By Anthony Corona
It only takes one voice to sing a song, but a chorus of voices can unite to raise that song to a masterpiece. The ACB Legislative Week is one of our organization’s spotlight shining moments, annually uniting our collective voices into a strong chorus of advocacy. We unite around imperatives and ideas that support the work of all our combined committees, affiliates, and members.
Over the last 2 years ACB has held this important set of events virtually with great success. We managed to take a well-established in-person model and convert it into virtual meetings, including Capitol Hill visits. We engaged members who hadn’t previously experienced the opportunity to advocate in D.C. while highlighting our collective power through the leadership meetings and the legislative trainings. We shined a great big spotlight on the amazing passion our members have to advocate for ourselves and others.
Now that the virtual meeting rooms are closed, I implore ACB members to keep the song going through follow-up and sustaining the advocating spirit locally. Through these meetings we have a terrific opportunity to build relationships with our representatives’ offices and the folks we had the occasion to speak with. Some of our meetings may have been flat or disappointing, but the majority of them were engaging and resulted in good conversation and the whetting of appetite for more from our community. Those conversations can be the beginning of solid relationships.
Using the momentum from Legislative Week to engage our local chapter’s and affiliate’s committees to keep the conversations going throughout the year will serve to open more doors of opportunity for ACB and our members and concerns. I implore those of us who participated this year to inform our local leaders where there was interest and engagement and to strategize how to leverage those successful conversations into relationship building models.
We have the chance to take a masterful performance and turn it into a long-running show if we carry our voices forward and create local choruses of advocacy.
ACB Voices 