in closing

how do you sum up the last year of your life spent on a campaign? i
don't know that it's possible. my brain is still feeling mushy after
four solid days of printing lists from midnight to 2 am, waking up at
7 to be in the office for volunteers to pick them up, spending the
next 13 hours bouncing from location to location and then going back
to the office to pull and print lists for the next day. but my job was
easy compared to what our volunteer organizers were doing; training
brand new volunteers and managing 4, 12 hour, back to back phone
banks. keeping everyone on task, motivated, focused.

this is the small, window-lined office i've been working in since
june. my "desk" is the short end of a long, collapsable table, and
every day i sat wedged between a preschooler-sized sink and the table.
from there, i could see everyone who came in the door of the building,
who volunteered in my room, and a tiny sliver of our room across the
hall so i could yell directions to the person sitting near the door
when we heard someone saying something crazy or, more often,
fantastic.

i am incredibly proud and honored to have been a part of what we just
accomplished. it feels like summer camp in that i'm going to miss the
people i've met, the inside jokes, the endless tacos and lattes and
phone calls. but it isn't really like summer camp at all because at
the end of our journey, we reelected the president of the united
states.

together, volunteers in austin called more than 125,000 people the last four days of the election. we made up more than 1/5 of the state's total even though we're 1/8 of the team. as the only paid staffer in the office, there were a lot of questions that came my way in the last year. but in those final four days, each organizer was the master of their own team. they made it fun, they hit goals, and they did it without any help. 

our volunteers represented every piece of america; young, old,
wealthy, poor, every ethnicity. every day we laughed, shared crazy
phone calls, experienced frustration and forged ahead. i will never
forget their stories and their reasons for being there. at the end of
the night, no one headed to the citywide watch party because we wanted
to end the way we began; in our neighborhood teams, crowded together,
working tirelessly. i couldn't be more proud of what we did, and i
can't wait to see what we will do.