We continue our series on getting to know our chapter leadership with a few words from Ben Cole, who was newly elected as Chapter Vice Chair:
We did it! With our efforts, we won the Presidency, we flipped the Senate, and held the House. Our party is poised to hold a unified government for these next two years at least. We should take some time to celebrate and revel in that because our work in Democrats Abroad was instrumental in making this happen. We should be hopeful and excited to see what comes next as we’ve started the job of governing! It’s time for us to roll our sleeves up again and back at it.
But before we do, I want to thank each of you for placing your trust and faith in me to elect me the Vice Chair for the Cologne/Bonn Chapter!
I am thrilled with our work from last year. From our Juneteenth March against racism, to our presence at the massive protests around in Cologne, Bonn, and Düsseldorf, to our GOTV outreach online, phonebanking, and through our stands in the city we were instrumental in raising attention to the important issues of racism and police brutality and helping Americans living in our communities to vote.
As your vice chair, I’m excited to get to work to recreate some of the success that we experienced last year and to create new initiatives and events to engage our chapter members and community members.
I am excited to work with Daniela, our chapter chair, to expand our voter outreach campaigns by taking account of our successes and challenges from this past election so we can know what to replicate and what can be improved upon. I also want to help develop citizen outreach and engagement mechanisms that will empower Americans living abroad to stay active and engaged with their representatives and policymakers stateside. I hope, as well, to bring an intersectional perspective and approach to our chapter’s work. I believe we can do this through coalitions and partnerships with other NGOs and activists, but also through educating and informing our members. We live abroad, but our voices and our input are just as important crucial to our democracy as those of our friends and families back home. This election was absolute proof of that.
We have an amazing opportunity to bring our party’s platform to life. As private citizens living abroad, we have the opportunity to reach out to our friends and neighbors in our communities to be living examples and representatives of the values and principles of our party and our nation. That is my vision for our chapter and our organization. I invite all of you to stay excited and engage and share ideas with us so that we can make our chapter the best it can be for our members.
Democratically yours,
Ben Cole
Chapter Vice Chair, Cologne/Bonn