Vote for Amanda Bell for National Organizer of the Year
Amanda Bell is one of three nominees for National Organizer of the Year!
Please go tohttp://www.facebook.com/grassrootssolutions and cast your vote for Amanda right now.
Really, this vote is for Living Our Visions and the families and people with disabilities who built LOV from the ground up and continue to build it every day. It's also a deserving high-five to asset-based, relational community organizing. A positive approach in some darker times.
Anyone, anywhere, can vote. Really? Yup. Borders don't exist in Facebook.
If your friends want to know why they should vote for her, read the below nomination note.
Don't have Facebook? It's super simple and will take two-minutes to set up. Just go to Facebook.com, set up an account and then go to http://www.facebook.com/grassrootssolutions and cast your vote!
And please encourage your friends or family members that care about community, inclusion, and the power of assets, to do the same.
Amanda Bell picked up the phone and developed a taste for coffee. She spent two years in coffee shops listening deeply to those that didn't hang up on her. She empowered those families to "use what they have to get what they don't have", mobilizing their gifts and relationships and those of the greater community to create meaningful lives brimming with friends, contributions and choices. Knowing the service system and government funding are forever stressed, Amanda asked families, "What would the good life look like for your child? We'll go from there." Families who know isolation answered a "community-centered life." For them that included creating a community building non-profit they named Living Our Visions-Dane (LOV). These families have created a web of relational support and family-designed projects they pool their own money to fund, to meet needs.
Knowing that people with disabilities have limited access to genuine relationships in community groups, Amanda and LOV imagined and created a Citizen Connector group to act as a bridge. Citizen Connectors are well connected, community folk who open their rolodexes to support LOV's vision and meet regularly for coffee. Need a horse, astrologist, free baked goods and a meeting with a government official in two days? Citizen Connectors will likely make that happen in 10 minutes or less. And they'll be smiling. That's organizing done right.
LOV members are also spearheading a "Get Your Vote On" project that includes leaders with cognitive disabilities reaching out to their peers around Wisconsin's new Voter ID law.
Amanda listens deeply and focuses on assets versus deficits at both a global and individual level. The eight families that started LOV-Dane in a living room, have built themselves into a 30-family strong organization. It's not easy or clean, but it is the roots of grass and sustainable if I've ever smelled it.
