🌱 Talking to Strangers Builds Radical Hospitality

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We talk about talking to voters. Talking to strangers can sound daunting, but it's so rewarding with these motivational interviewing techniques. Plus we have more tech and digital news you might have missed this month. Read on for more...

In Case You Missed It: 🌱 Can We Actually Persuade?| Deep Canvassing for Change

We're 48 days away from a hugely consequential U.S. election and I am fired up! Why you ask?

Because I left my hobbit hole to talk to real voters! This Saturday, at an ungodly hour, my friends and I set out to the Central Valley of California, the agriculture capital where much of our food is grown, to talk to the hard-working voters of Modesto, CA. We had hundreds of volunteers knocking on thousands of doors to help support the Congressional candidate, Adam Gray, win the seat that he barely lost in 2022 as well as Jessica Self for State Assembly and other down ballot candidates.

There are a lot things happening to make us feel whiplash about this election, but talking to real voters is the antidote to spinning out. I spoke with people who aren't aware of the election because they are busy working multiple jobs to make ends meet. One person's husband was sleeping because they work the overnight shift. A mother and daughter were cooling off from the heat, sipping tea, and cleaning in their yard. A group of men were hanging in the backyard along the chainlink fence while one hosed down a car part. My canvassing partner and I spoke to them all. We listened to their concerns and emphasized the importance of voting down ballot. We asked if they needed help voting. We reapplied our sun screen. We hung door signs on the houses that were quiet. We celebrated when we found the car again and turned on the air conditioning.

Also, all of these conversations happened in Spanish. We discussed how la mujer would need support in Congress if she won. We emphasized congressional candidate, Adam Gray's, focus on seguridad pública, agua, y agricultura. We helped a man register to voter while we talked to his tío about the candidates. My Spanish speaking skills had certainly atrophied since leaving Texas, but I was able to pick up on their everyday concerns and hopes about their government.

Mainly, we used the skills we've learned from motivational interviewing and deep canvassing to connect with voters. I was able to listen and show that there are people out there who care and want to create a more supportive government that meets its people.

Principles of Motivational Interviewing

All of that is well and good, but how do you actually do motivational interviewing, you say? Luckily, the minds around motivational interviewing (it’s been around for 30 years!) have some handy acronyms for easy instructions.

First up is how you can come to the table. People are smart. They understand if they are connecting or it they’re being pandered to or judged. They will lock up and ignore your views if they feel threatened; this is called the backfire effect.

That's why the most important thing to remember when deep canvassing is to practice radical hospitality. For motivational interviewing to really work, you need to show up in a compassionate and open way. It’s about seeing the other person as a collaborator or partnership of equals. People come to different beliefs for many different reasons and it's important to remove judgement when listening.

It’s about seeing the person’s absolute worth and feeling empathy for their thoughts and feelings. Finally, evocation is about truly listening and using their wisdom to draw out how this issue helps serve their values (not the other way around). Some people refer to this as active listening.

Practicing Radical Hospitality

Putting that empathy into practice is much easier with the four-step process to Engage, Focus, Evoke, and Plan. Before even discussing the issue or topic yourself, you want to engage with the person to establish a partnership with them and understand their values. That’s where the OARS or core skills of motivational interviewing come in. You should ask Open-ended questions to get a sense of the person. Using the w’s (who, what, where, why, and how) will help to facilitate dialogue.

You can also share affirmations about the person to loosen things up. It’s impossible to agree with someone on everything, but even the most different people can find some common ground. Take Ted Cruz. He and I could not be more different, but I bet he likes some good Tex Mex now and again, just like me. Finding common ground only builds the bond of partnership more.

The next stage is about focusing the conversation and having a clear agenda or plan. When talking about serious issues like this with voters, it’s easy to go off track, so having a clear set of questions and topics you want to hear about is important. In most election cases, these questions will be focused on will you vote and will you vote for our candidate.

Listen More, Talk Less

Now we get to the sweet spot of motivational interviewing. Once you’ve established an agenda, you want to evoke those reasons that would help them change. We do that through reflective listening. This is where the empathy part is really important. Reflective listening is not only listening to what they say but also what they implied. It’s taking their words and paraphrasing them back to them to help build support for your cause. The key to reflective listening is to remove your judgment to find common ground. Using that common ground you can begin to summarize the conversation and build a plan of action. That’s called getting your foot in the door, have them commit to or agree to a small piece and it will only make it easier to say yes to the larger issue. And if you ever get tripped up, the best questions to ask are "Can you tell me more about that?" or "Where did you first hear that?"

It may seem scary, but with these tools, we can have deeper and more effective conversations with people we don’t always agree with. Need proof? Just watch this heartwarming 15-minute video of this Tedx Talk about motivational interviewing. Stay for the precious man who meets a queer person for the first time and watch his mind change. ❤️

If you'd like to go deeper on motivational interviewing and learning these skills to talk to voters, I recommend buying my friend, Elizabeth Chur's new book, The Joy of Talking Politics with Strangers. She's also hosting a book launch event on September 30th at Manny's in San Francisco.

Elizabeth Chur | Author

Author

Enjoying our newsletter? Subscribe to get our resources and support in your inbox weekly. I created Roots of Change Media to help busy communicators and activists practice intentional activism through a decolonized lens.

🎙 Finding Your Role in This Year's Election

I flipped the mic and stepped back from doing the interviewing to appear on the Dear White Women podcast to talk about getting involved in the up coming election!

I am thrilled to share its release and help spread the word about the practical ways folks can get involved in moving our country towards a multi-racial democracy and away from the authoritarian right! I spoke with Misasha Suzuki Graham and Sara (Yoko) Blanchard about getting ready for the November election and how anyone can get involved to defeat the orange guy. 🍊 I hope you listen and enjoy!

254: How to Get Involved in the 2024 Election, with Sam Chavez

This episode is for all of you who may think: “My vote doesn’t matter.” “I don’t vote.” “I would get involved but I don’t know how or where to volunteer.” “I do

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Last Week's Flowering Deep-Dive

📚 Digital & Tech News Roundup | September Edition!

Wrangling this Month’s Digital Comms News

Our latest Digital & Tech News Roundup for all of the news you may have missed this month is out! Check out the trailer above or upgrade for the full video. I cover the latest around tech and digital media that will impact you or your organization’s communication’s planning.

• Artificial intelligence continues to consume and steal mass amounts of content and data
• We cover two important advertising changes that Meta and Google have implemented that will impact current and future campaigns
• Finally, I end with a lightening round of all of the social media platform updates that you and your organization might want to try out
• As always, we wrap the news in a social change lens so that we can use tech tools for good!

• 📚 Cheerleaders Deserve Equal Pay Too - The 19th is out with a deep dive on professional cheerleading. Despite the fame, NFL cheerleaders are still underpaid. Scarlett, a working mom, explained that she earned $1,000 total for the 2014 season or $125 a game for nine hours of practice a week and a full day of cheerleading on Sunday. It’s a dream come true for some, while also being an untenable nightmare for women trying to provide for themselves.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - The historical fights about feminism would have you believe that cheerleaders deserve less because they chose a profession that’s more feminine or aligned with the patriarchy. True feminism is about building a more equitable and empathetic world regardless of your life choices. The Netflix documentary “America’s Sweethearts” about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders is helping to raise this issue and help cheerleaders to collectively bargain.
• 📚 The History & Fear of Haitian Immigrants - By now, most of us have seen the memes about Donald Trump’s spreading of disinformation about Haitians. This piece by the Intercept explains the long history in the U.S. of racism and xenophobia towards people from Haiti. There's always been "this fear of ‘the Black Republic."
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - Our modern news often obscures the history of colonialism by skipping the violent colonial history that causes the instability that ultimately drives increase immigration to the U.S. We cannot forget this as the climate crisis worsens. Immigrants are people too!
• 📚 AI is an Extraction Machine - “AI actually is ‘an extraction machine that feeds off humanity's collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms’.” According to expert James Muldoon. (Source: Dispatch)
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - A new book, In Feeding the Machine, the hidden human labor powering AI, exposes AI from the viewpoint of the workers building AI and mining our data. Major tech companies outsource menial tasks to the Global South who face horrendous working conditions while mining sometimes unsafe and harmful content.
• 🎟 Why States Matter: Voting Downballot in 2024 - The team at Sister District, Daily Kos, and The Downballot are hosting a virtual event on September 23rd to talk about why voting for your state and local races is crucial.
  • 🤓 The Root 🌱 - They'll also discuss the history of conservative efforts to leverage state power for their regressive policy goals, the historical disinvestment of progressives at the state level, and how we build local progressive political power.

And that's a wrap on this week’s newsletter! We hope you found this helpful in your work to cultivate lasting social change. Forward this to a friend and help democratize communications!

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If you have any topics you want covered or have any questions, please reach out and let me know.

In Solidarity,
Sam Chavez
Roots of Change Founder

🌱 Seedling Member Zone

This week, we hear from one of the candidates I met in Modesto, CA. Jessica Self who's running for CA State Assembly tells use about the district, her history supporting the community, and how organizing can help us flip these key seats and allow the people of the Central Valley to have real, supportive representation in Washington and Sacramento. Find our latest videos on our 🎬 Quick Bites page.