Direct Democracy Diaries Episode 2: “Running Ballot Measures with Community + Care” with Lauren Brenzel and Sarah Parker

10/08/2025

Running a ballot measure takes more than signatures and soundbites — it takes people, trust, and courage. In this episode, co-hosts Chris Melody Fields Figueredo and Caroline Sánchez-Avakian sit down with organizers Lauren Brenzel (Florida’s Yes on 4 Campaign Director) and Sarah Parker (Executive Director of Voices of Florida) to unpack what it really takes to launch a ballot initiative.

From the tough early decision of whether to go to the ballot, to navigating funding challenges, to building a diverse and powerful coalition, Lauren and Sarah share the inside story of Florida’s 2024 fight for reproductive freedom. Listeners will learn how to balance strategy with care, build alignment across differences, and why the most powerful and equitable campaigns are always rooted in community.

If you’ve ever wondered how grassroots organizing becomes a ballot measure, this conversation is your roadmap.

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Highlights from the episode with Lauren Brenzel and Sarah Parker: 

• • “One of the things that’s difficult in the South and the Midwest and mountain states right now is we’re seeing legislatures restrict access to direct democracy. They don’t want people to have the power of their vote. And so each session that goes by, you have more and more risk for not having access to functional systems to put something on the ballot.”
  • “At the end of the day, our people don’t care about the coalition drama. Our people don’t have access to healthcare. Our people are being mass incarcerated. Our people are facing homelessness. Our people are being deported. Yhey don’t care about our infighting, so we have to keep that stuff internal and figure out how to move. We had a lot of productive conflict in the first year of the exploratory phase of the campaign that I think led us to being sophisticated in a way that didn’t always feel good, but that built a really hardcore campaign.”
  • “I hope that we see donors continue to move — and I’m not speaking in a Florida context, I’m speaking in a national context — in a way that is bold — in a way that is invested in organizing, in a way that is committed to not just short-term, piecemeal, state-by-state wins, but is committed to investment in people who fight on the ground consistently and folks who can talk to everyday people. Folks who show up in community and for campaigns that aren’t maybe the textbook ‘smartest’ thing, but are the most interesting and impactful campaigns.”
  • “Every time we see the seeds of fascism, it doesn’t just stay in Florida. It doesn’t just stay in Texas. We are guinea pigs. It goes to the federal government. Look at this administration now — look at the things they are doing. Look at the fact that in Florida and in Texas people are continuing to fight. They’re continuing to push back.”
  • “Without funding organizations that are in Florida and Texas or any other red state, you’re telling people that we only take the easy route. The best things that have come in history have always been the hardest route.”
  • “The organizers that are on the ground are not giving up hope. Oftentimes, I hear Florida is hopeless. No, we’re not! We’re some of the best organizers in the country. And I think funders also need to remember that when it comes to a national level, the people who have to do the hardest work are some of the best and the most resilient.”
  • “You should always pay attention to red states to understand what’s coming next in the federal landscape.”

• • “Not everyone will align with every single thing you have. And sometimes that is the way to lose the quickest. As the left, we’ll eat ourselves alive quicker than the right will eat us.”

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EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

• [00:00:00] Caroline and Chris open the episode and reflect on Desmond Meade’s impact.
• [00:01:30] Introduction to the episode’s focus on Florida’s Yes on 4 campaign and reproductive rights.
• [00:02:06] Lauren Brenzel and Sarah Parker join the show and share their backgrounds.
• [00:05:13] Lauren discusses health care access as a societal indicator and her organizing roots.
• [00:07:41] Chris and guests talk about the importance of organizing under authoritarian conditions.
• [00:09:06] Sarah explains why the campaign started early and the need for proactive action.
• [00:10:32] Lauren and Sarah describe coalition challenges and internal tensions.
• [00:15:14] Discussion of how early campaign funding was secured and the trauma of past Florida campaigns.
• [00:22:23] Sarah highlights the difficulty of grassroots orgs accessing resources and meetings.
• [00:25:10] Lauren and Sarah explain how ballot measure coalitions are structured differently than others.
• [00:28:20] Sarah elaborates on coalition dynamics and learning to move beyond ego.
• [00:33:23] Discussion of executive committees, communication, and building trust under pressure.
• [00:36:08] Lauren shares how legal support and care showed up in the face of political violence.
• [00:40:39] Sarah recounts personal experiences of safety and fear as a Black woman leader.
• [00:42:00] The lasting relationships and support network formed through the campaign.
• [00:46:25] Lauren and Sarah discuss BISC’s support and the importance of the Road Ahead Conference.
• [00:50:16] Sarah describes how the conference legitimized her and helped connect her to funders.
• [00:54:07] Lauren details the state’s weaponization against the campaign, including lawsuits and propaganda.
• [01:01:25] Sarah recounts how police intimidation tactics impacted petition signers and POC organizers.
• [01:03:36] Lauren and Sarah reflect on what they’re most proud of despite the campaign’s loss.
• [01:07:28] Advice to young organizers entering advocacy and ballot initiatives.
• [01:12:06] Final reflections: making Yes on 4 a love letter to their communities.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

Welcome to the Direct Democracy Diaries, the podcast where we explore the power of ballot measures and the people behind them. I’m Caroline Sánchez Avakian.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

And I’m Chris Melody Fields Figueredo. Join us as we dive deep into the stories, strategies and successes that are shaping the future of our democracy, one diary entry at a time.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

Hey, everyone, welcome to Direct Democracy Diaries. I’m Caroline Sánchez Avakian, co-host and BISC Strategic Communications Director. We are excited to have you back for episode two of our debut season.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

And I’m Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, your co-host and Executive Director of the Ballot

Initiative Strategy Center. We kicked off this season with a powerful and inspiring story of Desmond Meade, who was the architect of the 2018 Ballot Initiative, which led to the largest expansion of voting rights in over 50 years. And listening to Desmond’s story reminded me of when Bell Hooks said, “Love is an action.”

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

Desmond also shared with us all about leading with that love and putting the people before the politics. He also talked to us about respecting the leadership of the people directly impacted by the issue they are working on, which dovetails into today’s conversation. Chris, tell us a little bit about today’s topic.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

In this week’s episode, we’re going to stay in Florida, return to Florida to discuss another ballot initiative that was also an amendment for, but this time to protect reproductive freedom. Our guests will share insights about what it takes to start a ballot measure campaign, the decisions that you have to make throughout that campaign, the importance of building a really strong coalition, all those things that are so critical when you’re starting out.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

Love that! We’re getting into the nuts and bolts of how to run a ballot measure. Let’s get the show started, Chris.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

I am so excited about our guests today. We have not one, but two bad asses. Our guests are Lauren Brenzel and Sarah Parker.

Lauren is an organizer, a strategist, and was the Campaign Director for the “Yes on 4” campaign, which was the 2024 ballot measure that secured 57.2% of the vote to restore abortion access in Florida. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. Lauren has a decade of experience working on issues of healthcare access, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ advocacy.

They are also an alum of this training program. We also have Sarah Parker. Sarah is the Executive Director of the Voices of Florida.

She comes out of the Occupy movement and, as a leader in the 50/51 Movement and

Voices of Florida, was part of the coalition of organizations that were responsible for getting Yes on 4 on the ballot and supporting it throughout the campaign. That coalition also included organizations like Florida Rising, Planned Parenthood Action Network, the ACLU of Florida, SEIU 1199 Florida, and the Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition. There’s so many other great organizations that were part of it, too.

So, Sarah and Lauren, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So happy to have you all.

So I know you, Caroline knows you, but for those who don’t know you, tell us a little bit more about Lauren and Sarah. What motivates you? What drives you?

As Ella Baker would ask us, “Who are your people and what led you to this work?”

[Sarah Parker]

Yeah, Lauren, you want to take a shot at that first?

[Lauren Brenzel] Oh, thanks, Sarah.

[Sarah Parker] You’re welcome.

[Lauren Brenzel]

My people are southerners. My people are folks who should not be displaced from the region they live in because they’re marginalized.

People like to brand folks in any state that faces authoritarianism as uneducated or uninvolved or uncaring. And the reality is people who are willing to fight in these states are facing greater obstacles than most folks in states with easier pathways can imagine. And so my people are folks who have been in the struggle with me for years.

They’re folks who continue to be in the struggle. And I’m about trying to figure out health care access. I think that health care access, not just in abortion, but in a variety of different forms of health care, is a litmus test for how healthy our society is.

And our country and our states are failing to provide people with basic access to health care. And that extends well beyond abortion. I think about things like Medicaid expansion.

I think about cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. I think about the fact that most of us are just a few bad days away from incarceration or homelessness. And I think about a lack of services for mental health and physical health for those folks.

So, that’s why I fight.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

Thank you for that. Sarah, how about you?

[Sarah Parker]

Yeah, Lauren, that’s a one to follow up. So, you know, I think how I got into this work, you know, I’ve always been very vocal. I actually started as a child being very anti-abortion just because I grew up in the South and my Black great grandmother had different stories that she’d tell me.

Right? When I moved to Florida and Sarasota forever ago, I keep wanting to say a decade, but it’s been longer than a decade and I’m starting to show my age. You know, I saw my friends have to not even make difficult decisions, make decisions for their lives.

It was never difficult. And that kind of led me to abortion work. Since Occupy, I’ve just…I got so inspired, like, to realize that I actually had a voice.

Right. Like growing up as a young black girl in the middle of nowhere in Georgia and then living in Columbia, South Carolina, you know, you don’t feel like you have a voice. Right?

I was always really meek. And when I started to realize I had a voice, like it just slowly pivoted until I got a call one day after after I was doing a lot of BLM protest about Manatee County doing an abortion ban. Right.

Oh, there was that one time that I tried to do a protest outside of Planned Parenthood and Lauren had to stop me. We cross paths again later in a big way. Yeah.

We cross paths after the Manatee County Planned Parenthood was like, why don’t you go to legislative session? And I was like, what do you mean go to legislative session? I was like, we can just go up there and say stuff to them?

And they were like, yeah? And I was like, count me in. That literally changed my life.

Like, I got so involved. I was like barely sleeping, which isn’t healthy. And you know, and then I got the call to be on the ballot initiative, like every time I would just keep getting calls and realize that, like, yeah, my voice actually matters not only because I’m Sarah, but because I’m a Black woman that has had experiences, lived experiences that are important.

So, like my people are people that don’t realize they have a voice. Right? Like that’s half the reason why I’m involved in 50 51 is giving these new baby organizers the things that were never given to me.

I’m in there for Black women. That deal with crazy, crazy and sad and sad stories. And within the medical community, right.

And my North Star is definitely Angela Davis and Ericka Huggins. Now, those are my North Stars.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

Thank you both for sharing that. And in being so rooted and grounded in the South as a well, I don’t know, some people consider Texas a part of the South. I do.

I mean, I know the struggle of organizing and working in a state where people just kind of count you out. And also, I remember a time, you know, I was you know…. when I was growing up and Richards and Barbara Jordan were people within, you know, the state I grew up in. And so how drastically.

That has changed. So, I appreciate y’all that bringing that the voice of what it is to work under authoritarianism, which is real. We don’t have to wait for it.

Y’all know that very much living and working in the South. So, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit more about “Yes on 4.” And I think for a lot of folks, you know, how you even get started on the ballot measure is such a big question.

And if you could just unpack for us, like, you know, let’s start at the beginning. Why was it so important to move forward with reproductive rights on the ballot in Florida at the time that you did it? You know, so many people don’t interact with until even probably signature gathering, if that, or maybe when they’re voting on the issue itself.

So they don’t understand that process of like, how do you make that decision? How do you get started? What were the considerations?

What were the challenges and what did y’all do to bring people along?

[Sarah Parker]

I think it’s important to know that even though we didn’t go public with the ballot initiative until later, it was actually something that was proactive, right? For me, I saw the six-week abortion ban try to be passed in Manatee County. And then we saw the 15-week abortion ban in Tallahassee.

Then we knew the six-week abortion ban was right around the corner. So we already started planning, right, to do the ballot initiative. I still remember getting the call and I’m like, there’s no way we’re going to get enough signatures.

Like, this seems crazy. I didn’t even know why me, right? But I think it was to be proactive.

We saw the way the state was turning. We saw how the country was turning against abortion and reproductive rights. We even saw allies not want to say the word abortion, right?

They would go to repro. So we were being very proactive with that. And I think when we first got involved, like Voices, there were a group of really established people, right?

And I think one of the things that was really good was that we kind of shook up the table. Like, as soon as we sat down at it, we were pushing back against things and having hard conversations, even when it came down to the language about the word patient, for instance. I was definitely a big advocate of that and not just say women.

I think that that’s an important note. I don’t know if Lauren wants to add anything to that beginning, but that was an important note. And building a coalition that actually mattered, right?

Building a coalition of people that have been on the ground doing the hard work.

[Lauren Brenzel]

I think the beginning phases for us, I just think it’s important to note. Floridians faced some of the most difficult legislative sessions since 2020. We really saw the rebranding of the state during COVID.

And we had a Governor who seized a moment to basically change the entire population of Florida. He got tons of conservative white voters to move to the state of Florida because they were seeking freedom. And so the Republican brand in the state had never been stronger.

DeSantis himself, unlike a lot of Republicans in our state, is very anti-abortion. So we knew once he started to gain power in the state that he was going to weaponize it against abortion access. And I think something that’s special is we saw this 15-week ban, we saw the six-week ban.

Everybody told us that….we couldn’t do a ballot initiative. And we just dug our heels in, knowing full well that it was going to be a hard campaign, that we were probably unlikely to win. But that we had a responsibility to people to try as hard as we could because the avenue for doing so was closing.

So, one of the things that’s difficult in the South and the Midwest and mountain states right now is we’re seeing legislatures restrict access to direct democracy. They don’t want people to have the power of their vote. And so each session that goes by, you have more and more risk for not having access to functional systems to put something on the ballot.

And so we all just decided to dig our heels in. And a lot of our work was just convincing people that this was worth doing early on. And that starts not at a national level, that was having people buy in at the state level that we had to come along.

And then it was also, I think we have a problem in coalitions on the left with feeling really out of control because of authoritarianism and fascism. And one of the places that we can exert control is within our coalition. And we try to let the good be the enemy of the perfect.

And our opposition has no morals and doesn’t care at all. And we slow ourselves down and refuse to move in hard decisions because we value process over outcome. So, often we want a process that feels good.

And at times this work doesn’t feel good because you’re having to make very real concessions to try to create the smartest strategy. And elections are inherently violent. Like the reality is when you’re talking about mass sums of money, when you’re talking about needing to raise at a base level, I think, you know, inexpensive ballot initiative campaigns are still a few million dollars.

Expensive ones are over 100 million. You have to set strategies that understand the scale of those resources, the power imbalances that they bring, the tough conversations that you need to have internally and how to move externally in a functional, quick and strategic way. Because at the end of the day, our people don’t care about the coalition drama.

Our people don’t have access to health care. Our people are being mass incarcerated. Our people are facing homelessness.

Our people are being divested in by our government. Our people are being deported. And so they don’t care about our infighting.

So we have to keep that stuff internal and figure out how to move. And we had a lot of productive conflict in the first year of exploratory phase of the campaign that I think led us to being sophisticated in a way that didn’t always feel good, but that built a really hardcore campaign.

[Sarah Parker]

Yeah, something I want to add behind Lauren is that these legislators weren’t doing what the will of the people wanted. I mean, even when it came down to conservatives and Republicans, we watched them continue to do what they wanted, not what the people that elected them wanted. Right?

And being on the ground and listening to people from all kinds of different political affiliations, I started to notice that even with other bills. Right. And definitely specifically around abortion.

So, I think it’s important to add that. And as far as making concessions is something I’ve said on a lot of panels. We did get a lot of pushback, not only from the state coalitions, but from national coalitions.

And perfect is the evil. I mean, good is evil. Perfect.

Lauren kind of summed that up. But like we also had to make very hard decisions for our states. And, you know, what I’ve said before is that in order sometimes we’ve got to take that breadcrumb.

Right? And then we got to get that slice of bread. We got to see how the bakery actually works before we go rob and kick in the doors of the bakery.

Right? And at that moment in time, like, yeah, we wanted to push for more progressive abortion rights. But we had to start somewhere and we had to start somewhere that we thought we could be able to win.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

That’s a really good point. And it makes me think, you know, to also what Lauren said, yet you you had to really go in and you couldn’t do a ballot measure. You had to bring people along.

They didn’t necessarily believe in the beginning that this could be done. And to build those bridges between people, the funding community is one of those bridges that you have to to cross and to help build and bring people along with you. And so since campaigns, as you all mentioned, are expensive and can cost a lot and we know that they can be impacted by that early investment that most campaigns really need.

Can you speak a little bit to that process of getting that initial buy in from the funding community? Like what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way with that early funding?

[Lauren Brenzel]

Florida has broken a lot of people’s hearts in the political ecosystem. There is a lot of people who have worked in this state and have what seems like real trauma from it. There’s a lot of people who are beside themselves about Florida within a few cycles going from a pretty consistent swing state to a state that doesn’t have partisan electoral statewide advantage anymore.

And in fact, is pretty much written off the map at this point as….what anyone in a national ecosystem would consider a swing state. And everything is so expensive here because we are the third largest state in the nation. We have a huge, huge media market.

I think we have. I’m not going to even.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

It’s one of the most expensive media markets in the country. Yeah.

[Lauren Brenzel]

And it is a risky investment because people know that when you run a campaign in Florida, you’re likely to face, particularly during our time, the DeSantis administration. They know that Florida has a history of…. Trauma, like going back to people who worked in the state in 2000 when the hanging chad was the determining factor, a lawsuit out of the state of Florida was a determining factor on who was President.

And basically moving through the next 24 years of electoral work. And so we had to really reframe for investors why they should invest in this campaign. And it wasn’t because it was ever a solidly winnable campaign.

The phrase that we all got tired of saying at the end of the campaign was this is a hard fought campaign with a narrow pathway to victory. We were really honest with people about the fact that this was not a slam dunk. The entire time we were honest with people about what our internal polling was the entire time we were honest when there was attacks from the government.

And so I learned an early lesson with a funder who I won’t name here about like trying to hide the ball in something early. And he told me, like, this is not how you operate. This is not appropriate for the stakes and investment.

And I write a course on how I engaged with that. And it taught me so much about donor respect and transparency early on that I hold that value really firm. We can’t treat this like people treat partisan campaigns where they have like donor based polling that they literally create a soft poll and show it to people.

And then inside they have their polling that is realistic. We knew we couldn’t do that on a on a B.I. We also knew that we had to talk to people about, like, the actual factual physical realities of what is going on in the state and what is going on with the region. So this was never a campaign that was promising to, like, bring candidates along on the ballot.

It was never a campaign that was saying this is a surefire win. It was a campaign that was saying people are dying in this region and people can’t access care. And so we have to do everything we can in this moment to try to fix that.

And honestly, today, if somebody wanted to be an angel donor to Florida, I would say that it’s worth it again to try again. It doesn’t mean that it’s like necessarily the smart thing to do. I’m not trying to say that there’s an easy pathway.

I’m saying that I think that the continued investment in figuring out how to get people access to care is important. And so I encourage folks to think about how now they’re funding practical organizations on the ground. I think a lot of clinics are really at risk for closure in this state, both independent clinics.

And also, we’ve seen a mass defunding federally now of Planned Parenthood that I don’t think people have totally picked up on what the impact of that will be federation wide. I consider how people need to be supporting abortion funds who are consistently having to close for weeks at a time because they’re under resourced. I will always name my favorite one in the state of Florida is Florida Access Network because they also do advocacy and organizing work.

And I think that we have to keep telling donors the story of what real people on the ground are experiencing. One of the most transformative experiences for me during the campaign was there was a donor advisor who took donors on a field trip to our state where they went to clinics, they went to advocacy organizations, and they had a roundtable with us, about what they were facing. And I came to realize folks don’t know like they don’t know what they don’t know.

And wealth is… a protective factor in dealing with the consequences of harmful policy, it just is. And so it’s our responsibility in this time where the odds are completely stacked against us to explain the reality and to ask investors to be bold in their choices because it is certainly what our opposition does in their investment strategies.

We have seeded the campus organizing movement to a progressive or (excuse me), a conservative think tank that’s willing to funnel millions of dollars into that work. We have seeded populism in the working class narrative because we’ve stopped organizing there. We’ve systemically lost.

Folks who aren’t white conservative voters because of engagement and investment in organizing there. And that’s because those folks were doing poorly and their donors dug in on a multi-year strategy that was radical and transformative. And so we have to ask our folks to do that same kind of work.

And I think that’s how we approached the funder conversation. And donors showed up and their reaction afterwards has been kind about what the challenges were in Florida, even though it’s hard. I think we also have validators.

And Chris, I thank you for this. That just said, like the team did everything they could have done. It was hard fought and it was worth trying.

And I hope that we see donors continue to move. And I’m not speaking in a Florida context. I’m speaking in a national context in a way that is bold, in a way that is invested in organizing, in a way that is committed to not just short term piecemeal state by state wins, but is committed to investment in people who fight on the ground consistently and folks who can talk to everyday people, who folks that show up in community and for campaigns that aren’t maybe the textbook smartest thing, but are the most interesting and impactful campaigns.

[Sarah Parker]

Yeah. So like with that being said, we don’t see ground to fascism. We know historically, that is horrible to do.

Right. Something I can say, and just to push back a little bit on what Lauren said, one of the things that, you know, people tend to forget about is when you have grassroots organizations at the table and we don’t have that early funding, it’s really hard for them to move with the rest of the more established organizations. It was incredibly hard for us to make meetings at points.

It was incredibly hard for us, even though we were helping run security outside of the Supreme Court to not only keep the lawyers safe, but the executive committees. Even though we were a part of the executive committee to even be able to get up there, it took members, not organization members from the executive committees, donating to our organization so that we were able to make it to Tallahassee. And that would not have happened if Lauren, if I didn’t call Lauren sobbing and then Lauren didn’t call the executive committee and, you know, hold them hold them accountable in ways.

Right. So that’s incredibly important. And to continue to invest, like Lauren said, be bold.

Stop being afraid. Stand on business. Like you can’t stand on business 90 percent of the time.

Right. And the moments and times that we every time we see seed grounds of fascism, it doesn’t just stay in Florida. It doesn’t just stay in Texas.

We are guinea pigs. It goes to the federal government. Like, look at this administration now.

Look at the things that they are doing. You know, we…and look at the fact that Florida and people in Texas are continuing to fight. They’re continuing to push back.

And, you know, we forget that. And without funding organizations that are in Florida and Texas or any other red state, you’re telling people that we only take the easy route. The best things that come in history have always been the hardest route.

Right. And the things that you can learn from the states that do this and the organizers that are on the ground that are not giving up hope, because oftentimes I heard Florida is hopeless. No, we’re not!

We’re some of the best organizers in the country. And I think funders also need to remember that our need to remember that when it comes to a national level, that the people that have to do the hardest work are some of the best and the most resilient.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

Wow! Thanks for that, Sarah and Lauren. It’s very true.

I want to move us a little bit into another group that’s really, really important that we’ve already spoken about here and you’ve told us a little bit about, which is coalitions and coalition building. And before we get a little bit further into it, for those baby organizers, as Sarah put so well earlier, and for people who are newer to ballot measures and ballot initiatives, could you tell us a little bit about what a ballot measure coalition is and what did you take into account when building your ballot measure coalition?

[Sarah Parker]

I’m going to let Lauren go first on that one, because I have some opinions.

[Lauren Brenzel]

A coalition… is different in a ballot initiative campaign than it is in many other spaces in that the coalition’s ultimate goal is to win the initiative. So, oftentimes the coalition is broader than you’re usually comfortable with.

I think a great example of this is, like there was active Republican organizing and Sarah and I were like cordoned off from the Republican organizing group. because we were like too queer, too alt for Sarah, too Black. And so that’s like a frustrating part that I just want to name is like coalition doesn’t look the same in these spaces.

And also, then you have to navigate with people what that coalition looks like. When I was told that, I straight up was like, you’re thinking of a certain type of Republican. And there’s actually a lot of Republicans who would love to throw back a beer with me.

And trying to challenge just what people’s assumptions are on like who certain people can work with. Like, my friend Sarah is actually one of the local heroes of talking to Republicans. And I think we have to figure out how we’re bridging lines of communication.

Because right now, we’re seeding our democracy for a fear of talking to people that it’s hard to talk to. At the end of the day, I don’t really care if I get along with those people. I don’t care if we have the same common aims.

Again, I care about moving our culture and moving our people and getting wins for our people. Or at least doing the best job that we can to get those wins. More broadly, the coalition that I feel deeply committed to is like our people at the table and how we work with them.

And in Florida, I feel very lucky to have been mentored (by someone who I don’t know if she wants me to say her name on this podcast or not), so I won’t. She’s also Sarah’s mentor. We love her with all our heart.

Who talks to us a lot about coalition building and what it means to be driven by people when doing coalition work. And so how are you encouraging a coalition to say it in the space? How are you setting ego aside when you’re working in coalition?

How are you admitting that you’re going to mess up in coalition? And often across lines of power, you’re going to mess up in coalition. And how are you keeping everybody united on a goal?

I think something that we take for granted a lot in coalition work that I just want to name is building real and true relationships with people that are friends. You need friends in this work more than anything. Sarah and I before this, we knew each other.

But after this, I…..don’t know what I would do for Sarah, but…. it’s a lot. That’s one of my people on this planet now. And I try to approach most folks in coalition in a way that recognizes them as unique human beings.

And I think that that’s what really good organizers do. Because when you have a shared understanding of one another outside of just the work, you are able to understand what your personal values are. And you’re able to figure out how to move together in times that are hard conversations in a way…that is compassionate.

[Sarah Parker]

I think it’s really important to have community values and norms when building a coalition. It definitely kept a lot of people safe from my mouth points sometimes. I think that coalition building, it’s something that I had to realize was different than just being in my community in my echo chamber.

It’s something that I realized that I’m not married to these people. I’m going on Tinder dates. And I’ve said this on so many different panels.

I’m going on dates. Tinder is still on my phone. I don’t have to deal with them after a certain amount of time.

And that was my saving grace. But the one thing I could say is that everyone that sat at that table, they were there for the same thing. And I had to remind myself.

And that’s the ego and the pride breakdown. I didn’t have to love everyone. Yes, I walked away with friends.

I walked away with mentors. I walked away with so much education. I would not be theExecutive Director I was today without the coalition that was built.

And I think another thing is thinking outside of the box when you think about who’s going to join your coalition. And coalitions, so I do classes for 50/51. And what I say is that sometimes you’re walking down a path and sometimes you fork off.

And then you walk down that path again. When you’re walking together with someone, that’s your coalition. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to break off down the line.

There are organizations that were set on that coalition that I probably won’t speak to again. And that’s OK because they were there at that moment in time to win. They showed up to win.

And I showed up to win. And I think also having different levels of experience, you don’t have to know everything to sit at a coalition table. And the people that do know everything, need to recognize that they don’t have to have…they don’t have to be the smartest person in the room all the time, A.

And B, they need to have people that are newer or innovators, the visionaries, the strategists. It all looks different. And making sure you have that visionary, that strategist, the person that knows how to communicate, having those different people, the doers, right, is incredibly important.

And it looks different for every place. And making sure to have those people on the ground at that table and not just a bunch of national organizations is very, very important when it comes to ballot initiatives. It’s something that I doubled down on consistently.

And definitely something I had to break down my ego and pride about with Florida. Because like you mentioned earlier, who’s my people? Floridians are my people, right?

Even though I’m still working on a national level right now, Floridians are still my people. And it was hard to see national groups come in. I think I voted no about them being there in front of their face at one point.

It was incredibly hard. But I had to put my ego aside because that was what’s best, that at the time was what was best for Florida. And I had to remind myself of the patience that would be harmed, right?

And that I wasn’t the smartest person in the room. And just because I knew Florida didn’t mean that I understood the media market, right? Or didn’t mean I understood digital media.

And so building, this taught me a lot. It taught me a lot. I didn’t have to sit next to someone that had all of, I didn’t have to give them a purity test each time, right?

You’re not, if you do that, you’re gonna sit in echo chambers and you’re not gonna hear the new ideas and new strategies or new innovations.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

I really appreciate, especially given the times we are in, right? I mean, let’s be honest with ourselves. We’re always in these kinds of times, right?

We aren’t on freedom side yet, right? And I appreciate the honesty about…moving across difference. Sometimes you aren’t gonna like people in a coalition or in the work, and that’s okay.

We have to, I think, do a better job of really understanding what it means to be in principled struggle with each other. So I really appreciate both of your honesty. It’s not gonna be perfect.

There’s no cookie cutter way to do this. Coalitions are just messy by nature because human beings, we are so effing messy, right? We’re in Mercury retrograde right now.

Like it’s just a messy, messy time. And I think, you know, saying sort of, I think one thing that that would be, cause y’all have mentioned it a couple of times, there’s the coalition that you work with. And I think maybe folks have less of a glimpse into an executive committee and what that is in a ballot measure, which also is gonna have some competing priorities too, right?

You know, that is where a lot of the decision-making body will happen in a ballot measure campaign. And then you also have your coalition. So, you know, how do you build alignment and trust across these different types of bodies that do work for these different formations that do work around a ballot measure?

What were some of the critical tools that y’all might’ve used when there was maybe some, this difference in struggle that you had to confront? And, you know, what are some lessons you learned in that?

[Sarah Parker]

One of the things that I think is important. So I’m more of like a people person, more than a tech, like technological or analytical person. I’m like a people emotion person.

And one thing that I kind of lived my life by now is open-mindedness and willingness, right? And trust. If you don’t have trustworthy people or people that the community trust on your executive committee and you just pop up, that coalition is less likely to trust you, right?

The people that have already been doing the work. And I think that’s one thing that we had. I can say like a majority of the people that sat on the executive committee were either very well-known personally in the community or their organization was very well-known.

And I could say the people that were in that coalition, there was already relationships that were there, right? And being honest and open-minded and giving them a little bit of autonomy to move in the way that they could move, to move in the way that they wanted to move was incredibly important. And also making sure that they had funding to be able to move was incredibly important, right?

Because we go back to one of the first questions, like Florida has been defunded. And we still all came together and created this beautiful, amazing system and infrastructure that I will say still exists. And we were able to mobilize the Tallahassee and kill hundreds of bills because of the infrastructure of Amendment 4.

So I think that we’ve all been in the trenches and unless you’ve been in the trenches specifically in Florida, alongside the people in the coalition and the executive committee, there would not have been that trust, right? And we had to trust each other even if we didn’t get along. So I think that I’m gonna add that to like just a personal opinion, having that open-mindedness, that trust and that willingness to communicate was incredibly important.

Having those meetings with each other was incredibly important. And Lauren was really good. When I talk about communicators and strategists and visionaries, Lauren was all of those things in the executive committee and communicating between the two, like making sure there is open communication.

Because I see that even in coalitions, not executive committees and coalitions, but like flat hierarchies, I see that the communication is off even now today, sometimes. So communication, being truthful, those things are really important. And being honest and showing up authentically, like showing up, feeling the feelings that you’re feeling, showing up and saying how you’re feeling was incredibly important.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

I wanna know where your cancer placement is in your chart.

[Sarah Parker]

Sarah. I can find out, I’ll let you know. I’m a Scorpio though.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

My daughter’s a Scorpio. I know where the sting of the fire comes from now. Lauren, do you wanna add anything?

[Lauren Brenzel]

I think the only other thing that I would add is these pathways become a lot clearer when you’re truly in the struggle. Like we were facing really scary stuff in the campaign. We had the full state weaponized against us.

And so we were facing serious fears about criminal investigations, civil investigations. We had the state reports written against us for being fraudsters. Still, if you Google me, my Google history is like, I’m a fraudster, which kills me because I’m a very by-the-book individual.

I was raised Catholic. I have a lot of guilt. We had Heritage Foundation appointed to what was supposed to be a neutral board to change our ballot language.

And this story is not unique to Florida. We see ballot initiative campaigns consistently interfered with in a way that if they were candidate campaigns, it would get more attention and people would be more fearful. But what that meant in the executive committee was actually, we became so bonded over our need to keep each other safe and sane in that campaign that there was a point by the end where if anybody had been sideways to anybody at all, I would have come for them because we were so in it together.

I kept telling people by the end that they became honorary Floridians because of how gritty they were willing to get on this campaign. Within the state, there are people that I’ve come to respect in a way that I just could never fully conceptualize where every time somebody was having a hard day, somebody else came in and picked it up. And then I will always say this in specific, the ACLU of Florida, the way that they worked in partnership with the Elias Law Group to keep us safe, I can’t express enough protection for that because part of what authoritarians do is psychological warfare.

And there is psychological warfare of having systems weaponized against you in a way that is political violence. And so I also just have to shout out and appreciate people who were keeping us legally safe at that time and providing assurance to those of us who didn’t know that that was gonna be the experience of this campaign. I think we knew that it would be rough, but it was so much worse than we ever could have conceptualized.

And there’s so much that……I just don’t even know how to share now that we’re out of it. I just will always hold a love in my heart for those folks and what they did for the team. And the executive committee ultimately just became really a special place.

Despite, like Sarah said, there’s some folks who I ended up being lifelong partners with. There’s some folks who were probably never gonna be close, but I would always look back on that time with just a deep appreciation of people being curious about their skill sets, about people really leaning into their skill sets and trusting other people, and about the bravery that was in that executive committee.

[Sarah Parker]

I wanna plus one what Lauren said and say like, yeah, no, like me and Lauren actually had conversations like how we felt about anyone, like that stayed very eternal. And externally, like you didn’t come for any executive committee member or coalition member in front of anyone. It was just, there was trust there, there was loyalty there because everyone wanted to win.

And we were very protective towards the end. We were extremely protective and we definitely leaned on each other emotionally. I know me and Lauren. At the beginning, I was a mess.

At the end, Lauren was the mess. So, like I was calling Lauren at 10, 11 o’clock at night being like, I don’t know, you know? And it was a nice balance and it was nice to have someone to lean on.

And it was just not Lauren, there were multiple other people that we could call and we could lean on. And it was incredibly scary, incredibly scary, definitely being like a Black woman in Florida. I was, and everyone else says that they weren’t shocked about what DeSantis did.

For someone doing their first campaign, I was incredibly shocked, but it started, I felt safe and I felt like I could fall back if I needed to, when I needed to.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

I mean, the level of cruelty that they just continue to like…..one-up themselves is just, even if you want to, you can come to expect it, it doesn’t make it hurt any less. And I appreciate you’re both demonstrating like…..the deep and really authentic care for one another. There’s this beautiful photo from our conference that is gonna be the cover art for this episode of you, Sarah and Lauren looking at each other with this big, this huge smiles.

I can feel that love in that photo. I can feel that love that you have for each other in this conversation. And you, I mean, Lauren, you said like y’all didn’t start, you knew each other, but you didn’t know each other like you know each other now.

So like how, and you talked a little bit of how like the safety and care showed up through the support of….the ACLU. How did that, what are other ways that that care showed up in the coalition and to what Sarah, you said, y’all left something behind in that campaign. There’s an infrastructure that outlasted.

How has that care continued to manifest since election day?

[Sarah Parker]

Yeah, I mean, as a new ED, I think that like, man, like I wish I would have known before I stepped into the Executive Director position, like what an Executive Director was.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo] Girl, call me anytime.

[Sarah Parker]

I’m going to. So, like going in, you know what, Lauren, since you brought that up. Me and Lauren knew each other from Planned Parenthood, right? And I, they had yelled at me via text and told me I couldn’t do that.

They yelled at me in a Lauren way or what I call talking Planned Parenthood way. And then later on, we did a direct action and Lauren accidentally got arrested, but didn’t know they were part of this direct action. And that was my fault.

And I didn’t come clean about that until the coalition building. And I was like, “hey, you remember that time?” And they’re like, yeah, I was like, well, this was the plan and it kind of like flipped, right?

So like Lauren is someone that I can call about anything. There are other people that like, there’s like Black women that check in on me all the time, right, as an ED. There’s one, like one woman that was from the coalition that fiscally sponsored us later on when I had filed our C3 paperwork wrong, right?

I have mentors now. I know that like, if I’m freaking out about funding or I’m trying to build a board that I can lean on them. And I don’t think that I would be the ED that I am today that is still a baby ED, right, still growing.

Voices is actually now like…we’re legitimized, even though we were already doing the work, but we know how even movement spaces can be inherently racist and inherently biased. We are legitimized now. So, we get to sit at tables even if no one wants us to because we are in that spot, right?

And that infrastructure, people are excited to fight back now. Even though we lost, people know that we got a higher percentage, if I’m not mistaken, than Trump, right? And we might’ve lost when it comes to like on paper, but we won when it came to like our heart and being able to push forward because people had lost all hope.

And even after November, we saw a little bit of hope lost, but people got back up and utilized that infrastructure, utilized that energy, and they continued to fight. This gave people in Florida more hope because they realized that the nation hadn’t really turned their back, like certain people in the nation, certain funders in the nation hadn’t turned their back on Florida. So, I think that that care and that love is still very much so here.

I think it shows up in different ways. And because it shows up for me, now these new organizers that are starting their own nonprofit across the country because of 50/51, I get to show up for them, right? And you get to pass that baton.

Like for me, I feel like I had to take the baton and run with it. Like I had to snatch it out of everyone else’s hand and run with it. Now I’m like, here, I wanna prepare you to take this baton because I wanna give you what was not given to me.

And I can say this coalition, the executive committee, this ballot initiative put me in the position that I am today. Like I would not have known any of you. I wouldn’t be on this podcast.

And if it also wasn’t for Lauren and other people advocating that I start going to panels, also because I talk my talk and I don’t care. I’m gonna say what I say and I’m gonna stand on business all the time. I would not have gotten opportunities to be in rooms that I should have been in to begin with.

So, you know, I think that that answers your question. I hope it does anyway.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

It does. Yes, thank you. Lauren, how about you?

[Lauren Brenzel]

I think the care shown throughout the campaign also just look like people caring for our patients and people really wanting to figure out at the end of the day, how we were going to protect people and revisiting that as much as we could. When things were hard, it was important to look at what we were fighting for and who we were fighting for. I would watch our patient stories like on repeat during some of the worst days of that campaign.

And there were times when I was feeling down and then I would talk to a doctor and I was like, what am I like upset about? So, I think also care looked like consistently revisiting why we were doing this and consistently grounding ourselves in the real stories that we were hearing in our state.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

Lauren, Sarah, could you tell us a little bit about BISC and how we showed up for you all during the campaign? What was that partnership like?

[Lauren Brenzel]

Well, you have a phenomenal conference that I will always tell everybody in the Ballot Initiative space to go to. It is such a good intersection of getting to meet potential vendors for the campaign. It’s where I first met Change Media Group, who is now who I’m working with.

They’re trying to retain talent in the Ballot Initiative space outside of just nonprofits, which I think is really important and it’s something that doesn’t always exist in this space. Less BISC, I will say, and TFP is doing work too in that area. But getting to meet those folks is great.

Getting to meet coalition partners across the nation, it’s where I got to meet campaign managers from across the entirety of the nation working on repro campaigns. And we ultimately created a group chat where we could share resources and check in with each other. And then also it’s a space where you can access funders, which actually for folks who go to BISC is not a common experience.

Sarah and I pre-BISC did not have specific access to talking to funders. And BISC is one of the first spaces where I got to do that because they also take that conference space incredibly seriously. And then there’s like way before when my first BISC and I wasn’t running a Ballot Initiative campaign, I got to do learning at BISC and really like sit in on sessions and take lessons about what a Ballot Initiative was, what a campaign structure could look like.

And furthermore, there is so much on the ground support, Marsha from your team, I’ve been working with now since 2018, 2019 on various campaigns and the support that she provides one-on-one in helping to brainstorm things and the issues that you can talk to Marsha about that I have a deep trust that she’s not gonna tell others about it, but it has experience and will be not sharing that experience with me in a way that names it, but can help me think about who to connect with or how to navigate is so important. And then I love the cohort calls where we get together with folks to talk about just how to set up an exploration of a Ballot Initiative, how to do volunteer petition collection, how to do the initial phase of the research. So, it really is particularly as you’re starting to think about building a campaign, such an important organization to be connected with.

And then finally, I think that y’all are really moved by mission and purpose. And so having a validator at the national level who says like, hey, this work is important on a people-based level. And so how do we engage with these campaigns that again might be difficult is so important in this landscape.

And I think it’s one of the things that’s so unique about Ballot Initiative campaigns is just the expansiveness and the space and place that these campaigns take form, which is, I don’t know how the states that got Ballot Initiatives are the list that they are, but it is a mix of like, yes, your California is in some of your more progressive states, but it’s also like Florida. It’s Ohio. It’s Arkansas.

States that….are a little unique in how they’re structured. And so it really does bring it to the people in a different way.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

I love hearing that, Lauren. And it’s so interesting to hear about the connections that are made at the Road Ahead Conference, because our takeaways are what we see right in front of our faces and what’s happening at the conference. But when we hear, oh, there’s this other group that met up afterwards and we’re still connected online, these are some of the stories that we don’t know.

And it’s just so heartening to hear that these connections are happening, that they’re growing, and y’all are taking it offline away and building on it is just so heartening. Did you wanna add anything, Sarah?

[Sarah Parker]

Yeah, so I got my first biggest funder at the BISC Conference. This conference was one of my first conferences out of the state of Florida. I was so anxious, but it was nice to be there because I felt like an equal.

I also got some relationships that I still utilize today, like Black Feminist Future. I’m officially a member of that. And I got to meet Ohio Women’s Alliance, where Rhiannon is one of my biggest mentors and one of my biggest advocates, not just for voices, but just specifically for me as a Black woman, as a Black ED.

And you guys have put me on panels when I was like, I don’t understand why they’re calling me, but okay, I’ll do it, right?

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo] You’re fired, that is why.

[Sarah Parker]

Like, exactly. We want realness.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo] Yes.

[Sarah Parker]

I’ve learned that. Lauren’s definitely like put that into my head because Imposter Syndrome is real, right? Lauren’s definitely put that in my head, getting the opportunities.

I don’t think I would have gotten the opportunity to go to other conferences had I not been to that conference. And like I said, like, I might’ve been a new ED, new organ, like not a new organizer, but like new in that kind of space. And I didn’t feel like that.

I felt very welcomed. It was a great time. It was a safe space, like living and being in Florida.

Fighting for my life as an ED, fighting for my life as an organization, fighting for my life as a Black woman with the capacity to get pregnant, fighting for the life of my friends. Like that was a good escape. That was a good escape.

And it was definitely needed. And I got again to meet funders that took me serious. So, you guys have helped out a lot in that way.

And Chris has always said I can call them, which I keep forgetting about. And I put a note in my thing, so I’m gonna start calling you.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

Listen, Lauren knows this very well. Like once you got my number, you’re like stuck with me.

[Lauren Brenzel]

Touché.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

No, I just, you know, as someone, I like to say I’m a millennial old and an elder millennial. I’m in my, I’m in my senora, my senora era. I’m in my auntie era.

And it’s young folks to me, right? Like to you, you are the presence of movement work. And Sarah, when you were talking about like, yeah, I wasn’t taught a lot of these things, but I want it to be better for someone else.

Like, I feel that so deeply because I had the very same experiences as a queer Latina who was like not invited into a lot of rooms. And I’m like, “fuck you!” I’m gonna make sure that other people don’t have that experience.

So yeah, well, we’re gonna, you’re gonna have my cell and you’re more than welcome to text me anytime.

[Sarah Parker]

You mentioned millennial. I found out there’s a thing called a zillennial, like a Zoom millennial. Yeah.

And I think I’m a zillennial and I’ve been telling my youth chapter that and they’re not taking me very seriously.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

There’s a zillennial too, like the cusp of X in millennia, which is where I’m at. So we could talk a whole episode about this. So, y’all have alluded to this several times, right?

It’s like, we are living in a time of fascism and authoritarianism. Like we don’t have to wait for a shoe to drop. It has already dropped a while ago.

And y’all know that very deeply in Florida. And we are living in a time with the even further erosion of our democracy. And that is true for ballot measures as well, right?

There were unprecedented attacks that y’all face with “Yes on 4”, right? Like I use it as an example too. And you can talk all about it.

Like that is every move that the state made against y’all, the state violence is a play out of the textbook of authoritarianism. So, talk to us a little bit about that, how y’all fought through it and how you see that might continue to manifest across the country.

[Lauren Brenzel]

Yeah, I mean, I do wanna go back to just protest arrest in the South. Cause I wanna know, I think four members of our executive committee had been politically arrested. It might’ve been five.

And so the weaponization of organizing, like there’s nothing in the Trump administration moment we’re in where activists and organizers have started to be arrested at a national scale that is I think in any way surprising to anybody who has been working in an authoritarian state context. But even with that level of preparedness, I wasn’t anticipating.

And I do wanna just like move back to think a moment that we reflect on in Florida still is the amendment for campaign in 2018, our voter rights restoration campaign.

People really focused on the fact that they reduced the number of people who would be impacted by that initiative by basically putting Jim Crow-Era poll taxes on people who couldn’t pay their fines and fees from being previously incarcerated. But the other thing that we saw that gets talked about less is that in 2020, there was basically a public humiliation ritual of predominantly Black voters who had been previously incarcerated who were arrested for voting after that election cycle. And were basically paraded out into a media circus with trumped up charges.

And I think only one person actually faced even a trial in that case, but were publicly humiliated into being fearful of voting. With amendment four, we saw, we were subpoenaed multiple times for stuff that was like, why do you keep subpoenaing us for this? We in the last two weeks got sued 22 times that they were clearly, if we won gonna try to kick us off the ballot.

We had multiple hundred page reports written on us that if you actually look at them, there’s like hundreds of blank pages in them, but they became this messaging tool to talk about how fraudulent we are. They released a TV advertisement at the same time they did one of these from the Republican Party of Florida called Fraud or Flawed. So, there was clearly collusion between state law enforcement agencies and the Republican Party of Florida.

We learned after the election that there was an alleged, and I’ll use the word “alleged”, funneling of Medicaid settlement money that should have gone to the agency for healthcare administration away from people who deserve Medicaid, of which I wanna note because we don’t have expanded Medicaid in Florida is predominantly children. And in 2024, 600,000 children were kicked off the Medicaid rolls while we saw $10 million being diverted in settlement money to what is allegedly a political slush fund that ultimately funded allegedly the anti-cannabis political committee. We saw Heritage Foundation employees being appointed to what is supposed to be a neutral board that puts language on the ballot to write language that basically said, “we were giving away free abortions to minors without parental consent.”

I do wanna note 57.2% of Republicans voted for that. And they would have written the expansive policy for us if we had won. But we just saw so much weaponized against us.

And I think the unique context in Florida that I want people to be mindful of is we have something called an Office of Elections Crimes and Security, which is a police force that is dedicated solely into investigating elections crimes. And the reality is there aren’t elections crimes. They’re incredibly limited when people break the laws on elections.

And they’re often incredibly minor infractions, like people who didn’t know that their rights were restored who voted unintentionally, somebody who mishandled a vote-by-mail ballot. And they tend to be, again, like handfuls of incidencies in a state as large as Florida, but really nationally. So, to have an entire dedicated task force that is resourced to the tune of millions of dollars that sole goal is to investigate basically trumped up elections charges is I think the flashpoint at which Florida got to a really scary place.

And that was the same group that arrested those individuals after the amendment for 2018 voter rights restoration campaign. And so something that I’m thinking about a lot right now is are we going to see at a federal level the standup of an Office of Elections Crimes and Security? What other states are we going to see an Office of Elections Crimes and Security go into?

Because it was so core to multiple attacks that we’ve seen in the last few cycles in the state of Florida. Also think that we need to be mindful of the use of public infrastructure in fighting against a fair vote. So, I talked about AHCA before.

Some of the other things that we saw from AHCA were advertisements, PSAs to the tune of, I would estimate, tens of millions of dollars. We’ve seen CEOs from the cannabis campaign estimate $50 million in spending. We saw a reporter in the state of Florida, Jason Garcia, track down $20 million in spending.

So, the utilization of tens of millions of public dollars that were diverted from our Medicaid agency, Department of Transportation, opioid prevention dollars, which Florida has one of the largest opioid crises and has for the last 25 years, and Department of Health, who is supposed to serve low-income individuals’ healthcare to fight ballot initiatives, to the point where we had a website on AHCA’s page that was like, “the fear-mongering liars.” It felt very House Un-American Committee. And I think we will continue to see they got away with doing public advertisements using taxpayer dollars against this campaign.

How does that show up in future elections? And how does that move from the ballot initiative space into the partisan electoral space and really harm our rights? How scary is it that somebody has authority to just change what’s on the ballot?

And why are we more concerned about that in a context outside of just direct democracy? It really scares me how quickly folks move on from these campaigns and what happens in them. We’re seeing an aggressive presence right now in Missouri that is attempting to repeal the ballot initiative that they just won in that state.

We saw major attacks in the state of Nebraska. Mississippi doesn’t have a ballot initiative process right now because of a horrific Supreme Court ruling that they had that said they redistrict, they now only have four congressional districts, but oops, ballot initiatives require five congressional districts to be collected in, so now you don’t have ballot initiatives. And we saw in Ohio an attempt to pass a 60% threshold right before the election.

This is not the sign of a healthy democracy, and this has implications not just for direct democracy, but for how we treat elections in general in ways that I hope people really take seriously and conceptualize and keep their eyes out for things like the utilization of public funds and the policing of voting in a way that I think as the national landscape changes, states who don’t currently face these issues will be facing. You should always pay attention to red states to understand what’s coming next in a federal landscape.

[Sarah Parker]

I just wanna add one thing that you did forget. There were police knocking on people’s doors that signed petitions.

[Lauren Brenzel]

Mea culpa! I did forget that.

[Sarah Parker]

As a Black woman, to think that they were knocking on people’s doors, like the anxiety, if they did knock on a Black person’s door, the anxiety you must feel, the emotional trauma, that doesn’t make you feel safe, that doesn’t make you feel like you can utilize your voice, and that was really important. And that’s one thing that I can say pissed me off. I couldn’t think of another word, I’m sorry.

I was angered, I was annoyed, and they also targeted paid petitioners that were people of color and people that were in poverty, obviously. We looked through their names and we would look at that every single day to make sure that were they arrested again. That was really problematic for me, but they know exactly what they’re doing.

And now that they got to do that in Florida, like Lauren just said, it’s really easy to say a lot of things from a high rise in a blue state. It’s really easy. And I said that to someone on Twitter once, it’s super easy.

But when you’re out here on the ground, it’s incredibly scary to utilize your voice. It’s incredibly scary to utilize your autonomy. It’s incredibly scary to push back against fascism.

And one of the things that I’ve been teaching lately is like, what is fascism? And people are like, oh, you just throw that word around. No, no, we don’t.

Ultra nationalism, power being in one party or one person, scapegoating communities and utilization of police. Like we are living under a fascist regime right now. And it’s not like we’re a slippery slope.

Like, no, we’re already here. We’re not on the highway to fascism. We have pulled up to the house of fascism.

We have walked in the door and sat down at the table. So, to think it’s not gonna happen to you, is incredibly naive.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

That’s so real. And I appreciate y’all just like, we’re here y’all. We are at the door.

We are sitting at the table. So obviously the results were not what we all hoped for, even though 57% of Floridians said yes. What is the one thing that you are the most proud of from the campaign?

[Lauren Brenzel]

I had a day shortly after the election where somebody told me that the thing that I needed to take away from this was that there were people who were young organizers who this was, I’m gonna cry. This is their first campaign and it was their entry. I know who, I know the person.

It was a thing that like brought me peace during that time. I think she would be okay. It was Christina Uribe from Gender Action Equity Fund.

And it was the most comforting thing that anybody said to me during that time. And I think that I got the name of the org wrong, Chris. I’m incredibly sorry.

It’s fine, you’re fine. I then didn’t know how to fully internalize and believe in that. And I was at legislative session with the anti-petition bill and a young woman got up and her testimony said, she knew that this was not a fraudulent campaign because she had been a petition collector and it was the thing that brought her into the movement.

And she was a junior lobbyist for an organization. And so I got brought in on a losing campaign. My first big campaign was the Andrew Gillum campaign in Florida in 2018.

It was the only other campaign that got even close to breaking my heart as much as this one did. It was my first electoral campaign where I was a Director. And it reminded me that training up on a hard campaign is critical for having really good skills as an organizer.

So, I’m proud that we provided people with a campaign to feel really committed about and excited about in a year where they maybe didn’t feel that about other ballot options. I will forever take that with me. And I hope that there are lots of young people across the state of Florida for whom their organizing experiences on this campaign were impactful.

That is the thing that I feel proudest of.

[Sarah Parker]

Yeah, I feel proudest of how everyone showed up. One thing I would always mention on the campaign and something that we mentioned to begin with and I would sometimes use for grounding was what’s after this? What happens if we lose?

Like, what are we leaving behind? And I mentioned it before, but I’m so proud of the people that just started that are now taking the reins, that are getting involved, that are staying involved, that are fighting. I’m proud of how Floridians refused to give up.

And that was a hard loss for some people. Like, I remember I had to go on stage, which, man, I’ll always remember that. I had to go on stage and give this hurrah speech.

And by the time I walked off stage, I looked at the comms team and the way that their face looked, I was like, we just lost. And they were like, yeah, but we have to hold. We need to make sure.

And I just turned my back and silently cried. And then they were like, okay, you have to get back up there and do this other speech. So, like, sucked it up, went back up there.

And, you know, to see all those people that were crying, those are the same people that are back out in these streets and they’re not giving up hope. They’re fighting like hell. I’m proud of the fact that we showed the country that we’re worth fighting for and that we’re gonna show up the best way we can every single time.

And that Florida is not hopeless. Actually, we’re full of hope when we’re full of resilience. And I’m proud of the people, the experienced organizers, the new organizers, the people that were organizing before but weren’t new or experienced.

I’m proud of the grassroots organizers that showed up. I’m proud of Lauren. I’m proud of the executive committee.

I’m proud of the whole campaign. Let’s be real. Even the vendors, even the national groups that I consistently push back against all the time, every day.

I’m proud of my state and my team.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

You’ve provided so many insights already into your lives, your lives as personally and professionally, what you all went through in creating this campaign from nothing. And for those baby organizers who are tuning in right now and are just starting their career in advocacy or politics, what is something that you both wish you knew as a young organizer?

[Sarah Parker]

That it’s okay to talk your talk. That it’s okay to shake the table sometimes. That if people don’t want to sit, people don’t want you to sit at their table, build your own.

And sometimes if people don’t want you to sit at your table, you need to do some introspection. And there is a level of respecting the experienced organizers on the ground also while still holding to your morals and your values. That you don’t know everything.

That pride and ego will get in the way each and every single time and it shows up in different ways. That you should do ecosystem checks. You should see who’s in the ecosystem.

You should see who’s already doing the work. You should see how you fit in there even if

you’re fitting in there by starting a new organization. If you don’t like the other organizations, it’s okay to start your own.

Voices started as a group of friends. We didn’t agree with different things from different organizations. Stop doing purity tests.

Not everyone is gonna align with every single thing that you have. And sometimes that is the way to lose the quickest. And you will eat yourselves alive quicker.

Like as the left, we’ll eat ourselves alive quicker than the right will eat us. And self-care is an act of political warfare. If anything, if your org or the movement or anything’s going to die, with you taking 24 to 48 hours off, then it wasn’t meant to be in the first place.

So, it’s okay to take time for yourself and you have to act in radical love, not only for your community, but radical love for yourself. And when you do that, you act in radical love for your community and don’t create toxic workspaces by not taking care of yourself. You have to lead by example.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

That’s such an important message. I think we all need to hear it over and over and over again because even as young organizers come in, I think we all fall into the trap of working the hardest will get you the farthest. And it’s just not true at all.

Lauren, how about you? What do you wish you knew as a young organizer?

[Lauren Brenzel]

Yeah, I want to agree with Sarah around like how the left interacts. I came into this work when I was younger and I was so aggressive about just like, my viewpoint was the correct one and it wasn’t my job to understand anybody else’s viewpoints. And you have to figure out what your limits are with that.

But certainly in this moment, people are not on our side and we have to figure out how to get people back to our side. And sometimes that means a kind of work that, again, is more outcome oriented than it is about a process that necessarily feels good. I would say the other thing around self-care, we try to be too cute with what we talk about with regards to self-care.

So, we think about like the very fun flashy things that are involved in self-care. And I have had to learn the hard way that for me, it’s about literally like, am I sleeping enough hours in the night? Am I eating three meals a day and snacks?

Am I being present when I’m doing tasks? Like as simple as like when I’m brushing my teeth, I need to think about brushing my teeth or I’m not being present in those actions. And there was like a time after this campaign where like I felt like a weird robot trying to do basic stuff because my brain was so used to going all the time, what should have been the quietest moments.

And it is so much harder to unlearn those things than it is just create good habits in the first place. And so if you are just entering this work, sleep the correct hours in the night, eat three meals and snacks a day, go to therapy, get on appropriate medications, and don’t always think about self-care and like the cute face masks, getting a massage once in a while thing. Think about it as a real like basic brass tacks of am I caring for myself as a basic human being?

And am I treating myself the way that I would like to see others treat themselves like practicing the reverse golden rule? I think it’s incredibly important. Organizers are good at treating your neighbors well rule and oftentimes very bad at the treating yourself well rule.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

It’s a daily practice for sure. So, as we close out, you’ve both heard me say, the call to action is to make ballot measures, love letters to our people. How was “Yes on 4”, a love letter to your community?

[Sarah Parker]

We showed up for people. We said that we were gonna fight for their lives because that’s what was at stake. We operated in radical love and in some cases because we didn’t have those trainings.

Like Lauren said, we put our whole body and our minds into this. I mean, I missed my son’s birthday to go do the work that we needed to do for Yes Unfor and also for my organization. I think we operated in such radical love and they saw that from the patients to the people that were storytelling about their stories to even my friends that didn’t realize there was a six week abortion ban and then later found out and saw me fight.

They loved the campaign for that. We showed up in the most graceful, truthful and honest way. And that’s what love is, right?

People forget that love is not a noun, it’s an act.

[Lauren Brenzel]

For me, I think it was a love letter in that everybody fought as hard as they possibly could. Nothing was left on the field. Everybody set the goal of doing everything that they possibly could.

And we did that. And I also think there’s an insurmountable grief in not being able to deliver what’s needed for people, but there’s also an incredible importance in continuing the fight. And there are folks who are dedicated to that.

And it’s hard because without that win, I mean, I know a lot of the fight actually I suspect has to do outside of a traditional infrastructure because it means getting people care in a way that is unapologetic. But from a policy standpoint, it’s hard to figure out what that next step is at this moment, but people are committed to continuing to lean in and they haven’t stopped organizing. And that’s a love letter in and of itself.

[Caroline Sánchez Avakian]

Thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. If you’re interested in the work that Laura and Sarah are doing, you can learn more at floridiansprotectingfreedom.com and voicesofflorida.org. And we’ll include those links in our show notes as well.

Thank you again, Sarah and Lauren. Thank y’all so much. Thanks for listening to the Direct Democracy Diaries.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, leave us a message on our socials at ballotstrategy and check out our website at ballot.org for more updates, insights, research, and so much more.

[Chris Melody Fields Figueredo]

Can’t wait to see you next time. Keep fighting for change, one ballot at a time.