Members of Congress receive hundreds or even thousands of letters and emails each day. For the Quakers who wrote to their members of Congress at Intermountain Yearly Meeting in June, FCNL staff made sure their letters stood out above the rest.
Even from the beginning, the FCNL team was well aware of the responsibility they’d been entrusted with, as the voices of the Quaker community were in their hands.
387 letters and postcards were composed by Quakers at the Intermountain Yearly Meeting, on issues ranging from healthcare reform and Pentagon spending to immigration reform and private prisons. Quaker Field Secretary Christine Ashley assumed responsibility for FCNL’s delivering the materials to representative offices.
As the FCNL team entered the Russell Senate Building with letters in hand, the GOP’s draft of the Senate healthcare bill had just been revealed, and in the words of Aurelio, the environment was “quite intense.” At Colorado Senator Gardner’s office, the group was assured that the letters would be relayed to the senator’s staff, although none were able to talk at that moment. The group continued on to Arizona Senator Flake’s office, where once again they dropped the letters off and moved on. Aurelio recalls, “I was a bit frustrated [at not being able to speak to a staff person too], but I remembered that it was not only about my voice and my story, but also the ones [we’re] lifting up.”
The group left the Senate offices excited about the impact of the letters, recognizing that the gesture of handwritten letters was advocacy at work. The significance was not lost on Hannah: “The handwritten letters that people clearly put time and their hearts into… I think this kind of advocacy is important because it puts a name and a story to constituents.”
