Family Time

You could break the schedule of a Field Organizer in Bucks County into three time chunks: weekends, weekdays, and weeknights. On the weekends we canvassed; out-of-state volunteers poured into our offices by the busload, and we sent them out knocking on the doors of undecided voters. On weeknights, we made phone calls; from 5pm to 9pm, local volunteers poured through list after list of undecided voters and volunteer prospects and called to persuade or recruit them. And on weekdays we spent our time preparing for weekends and weeknights. All told, we started by 9am and typically finished some time after 10:30pm.

The only regular downtime that we had was from 9-10pm, between the end of calls and the beginning of our daily reporting. In the Lower Bucks office, we called this Family Time. We would pile into one of our conference rooms with our laptops and stacks of papers and dig into casseroles of baked ziti or lasagna provided by generous volunteers. Feasting was followed by furious tallying of our voter contact results and a 10pm nightly conference call with regional and state directors.

This was pretty much the only regular time on any given day that we could count on seeing the whole field team from our office. Some organizers trickled in late from remote phone banks or volunteer meetings. Rolling in around 9:30pm with coffee, coat and shoulder bag, they’d settle into an empty seat and scoop up a plate of home-cooked goodness.

In what felt like a 24-hour job, I think our spontaneous decision to have Family Time—even when we didn’t have any food—created a sense of camaraderie that otherwise would not have existed. We got to know each other better, we compared challenges and successes, we shared humorous stories, sometimes we caught up on the news, and we generally let ourselves out a little.

The name “Family Time” was a joke at first, but we grew into it. By the time the election had come and gone, it didn’t feel far from the truth.

And it makes me think about the importance of families having shared time together. It was during that regular evening hour not just that our phones were less likely to ring or that a responsibility was less likely to take us away, but also that we were more likely to slow down and step out of our daily focus on goals or agendas.

But maybe with a family it should be a little earlier.

And maybe without the laptops.