Green-Rainbow Party Growing Legs Through Volunteerism, Diversity
LENOX, Mass. — Some two dozen people, many of them new recruits, gathered at the library on Tuesday night for the monthly meeting of the new Berkshire chapter of the Green-Rainbow Party."There are a lot of people who are seriously looking at this party,” said Lee Scott Laugenour of Lenox, who ran as the party's candidate for 4th District state representative in the last election. "We're a growing party and we’re getting new membership all of the time. We’ve had three new recruits since last month’s meeting. It’s great to see so many people coming two months in a row. Now we need to focus on youth and diversity in the party.”
The Green-Rainbow Party is working to position itself as an alternative to the two main political parties. It's showing in the last election bumped it to "major party" status in Massachusetts that it's hoping to sustain. The liberal Berkshires is being seen as fertile soil for the party's growth.
Laugenour and Darlene Baisley, both Berkshire County representatives for the Green-Rainbow Party State Committee, chaired the meeting. While there was much ground to cover in the span of two hours, most pressing on the agenda was outreach and exposure.
 Scott Laugenour signs in new and old party members. |
"One of the focuses of this meeting is to come up with three, just three, action items that we can carry forth," she said. "What can we do to reach out to a more diverse, younger membership? A lot of young people aren't becoming involved or even registering to vote because they are very discouraged by what they are seeing."
Some suggestions to get youth involved included forming a Youth Green group much like the Young Republicans, reaching out to school environmental and political clubs, volunteering at youth-focused events such as the upcoming Hear Us performance sponsored by Youth Alive, the Pittsfield Prevention Partnership and the countywide "Lift Ev’ry Voice" celebrations set to begin in June.
Peter Vickery of the party's Amherst chapter suggested that each new voter receive a birthday card from the party as well as other ceremonial endeavors.
"It’s too bad we don’t have naturalization ceremonies in the Berkshires,” he said. “We could be present at those. We could also send out birthday cards to our voters and get the voter list updated every month so that it just becomes routine."
Getting into a routine is exactly what Mark Miller, former Green-Rainbow party candidate for the county’s 3rd District, hopes to achieve with monthly meetings and greater exposure within the community. He cited many venues through which the party could spread its message of the 10 Key Values as well as show a strong presence within the community as a whole.
"We want to carry our values forward, and volunteering is an effective way of getting the message out," he said. “We need to be collaborating with other community organizations like Habitat for Humanity, the Western Mass. Labor Action, the Salvation Army. They would all be receptive to having anybody there to help. Plus it’s a great cross section of the community."
Laugenour is hoping that as the party grows, more members will be inspired to run for local government, including in the upcoming elections for town offices held in the spring. Gaining candidacy and recognition within their own communities, the very same ground-up approach, he said, launched the Green Party into legitimacy in the Berkshires.
"We really need to support candidates for the 2011 town elections,” he said. “I know they are nonpartisan elections but that doesn't mean that we as a group shouldn't or couldn't endorse our members."
