If you’ve ever run or worked on a campaign, been a candidate for office, or just pretty much been involved in politics in almost any capacity, you’ve seen how important volunteers are to political success.
And you’ve no doubt noticed that all volunteers are not created equal. Some are worth more than others, some better than others, or some are just better at certain things than others.
So what makes for great volunteers?
There are at least four qualities that stand out as the marks of really great volunteers. Of course, few have them all, but they’re a standard you should reach for when trying to find people to help – or if you’re thinking about volunteering yourself.
Four Top Qualities of Great Volunteers
1) A commitment to the cause
Do they believe in the campaign? The level of commitment from the people involved in any effort is usually the greatest contributing factor to success or failure.
No matter how desperate a campaign may be for help, if “the help” doesn’t really believe in the cause, then you’re really not going to get much out of them and they’re not going to help you motivate other people.
2) A willingness to sacrifice
Great volunteerism is based on sacrifice. But good volunteers don’t think of it as sacrifice, but rather as an investment in the things that they care about.
That’s why you’re going to get more support from people who really believe in the cause to begin with.
3) A sense of humility
Who wants to hang around someone who thinks that they’re “too good” to be there? The type of person who lets everyone else know they should feel “blessed” that they’re around. They will be less “help” and more “hurt”, in the sense that they can run off people who actually do want to help.
A good volunteer is someone who is able to set aside their ego in deference to the cause that they’re involved with. Pride and volunteering don’t go well together.
4) A positive attitude
Attitudes are infectious, (both good and bad). And since nobody wants to work around people with “jerky” attitudes, this is another type of person who can quickly run off the real help.
Good volunteers maintain a positive attitude that encourages others to keep going regardless of circumstances.
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Even though any political effort is usually extremely grateful for any volunteers that it gets, these are some of the qualities of great volunteers that you should keep in mind when looking for people to help your cause.
Run down the checklist. How do you or your volunteers stack up?
Over the long run, it can actually pay to be picky.
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You can find out more tips on volunteers and volunteer management in my Grassroots 101 Training Series. Check it out!
Culture war becoming a war over religious liberty
When liberals talk about opposing the “legislating of morality”, what they really mean is that they oppose policies that are supported by people whose morality is based on religious beliefs – and that they want to force everyone else to comply with their own secular based version of morality.
And since fewer liberals believe in God anyway, destroying religious liberty isn’t something they worry about.
In the wake of new gay marriage laws we’ve seen Christian photographers, Christian bakers and Christian owned venues sued for refusing to provide services to same-sex weddings. We’re now seeing lawsuits against states that don’t recognize gay marriage by homosexuals who have been “married” in other states.
We’ve seen Catholic adoption agencies run out of business for refusing to violate their faith and place children with homosexual couples; and seen a Christian school get sued for expelling two students that were involved in a lesbian relationship on the grounds of its religious views.
In San Diego a fertility doctor was sued for refusing to artificially inseminate an unmarried lesbian because of his beliefs. Meanwhile, the state of California is considering legislation mandating insurance coverage for gay and lesbian “infertility”, (yes, you read that right).
In the area of healthcare, the government is trying to force religious institutions to pay for insurance coverage that includes not just birth control, but drugs that are designed to induce abortions.
As one Catholic Bishop put it, the state is trying to use the “rule of law to force a church institution, in violation of its own self-identify and constitution, to pay for something in its own workplace that the institution holds and teaches to be sinful.”
To paraphrase another church official, does the state have the right to tell citizens how to practice their religion? Many liberals would emphatically answer “yes”.
According to the Obama administration, once you start a business you don’t have First Amendment rights anymore. In its response to Hobby Lobby’s lawsuit against Obamacare’s abortion coverage mandates, the administration wrote: “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer…and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” Got that?
In our military, the Air Force censored a video created by a chaplain simply because it included the word “God”; another chaplain was removed for not allowing a military chapel to be used for a same-sex wedding; and another service member received a potentially career ending reprimand for expressing his religious beliefs about homosexuality on a personal religious blog.
Senior officials at Fort Campbell sent out emails informing the ranks that “the religious right in America” is a “domestic hate group” because of its opposition to homosexuality. And this is the same military that recently produced training materials that lumped Tea Party supporters in with terrorists.
As instances like these came to light, a Republican US House member introduced an amendment to a military funding bill that would have “required the Armed Forces to accommodate actions and speech reflecting the conscience, moral, principles or religious beliefs” of service members.
The Obama administration “strongly objected”.
Add all of this to the recent Supreme Court decision on gay marriage in California which, as Justice Scalia put it in his dissent, formally declared “anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency” and that “any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement”.
That’s par for the course. The diversity and tolerance crowd doesn’t give a rip about diversity of thought or tolerate values that are different from their own, (such as they have them).
Gay marriage is the biggest weapon in this war simply because refusal to accommodate or sanction it can potentially leave you open to massive lawsuits in the conduct of normal business.
As former US Senator Sam Brownback put it, “…in states with same-sex marriage, religiously affiliated schools, adoption agencies, psychological clinics, social workers, marital counselors, etc. will be forced to choose between violating their own deeply held beliefs and giving up government contracts, tax-exempt status, or even being denied the right to operate at all.”
In short, the active practice of one’s faith in everyday life would no longer be legal.
These are the kind of problems you run into when government becomes so large that it covers virtually every type of human interaction. Inevitably it crosses the line from the secular to the realm of religious conscience.
All of which is kind of ironic for a country created by people looking for religious liberty.