC sign on in support of cutting funding for Trump’s deportation machine. Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have received billions in additional funding to tear gas, separate, and cage families, and to terrorize communities. Members of Congress should sign the letter led by Reps. Jayapal, Pocan, Castro, and Chu calling on the House Appropriations Committee to #DefundHate by cutting funding to the agencies that carry out Trump’s racist immigration policies.
6. Tell your MOC to co-sponsor H.R. 1046 to stand up to Big Pharma and cut drug prices. Drug companies charge people more for medicines in the U.S. than they do anywhere else in the world, but Congress has a chance to act to rein them in. House Democrats should co-sponsor H.R. 1046, which would allow Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies to ensure that people don’t have to choose between their medicine and other necessities.
7. Sign up for the National Call on Thursday. June 6 is the next monthly Indivisible National Activist Call! All group leaders, group members, and other Indivisible activists are welcome. We’ll be rolling out our 2-year strategy to defeat Trump and defund hate. You won’t want to miss this.

Friday, May 31 news:

At our meeting we decided to support Indivisible’s call for investigations of Trump that could lay the groundwork for impeachment (Bruce will post the details). We decided to make new postcards with the Blue Wave — 1,000 of them arrived yesterday–and we made new buttons for the Quiet Evening at home and future campaigns. We also perfected the links to our fundraisers (see below). PLEASE SEND THESE LINKS around to friends so we can start moving funds towards Virginia.

Item 1: Auction Link (to send an intern to Virginia).

Item 2: Also to support our efforts in Virginia. Copy and paste the information below and send to your friends.

---

Help Flip The Virginia State House and Senate Blue in November 2019 with a 

QUIET EVENING AT HOME 

Virginia Primary Day: Tuesday, June 11th

No need to fight for a scarce East Bay parking space. No need to dress up. 

Just contribute $20 or more at our Act Blue link that will directly fund the Virginia campaign efforts in State Senate District 7 and House of Delegates Districts 83 and 85. For your donation you’ll receive

• One teabag to take you comfortably through the evening of the primary
• An authorized, collectable and handmade button from our Indivisible Elmwood group
• Information regarding 3 important Virginia elections so you can understand the primary results

In order to receive your gifts, let us know you’ve contributed and the address to which you’d like our appreciation to be delivered.

We meet this Sunday May 26th at our usual time and place (4:30-5:45, 2745 Elmwood Ave) to discuss Indivisible impeachment support, work on our fundraisers and hear updates from our East Bay Activist Alliance liaison Bill. Special spring treat: Sangria!

We set in motion both of our fund-raising efforts and they will go live later this week.

1. Everyone will be sent a link to our Political Memorabilia on-line auction by the end of the week so we all can start passing the link on the political mavens we know. Thanks for all the terrific donation and the help organizing the 20 lots.

2. We’ll also be sending everyone the invite link and file with printed summary of the Virginia Primary) for our Quiet Night At Home fundraiser. To start selling these (minimum donation $20), you’ll need to print out the primary info file as a one-page sheet, find your own tea bags, and add one of our buttons (we made the first 60 at our meeting) and put in an envelop. If you do not have any of our great new buttons, please email me about picking some up. They will also be available at our next meeting, Sunday May 26th at our house.

This Sunday May 12th 4:30-5:45 at our house (2745 Elmwood Ave) we will officially kickoff our next set of Blue Wave activities, starting with our fund-raising for Virginia. We’ll have our new buttons, new postcards and new energy. Please plan on attending. Bring all donations for our on-line auction and any friends looking to get active preserving our democracy. What we launch on Sunday is the Blue Wave that will take over the White House!

Andy is out of town and I am sick so we are not having a meeting tomorrow Sunday April 28th. Our next meeting will be Sunday May 12th 4:30-5:45 at our house. Everyone now has two extra weeks to gather items for our “From the political past into our Democratic future” auction. I will be posting some action items tomorrow in place of our meetings and plan to begin regular M and F postings. If anyone has anything they wanted to present tomorrow, please post it to the group. See you all in two weeks!

1. Bill explained that our old local CA13 Sister District group has been renamed East Bay Action Network and is now an affiliate of (and not a sub-group of) the larger Sister District organization. CA 13 is going solo in order to be able to engage in not only the activities forwarded from Sister District but also other actions that are not part of the SD mission. Most of us will not notice any difference in how our group functions and Bill will keep us up with anything we need to know about this reorganization.
2. We went over our two upcoming fundraisers. First, we will offer our Quite Evening at Home for June 11th, the night of the Virginia primary. Look for a sample invitation to be posted later this week–hoping that everyone will give their suggestions on how to improve it. We will then send it around to friends via email. For the second fundraiser, our Political Paraphernalia Auction, we will be able to host an on-line auction with 20 items (one item can actually be a group of items). Please bring all donations (old buttons, bumper stickers etc. to our next meeting. We will take photos for the auction at the meeting. The auction will go live after we have done as much as we can with the Quiet Evening. Funds raised by the auction will go to Bill’s intern program.
3. Judy gave an update about all the work going into replacing the Alameda sheriff. Bruce will be coordinating with Indivisible CA since they can be a big help with this vital issue. Judy will be posting information to keep us up to date. Thursday May 27th panel on Alameda County Politics at the Wellstone Club meeting, 7:00 Humanist Hall Oakland (This information will be repeated closer to the date of the meeting.)
4. We went over a possible button design. Andy will be printing out some samples for our next meeting so send any ideas on to him. We also reviewed the postcard plans. Hope to have them for our next meeting.
5. We wrote postcards for a study on voter turnout that Sister District is doing. We will certainly share anything we hear about the results of various postcard studies—though it may be a while since this was about getting voters out this coming November.
6. .