Courtyard café: Building the BC Greens family

• Principled party foundations:
  • Banning big money
  • Evidence-based decision-making
  • Long-term thinking versus election cycle
  • Clear statement of values
  • Non-whipped votes
• Enhanced fundraising capacity
• Greater staff resources dedicated to providing services from the provincial office
• Ensuring convention is economically and physically accessible
• Maintain stability in the provincial office
  • Develop succession plan

• Growing interest in the party, but not always jobs immediately available for volunteers
• Some volunteers highly engaged but danger of burnout
• Competing for people’s time
• Difficult to get volunteers if they don’t know about the organization

Recruiting volunteers

• People do what they like to do
• Encourage the leader in the volunteer. Create space for them to be a leader
• Have co-chairs to split the workload
• Removal of barriers
• Build a community
• Ask new volunteer to bring a friend
• Develop team building processes
• When you make the ask for a volunteer, you need to make sure there is an activity for the volunteer to do
• Need to build relationships
• Provide physical and emotional support for volunteers ex. social events, food
• Hold workshops for volunteers
• Avoid being “politically in your face”
• Provide a structured approach to onboarding volunteers
  

• Growing number of organised riding associations (RAs)
• Three staff dedicated to field and RA development.
• Reluctance to fundraise
• Goal of RAs is to build a community with common interests
• Look to the 100 year goal, long-term change in community not just the next election battle
• The party has vision and mission statements, RAs don’t need separate ones

Developing stronger riding associations

• Connect RAs with other Greens in the riding by providing list of members
• Identify clear roles and responsibilities are critical
• Establish team improvement goals
• Enhance data access to give insight into our local voters/demographic base
• Provide help and resources on how to reach and communicate with target voters in apartments and condos
• Provide training on how to build community engagement and how to seek input on issues versus speaking on issues
• The provincial office should do more to help the building RAs to grow develop
  

Caucus has shown that politics can be done differently

• Independence
• Non-whipped votes
• Culture/process of rational decision making
• Integrity/transparency of decision-making

Caucus has played an effective role shaping better policy through CASA

• Lobby reform
• Legislation to ban big money
• Influence on CleanBC
• Salmon
• Benefit corporations legislation
• Ride Hailing

Caucus has conducted themselves with integrity

• Collaborative approach
• Trust building
• Long-term focus
• Willingness to stand for principles ex. LNG

Strengthening caucus

• Get more MLAs elected!