Campaign and Elections Workshop Held on April 28

On Saturday, April 28, from 10 a.m. until noon in the Chapel Hill Town Council chambers, the Community Action Network held it’s second workshop covering the offices of Carrboro Board of Aldermen, Chapel Hill Town Council, Orange County Board of Commissioners, School Boards, Hillsborough Town Board.

Gary Barnes, CAN chairman, proclaimed the event a success, and said, “We offered this workshop as a public service and we provided useful information that we hope will stimulate interest in running for local offices and working on campaigns.”

The workshop format was questions to a panel of former elected officials and volunteer campaign workers. Members of the audience then participated by asking questions of the panel members. Panel discussion and questions were moderated by Rosemary Waldorf, a former Chapel Hill Mayor. Panel participants included Nick Didow, a former Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board member; Tom Jensen, recent UNC-CH graduate who has been active in a number of local campaign; Thomas Mills, a political consultant; Ruby Sinreich, a former candidate for Chapel Hill Town Council; and Mark Kleienschmidt, a Chapel Hill Town Council member.

After panel discussion and questions from the audience, participants broke into small, unstructured informal groups where questions were asked about running for office and working on campaigns. Additionally, the Community Action Network prepared a resource packet for all participants, including basic information about how to file for elections, samples of reports required by the Orange County Board of Elections, and a campaign activity timeline.

On the OrangePolitics blog, former Chapel Hill Town Council candidate Will Raymond wrote:

Just got back from the forum. I commend C.A.N. for providing an excellent
educational opportunity for new candidates. As the election season progresses
and the candidate pool solidifies, I hope they would consider doing a
“refresher” version (maybe post July’s signup date).
Frequent (and occasional) OP posters Tom Jensen, Ruby Sinreich, Allan Spalt, Nick Didow, Mark Kleinschmidt and Fred Black gave their advice on everything from the
“nuts-n-bolts” of running a campaign to managing the press to getting up to
speed on issues.

Another attendee and CAN member wrote:

Nancy, thank you to you, Fred Black, Rosemary Waldorf, the panel participants,
and all who pulled all the candidate information together for the very
informative candidate workshop CAN held this morning.

I'm sorry I had to leave quickly after the panel finished because I also had a Book Group meeting this morning which I didn't want to miss entirely.

My thanks to all for all their work in this useful workshop,

Lynne Kane
Chapel Hill
resident
CAN member

A video (98 minutes) is available at :

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8406773552890244852

Here are some of the pictures taken that morning: