Monday, 25 Feb 2002

WASHINGTON, D.C.

There were three priorities on my to-do list for Monday: 1) find my office; 2) meet the Clear the Air coalition partners; and 3) find somewhere to live. I didn’t fully complete any of these tasks, but I made a good start.

Green Corps had arranged for me to use donated office space at the offices of US PIRG, so that was my first stop. The PIRG office is being renovated, however, and I learned that I wouldn’t have an actual desk until Wednesday. No problem. PIRG gave me a long distance phone code and an Internet connection, and I was able to borrow a desk for the day.

Moving on to priority number two: Clear the Air’s field director told me that the coalition’s most active partners in Virginia are the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Izaak Walton League of America. I’m anxious to meet these people, because I’d like them to fill me in on what’s been going on with the campaign in Virginia, and what needs to happen. In particular, I’d like to know more about Sen. John Warner, a moderate Republican who sits on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and therefore will help determine the fate of the Clean Power Act in the Senate. What I want to know: What does Sen. Warner need to hear and who does he need to hear it from to make him vote the right way?

I’m also hoping the folks from our partner organizations can help me figure out exactly how my work will fit into similar efforts across the state. I’ve been given a set of basic goals going into the campaign — for example, we’d like to see a certain amount of media coverage, hold a certain number of public events, and so forth. However, I don’t want to step on any toes or duplicate any efforts that are already underway.

For instance, one of my goals is for organizations in Virginia to write letters to Sen. Warner in support of the Clean Power Act, or to get involved in the campaign in other ways. Whether I’ll talk to environmental groups, public health groups, or religious groups depends on what our coalition partners are doing and what they can tell me about Virginia politics. If there are already people working to get religious groups to write letters, I either won’t focus on those groups, or I’ll talk to the people who got there first and see how we can work together. And if our coalition partners think that it would be more useful to get other types of organizations involved, I’ll focus on that instead.

In between calls to our contact at SELC and the Izaak Walton League, I did some research on organizations in Virginia. I tried to find a phone number, fax number, email address, and contact person for each organization, and recorded this information on a spreadsheet. In the afternoon, I finally reached SELC’s clean air campaign coordinator and set up a phone meeting with him for tomorrow morning.

Towards the end of the day I was able to turn to priority number three: housing. As I write this, still homeless, I realize it should have been priority number one. I browsed through the classified section of the Washington Post and surfed the net for about an hour and found a few rental possibilities, but none of them answered when I called. I’ll try again tomorrow, and I’ll also ask around the office — generally a foolproof way to find housing of some kind.