Hi there! I'm excited to announce the brand new Forward Party Activist Update Center. You'll hear what Forwardists are up to nationwide, learn about new and upcoming projects to grow our movement, and meet the incredible volunteer leaders turning this unprecedented, intense and incredibly fun project into a serious, landscape-changing reality. I hope to update this at least a few times a week, both personally and via guest posts from volunteer leaders and our team at HQ.

I'm Will Conway, the National Organizing Director for the Forward Party. Really, my job is facilitative: I provide the tools, training, guidance and resources to empower our growing community of volunteer activists. As of this writing, our total activist universe is just shy of 20,000.

Can we talk about that for a minute? Nearly twenty thousand humans have raised their hand to grow the Forward Party and turn this movement into reality. I'm grateful to be a small part of a wonderful, thriving community of brilliant, thoughtful humans who want to make our country a better place.

Since I joined the Forward Party, we've taken great strides in facilitating the work of those 20,000, but we're not close to where this project needs to be. Below are a few of the most important updates so far.

Recent Updates

• We now have state leadership teams in 35 states and territories. The work of building sound state leadership is never done, and there isn't a state or territory in the union in which we couldn't use another incredible leader. If you're interested in joining the team, submit an application. That said, the progress so far is outstanding.
• We launched Your Dashboard, a personal, tailored-to-you control center for all things Forward Party. See yours here. Milestones:
  • So far in March, 100 Forwardists have recruited 315 brand new Forwardists to our community using their personal recruiter link. The top 20 highest recruiters will meet Andrew Yang on a private Zoom call. We didn't even announce this program in any organized way - it just happened organically. We'll launch it publicly in April, meaning many hundreds more Forwardists will grow our community even larger.
  • All fifty states, the five outlying territories and Washington DC have online community centers to connect with local activists. More than 1,300 people have joined their state communities. If you haven't already, join yours. Local leadership is responsible for updating those pages with upcoming meetups, volunteer opportunities and more, so joining your state community is the best way to see what's coming up near you.
• We're about to launch a pilot program for street teams in eight states and Washington DC. More details on this are coming soon, but the reality is this: our movement has mostly been keyboard warrior kinda thing so far. During a dark, Omicron-infused winter, this made sense. But Omicron is fading, spring is springing and it's time for us to take this movement into the real world. If I had it my way, we'd have two volunteers on every street corner in the United States, and a table at every festival, fair, and concert all summer long. That'll take a minute, but we're on our way.

What's Coming Up

• Notice how the "College Chapters" and "Communities" sections are completely blank? That's not for a lack of interest. Now that the state communities are beginning to take off, we'll get rolling with college chapters and online communities soon.
• Currently, only our state leadership teams can post or host events. That's a major setback: soon, all activists will have the tools to host their own events on our website, as well as get resources (like slide decks and physical merchandise) to make those events a success.
• Have you noticed that our community seems to be all over the place? You're not quite sure where to go to meet and talk to other Forwardists, so you kinda feel all on your own. That's because we don't have one central communication tool for you to chat with each other. Communities have formed on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, this site, Discord and more. State leaders are on our national Basecamp account. I don't want those communities to disappear, but we do need one central place to talk. I'm working on building that out now (it's looking like it'll be on Slack, but don't hold me to that).
• Once our Street Team pilot program clicks into full swing, we'll take it national. There will be seamless tools to order merchandise and literature for Street Team Captains, as well as online training courses to get you certified, both as a street team volunteer and as a captain. More to come.

That's where we are today. I'm so excited to be on this journey with you! I'm also fairly active on Twitter (and my Twitter account is just straight up Forward Party organizing stuff these days), so feel free to follow along for more news and updates.