Two weeks ago, after enjoying being unemployed for three months, I started a new job. I’m now the associate campaign director at The Next Generation, a political campaign consulting and issue advocacy firm in downtown Oakland. You might have noticed the new badge on the top left the page that links to the Tax Cannabis 2010 campaign, which is what I’ve been spending most of my time on at work. I’ll also be working on some local candidate campaigns and will be sure to disclose that as I write about candidates.
It’s an awesome job – I get to spend my days doing some of what I love most – strategizing, writing, organizing, coordinating communications, and a bit of everything else campaign related. The Next Generation is an especially good fit for me because of the firm’s values, which match up well with mine. I worked with them as a volunteer for the Berkeley No on KK campaign and Rebecca Kaplan’s campaign for City Council.
I’m also ecstatic to be working in downtown Oakland again. I missed the small-town/big-city paradoxical vibe of downtown and love that I’m again constantly running into people on the street. It’s also great to be so near City Hall and right between AC Transit and BART, so it’s a lot easier to make it to meetings.
The downside is that I’ve been working a lot, which, when combined with other life commitments – planning a wedding, being president of East Bay Young Democrats, attending tons of meetings, and attempting to maintain a social life – means I have less time for blogging. Now, somehow last year I managed to work just as much and still blog 4-5 times a week so I think I’ll get back into that groove again as I re-balance my life, but I’m not there yet.
So, for now, expect blogging from me to be lighter than it was in past months. Also expect more guest blog posts, as I’ll be soliciting those more. In particular, I’m going to be opening this blog up to political candidates running for any elected office in Oakland (city council, mayor, AC Transit, BART, school board, etc.). For the next several months, I’m inviting all candidates to write a blog post introducing themselves. After that, if the introductory posts work well, I might try to arrange guest posts from candidates on specific issues. So if you’re running for office, contact me at oaklandbecks at gmail dot com to arrange a guest post. (I’ll be proactively reaching out to candidates once the fields solidify.)
Speaking of that email address, I’ve totally slacked on keeping up with it and have basically ignored it for nearly a month. So I’m very sorry if you’ve written to me and I haven’t responded. I’ve now set the address up to forward to my personal email address so I’ll be able to better keep up. And this weekend I promise to get back to everyone who’s written to me recently.
I also have a couple of half-written posts that I’ll hopefully be posting in the next week or two. So please excuse the un-timeliness of them.
Living in the O 
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