This is the year-round tool for community action. An election is one day, but the decisions that shape our rent, our schools, our streets and our families are made all year long, in city council chambers and committee rooms, by people who are supposed to answer to us, which is why we keep a running list of clear, honest ways to reach them.
Each call to action below gives you a short script for a phone call and a draft you can use for an email, along with the office you are contacting, so that a five-minute call carries the weight of a neighbor who knows exactly what to ask for.
Pick one, read the script, and make the call or send the email. If you are signed in, you can log each action so the community can see how much we are doing together.
Submit a call to action
Partner organizations and community groups can bring their own campaigns to the board. Every submission is reviewed and approved before it goes live, so the feed stays accurate and trustworthy.
How submissions work
When you send a call to action, it comes in marked as pending. Our team reads it, checks that the ask is accurate and that the official and the script are real, and then approves it so it appears in the feed above. We do this because the people who use this board are trusting that every script holds up, and that trust is worth protecting.
Partner organizations are welcome to submit, and a partner may sponsor a call to action so that it carries their name and reaches further. Sponsorship is handled by invoice, off the site, for now, so just submit the call to action here and write to us if you would like to sponsor it.
Sign in to submit
Submitting a call to action saves it to your account so we can follow up with you, which means you need a free member account first. It takes a minute, and you can come right back to this form.
A walkthrough for a community group that wants to build its own campaign. Set aside one to two hours, bring a few neighbors, and work through these six steps together.
Before you begin
A call to action is strongest when it comes from people who live with the problem, so gather the folks who are closest to it, pick someone to take notes, and remember that the goal of the meeting is to leave with one clear ask, the words to make it, and the right person to send it to.
1
Name the problem
Start by saying out loud what is wrong, in plain words and in real detail, because a problem named the way people actually live it is far more convincing than a vague complaint. Instead of "housing is hard," say "rents on our block went up twice in one year and three families we know have had to move." Write the problem down in one or two sentences that everyone in the room agrees with.
2
Name who has the power to fix it
Every problem has a decision-maker behind it, and your job is to find the one person or body who can actually change things, because a call to the wrong office is energy spent for nothing. Ask whether this is a city matter, a county matter, a school district matter or a state matter, and then name the specific seat: a city council member, the county board of supervisors, a school board, a state legislator. If you are not sure, that is fine, look it up together, since knowing the right target is half the work.
3
Decide the ask
Turn the problem into one specific thing you want the decision-maker to do, because officials cannot act on feelings, they act on requests. A good ask is concrete enough that you would know whether it happened: "vote yes on the tenant-protection item at the next meeting," "fund the after-school program in this year's budget," "hold a public hearing in our neighborhood." Keep it to a single ask so the message stays clear.
4
Write the script and the email draft
Now write the words. For the phone script, open with who the caller is and where they live, state the ask in one sentence, give one honest reason grounded in what the community is living, and close with a thank you. For the email draft, say the same things in a few short paragraphs.
Keep both factual and respectful, because the point is to be heard, not dismissed, and read the script out loud in the meeting to make sure it sounds like a real person and not a form letter.
5
Decide who you are asking people to contact
Write down exactly who the caller or emailer should reach: the name of the office, the name of the official if there is one, and the phone number or email address. The easier you make this, the more people will follow through, so do the lookup once, here, so that no neighbor has to hunt for a number on their own.
6
Submit it through the form above
When you have a problem, a target, an ask, a script and the contact information, you have a complete call to action, so bring it back up to the submission form on this page and send it in. Our team will review it, and once it is approved it joins the feed at the top, where neighbors across the network can pick it up and make the calls with you.
For immigrant families
You do not need to be a citizen or a voter to call an office or send an email, because every resident has the right to contact the people who govern the place they live. If you would feel safer, you can give only your first name and your neighborhood, and you can ask a trusted neighbor or a member of our team to make the call alongside you.
This tool is free. If it helps your community find its voice, chip in to keep it that way.
This site is built from crowd-sourced and publicly available information. We work to publish only accurate information, but human error is possible, and when we get something wrong we make the public corrections needed. See the corrections log.
