The “Serve America” will not ruin our spontaneity

Giulia Prelz Oltramonti, 24, is an Italian student living in London.  Born in the US, she has an American passport.  This, along with a good deal of passion and hard-work, is what enabled her to volunteer on the Obama campaign from the summer of 2007 on and off til the general elections over a year later.  She answers questions on the Obama magic which lead her to cross the ocean, and the unperturbed power of volunteering.

 

How did you come to work on the Obama campaign that first summer 2007, when very few people had heard of him?

I was in Moscow finishing my Erasmus in April 2007, and was following the first steps of the presidential elections, looking at the various nominees.  I read up about Barack Obama and listened to a few of his speeches from previous years.  He seemed like such an incredible candidate, so I tried to get in touch with the campaign organisers in Chicago.  They told me that I should contact their Iowa office as they were looking to recruit some volunteers over the summer.  Once I got in to contact with them, it all went very fast.  I sent my CV in, I had a telephone interview, and before I knew it, it was beginning of June and I was in Iowa, working on the Barack Obama campaign.

 

What was the campaign like when you first arrived?

When I arrived, the campaign was tiny.  We were around twenty in the main office in De Moines, with just under a dozen one or two manned offices  around Iowa.  Apart from us, there was the Chicago office and that was it.  Barack Obama would divide his time between both offices.  When I first arrived, we hardly had anything.  It was just us believers.  You know we didn’t even have chairs to sit on!  But slowly things picked up, and by the end of the summer we had grown to an office of 50, and were very well equipped.  Everything we had, had been donated.  We had Obama chairs, Obama cars, Obama petrol, even our fridges in which we put our lunches were donated for the campaign and were called Obama fridges.

 

What importance would you say volunteering played  in the success of the campaign?

I think volunteering really was the success of the campaign.  Well, there were two levels, the volunteering, and the management.

The volunteering was happening in various ways.  There were us official campaign volunteers, and then there were the rest, who weren’t official but were doing so much of the necessary work.  People who would give a fridge as I said, or who would have a full time job, but then give up two hours of their day, to go and bang on doors and talk to people.  I think that’s what made the campaign alive, anybody could volunteer in any kind of form.

But then there was also serious commitment to management.  Barack Obama started with a core team who stuck with him until the very end.  This core team was incredibly focused on organisation and strategy.  In that way, the campaign was based on the force of volunteering, but it was never left to chance.  For example volunteers were encouraged to go and talk to their own neighbours, and organise street parties in their own neighbourhoods.  This meant that the campaign wasn’t a cold one, where people were coming from the outside, it was a local one, a real lived one.

 

What did this experience bring you as a volunteer?

What was amazing about volunteering that first summer of 2007, was that we really had the impression that we could change anything, that with our strength of volunteering we could literally change the world.  And you know, in a way, I think we did, each of us individually make a difference.  Every single phone call, every single effort.  You know, when you do something like that, it makes you realise the power that we each have as individuals.

I think the real strength of the Obama volunteers, was that we believed in it so much that we would almost do anything.  Just before the Iowa primaries, in January 2008, volunteers were still going from door to door in -30 degrees. 

 

How much had the campaign changed by the time you went back to the US the following summer?

The scale of it had completely changed, it was incredible seeing the sheer size of the electoral campaign, and to think back to where it’d all started. 

 

As an ex Obama volunteer, what do you think of the Serve America Act?

In terms of this new Act, I think it really reflects who Obama is as a man, and what his history is.  He is so attached to civil society and civil movements, that’s what he believes in and that’s really how he started out professionally.  But at the same time he decided to become a politician because, he thought that it would be the most effective way to change things.  In a way this act is a continuation of the way in which the campaign was structured.  Organisation at the top, but with a fundamental civil group making everything possible.

 

Would you say that the volunteering spirit risks being ruined by the new state structure surrounding it? 

In my opinion, absolutely not.  I get the feeling that there is a real effort from the coming from the Obama administration to keep that spontaneity that comes with volunteering.  I think Obama really understands what volunteering means and represents, so wouldn’t ruin it.

 

Has Barack Obama’s election as American President made you want to go back to the US to live?

No, it hasn’t.  My American dream was definitively ruined by the Bush years.  However, I really look forward to seeing what happens over the next eight years, and if I have to roll my sleeves up for him again, I will!

Follow this link for the Serve America Act background article.