A belated Happy New Year! We hope that 2020 has started well for you and yours.

As we mentioned in our last message, 2020 is going to be a huge year for RaBIT and we need your help to keep moving voting reform forward here in Toronto.

RaBIT has two big goals for this year. First, we need to mobilize Torontonians to participate in the consultations on ranked ballots that the city will be conducted starting in the summer of this year.

Second, we need to further strengthen the community of RaBIT supporters so that, when the time comes in late autumn for councillors to vote on whether to switch to a ranked ballot voting system, our community will be able speak loudly and make council understand just how much support there is for switching to ranked ballots.

Accomplishing both these goals means getting more people actively involved in RaBIT and its work. We’re hoping you can help us accomplish this by becoming a RaBIT Community Organizer.

What's a Community Organizer?

The basic idea behind Community Organizers is pretty simple: lots of our supporters have told us that they want a way to get involved with RaBIT that allows them to meet other supporters and learn more about RaBIT and ranked ballots. Our goal for our Community Organizers is that they can be RaBIT’s human connections to Toronto’s many different neighbourhoods and communities.

We’re very open to Community Organizers defining their own roles and activities, and we invite you to add your ideas to our brainstorming document. Some of the highlights from the ideas that we’ve already assembled include:

• Identify events in your neighbourhood or community, such as festivals, and help RaBIT organize volunteers to participate, provide information about ranked ballots, and collect signatures for our petition.
• Organize informational meet-ups in your neighbourhood and with your community to help inform others about ranked ballots and RaBIT.
• Write a blog post for our website or record a short video explaining why you support ranked ballots.

We’ve also been thinking about how we as an organization will be able to support Community Organizers. Some of the supports we’re planning on offering include:

• Monthly conference calls to coordinate activities between Community Organizers, inform the RaBIT board about what’s happening in organizers’ communities, and discuss RaBIT’s strategy.
• Providing Community Organizers with access to presentation templates and printed materials for use at events and for canvassing.

Now Is The Time

This year is going to be decisive for the campaign to bring ranked ballots to Toronto. If you have ever considered becoming involved in our work, the next 10 months is really the time to do it.

So, if you’re interested in being a Community Organizer, just want to find out more about the idea, or even have a different idea for how you can get involved, please get in touch at [email protected] and put “Community Organizer” in the subject line.