About Arizona List
Arizona List (AZL) is a political organization that was founded in 2004 with the aim to support and elect progressive, pro-choice, Democratic women candidates to local and state public offices throughout the state of Arizona. It is the only Super PAC in Arizona dedicated solely to electing women and has become one of the largest financial resources for pro-choice, Democratic women candidates.
AZL believes that getting women elected to public offices is crucial to enacting real change, and works to achieve these goals via fundraising and financial support, candidate work, fieldwork, and more.
Photo (above) by: Jon Manjeot, n.d. "Arizona Desert Landscape"
Photo (left) by: Arizona List, 2022
Work as an intern
Interns with Arizona List have the opportunity to learn about political work from a local, grassroots perspective, and engage directly with various stakeholders in the political process, from voters to donors to campaign directors to candidates. The work that I was engaged in as an intern included:
Voter outreach
Voter outreach most typically includes canvassing—going door to door to speak with voters about a candidate(s)—and phone banking, which involves calling voters. This on-the-ground work is crucial for campaign success and is a key component of intern work at AZL. AZL organizes canvassing and phone banking events in support of their endorsed candidates, which I frequently attended and assisted with as an intern.
Candidate assistance
As an AZL intern, I was assigned an AZL-endorsed candidate to partner with and assist with her campaign needs, as well as serve as a point person between her campaign and the organization.
Some of the particular things I worked with my candidate on were the development and creation of campaign literature (a flyer with info about the candidate that is handed out when canvassing), the creation of social media graphics for various events and fundraising initiatives, and frequent canvassing.
Photo (right) by: Arizona List, 2022
Graphic design
I completed various graphic design projects for AZL directly and for my assigned candidate as an intern. Specifically, I created various educational and aesthetically driven designs acknowledging and celebrating various holidays and for Get Out The Vote (GOTV) initiatives.
For my candidate, I created a social media campaign for an online fundraising initiative of hers and designed, from start to finish, canvassing literature, as mentioned previously.
Graphic (left) by: Sadie Parent, 2022
Donor Research
Because AZL provides assistance to political candidates, some of the work that the organization does, and that I did as an intern, is in identifying potential donors by combing through Campaign Finance Reports and recording donor information in spreadsheets. This way, both Arizona List and its endorsed candidates had more potential contributors to whom to reach out.
Events
Another aspect of my work as an intern was attending and representing Arizona List at various political events. This ranged from attending the Tucson Women's March to a black-tie fundraising dinner for Democratic candidates in the state.
Photo (right) by: Sadie Parent, 2022
My takeaways
During my internship with AZL, I had the opportunity to learn so much more about the political process and its inner workings than I feel I could have without this level of direct involvement. More specifically, I have learned about how politics, even—and perhaps especially—local politics, functions via a complex web of relationships. Experiencing this network in action has given me insight into the kinds of work I would like to engage with, personally and professionally, in the future. While I see (governmental) political action as a crucial aspect of our enduring march toward positive change, I value what I have learned about its limitations; particularly how political actors tend to miss the forest for the trees in terms of engaging people whose everyday energy is directed more toward the mundane than idealist conversations about the best governance. This understanding of the privilege that it takes to even consider politics day-to-day is something that will guide my thinking going forward.
Thinking more concretely about the best ways to engage people in politics, I really value having learned in-depth about voter outreach strategies. Running political campaigns requires a significant amount of people reaching out to many more people. This comes in the form of canvassing and phone banking, especially, which are skills learned through repetition—not to mention slight discomfort. Speaking to people you do not know about candidates and policies that represent your own values and aspirations for society can be exceedingly vulnerable; for me, putting myself out there in this way was challenging, but I also found it rewarding. Learning how to speak with strangers is a skill I am grateful to have had an opportunity to practice during my internship at AZL.
GWS Connections
My ongoing education in Gender and Women's Studies and the topics considered in my courses have given me many opportunities for reflection throughout my internship experience. In particular, an ongoing discussion in one of my GWS courses about identity vs affinity politics has been particularly influential in shaping the way I have thought about my work as an intern at AZL. The work of the Combahee River Collective—a group of Black Feminists in the 1970s who engaged in consciousness-raising and other political work focused on the liberation of Black women—and particularly their discussion of the value of identity politics as a powerful tool for ending oppression, have made me think about the ways in which AZL and many other political organizations form their politics from the site of shared identity. I see value in this because, as the Combahee River Collective suggests in their statement, we are often the ones best situated to lead the dismantling of our own oppression. Women's work to support and elect other women is a crucial component of achieving more just political representation. However, I am also concerned, as the Collective was, with how we can bring other people outside of the specified identity group of a given organization into our political organizing. Throughout my internship, this discussion in my GWS courses was a helpful tool for analyzing the ways that AZL is and is not managing to maintain a politics that grows from a shared identity while engaging allies with shared goals, as an "affinity" politics might suggest.