Peninsula Young Democrats

Click here for a PDF description of the event.

ABOUT THE TRAINERS

Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris is the San Francisco District Attorney, an Obama campaign chair, and a close friend and advisor to Obama. A staunch progressive and California's first African American DA, she has increased conviction rates to a ten-year high and used that political capital to start programs juvenile recidivism, increase witness protection, and crack down on illegal gun sales.

Mark Gorenberg

As Kerry-Edwards California finance chair Mark Gorenberg brought new Silicon Valley donors into the process, becoming John Kerry's single largest fundraiser in 2004. He was a software manager at Sun Micro-systems and is now a managing director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and a member of the Barack Obama national finance committee.

Judy Pope

During the 2004 election, Judy Pope led the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club through over 140 fundraising events, raising $286,000 in hard money for America Coming Together’s (ACT) swing state’s activities. The average gift was $82.35—grassroots before grassroots was cool. She is a facilitator and public speaking and fundraising consultant.

About Peninsula Young Democrats and Campaigning 101

Peninsula Young Democrats is a grassroots Democratic political club with members under 36 years old, drawn from the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem and beyond. Each year PYD hosts Campaigning 101, a skill-building workshop focused on different aspects of campaign work.

MORE ON THE TRAINERS:

San Francisco Magazine on Kamala Harris:

In liberal circles around the country, all this is suddenly making a lot of people very excited. Yes, Harris is personally dazzling—approachable, vivacious, intense, inspiring. “It’s unusual to find someone who’s that good-looking but also very intelligent, with a lot of substance,” says Craig Watkins, Dallas’s new African American district attorney, who credits Harris’s ideas with helping him win election this past fall against the slime-slingers in the Texas GOP. “It’s kind of intimidating.” Yes, she’s delivered on the basics (rallying her troops, scrounging up new Dells, winning major cases, and boosting conviction rates to a 10-year high, all despite one of the worst fiscal crises ever to hit the city). But it’s her ideas—and her ability to see them through—that have turned her into a hot political brand. “People flock to her—they want to work with her, and they bring all their friends and their connections,” says Supervisor Sophie Maxwell... “It’s like people saying, ‘Ooh, I want to work for Google.’”

more: http://www.kamalaharris.org/news/282

Atlantic Monthly on Mark Gorenberg:

Political fund-raising... was stuck in an earlier era... Relying exclusively on the rich put limits on who got involved, and by design the new campaign-finance laws weakened their influence... “If the most that any one person could write a check for was $2,000,” [Gorenberg] said, “then the important people suddenly became those who would put their hand up and say, ‘I’ll raise $50,000 or $100,000.’”...

Gorenberg tapped into his broad network of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and discovered that many of them were eager to get involved—eager enough not just to give but to tap their own networks to raise money for Kerry. Collectively, these “raisers” generated a great deal of money, and much of it came from new sources, particularly what Gorenberg likes to call the area’s new middle class.

“There is a tremendous amount of wealth in Silicon Valley,” John Roos, Obama’s Northern California finance chair and the CEO of the Palo Alto law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told me. “Not just massive individual wealth, but wealth spread collectively among the engineers, lawyers, and executives who made gains in the good years and now have the ability to contribute a $2,300 check...”

more: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance

Thanks also to Steve Spinner, Obama National Finance Committee and Obama campaign; John Roos, Obama National Finance Committee and Wilson Sonsini; and David Burd, Young Lawyers for Obama