Jenni Gallagher is one of the Neighborhood Team Leaders for ‘Burgs for Obama, a neighborhood team in Blacksburg, Virginia. Here’s how she and the team are gearing up for the It Takes One weekend of action.

By the end of this weekend, we’ll be 100 days out from Election Day. How is your team approaching that?

In the last week, it’s like…something flipped! We’ve always had our core group of volunteers who come out every week, but now we’re really starting to see more and more people get excited, and sign up to help. They’re begging to know what they can do to help Virginia win.

How did your team go about planning for this weekend of action?

We started planning a few weeks out. We have weekly voter registration drives at the farmer’s market, but when we hear that there’s a weekend of action coming up, we start thinking about other places beyond that. My co-leader and I call around asking the Core Team Members for ideas of other places we can canvass. Then when we have a list, we’ll recruit for volunteers: we’ll make calls, and send out notices on Facebook and our team’s email newsletter, and we’re also on Dashboard.

What kinds of events are you and the team planning this weekend?

There’s an outdoor music festival this weekend, so we’ll be there Friday night and Saturday to register voters. There’s also a free music concert near the Virginia Tech campus, and a small theater downtown, and of course the farmer’s market, so we’ll have people registering voters at those locations as well.

The main benefit we have in Blacksburg is that we’re a university town, so we’re making sure we talk to the students and either get them to register for the first time, or update their registration.

As one of the team leaders, what’s on your mind right now?

You know, we just had our monthly organizational meeting the other night, and I told everyone: “We have 105 days. It’s time to start feeling a sense of urgency. When the First Lady was talking about the weekend of action, she said that this election could come down to just a few votes per precinct. And that outcome comes down to us.”

I’m ready to do this work. I don’t want to wake up on November 7th and think that I didn’t do everything I could to help win.

Join Dashboard to see what your neighborhood team is planning for the It Takes One weekend of action.

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