Building an Army on Wheels

By Megan Tady, WireTap. Posted April 26, 2004.

What started out as bar talk ended up becoming an organization with 4,000 volunteers.

As legend has it, five people sat at the Rogue Brewery in Portland, Oregon on an evening in 2001, trying to devise a plan to save their state. Drinks were had and ideas were proposed. They could start meeting every Wednesday night to watch the "West Wing...." nah, that would too passive. They could take over the Democratic Party... hmm, no, taking over a party is too risky. They could get a bus and start trekking across the state supporting progressive candidates... but buying a bus is too… too… wait a minute. They could get a bus.

The Oregon Bus Project is the free-wheeling, grassroots-shaking, democracy-flouting, politically-charged answer to what a small group of progressive activists saw as a crisis in their state. Among other problems, the state legislature had been dominated by right-wing conservatives for nearly a decade, rural and urban Oregon could not identify with each other, and important issues were batted back in forth among legislators -- a tennis-match of will that saw no winners. The group identified a need to bridge this urban/rural divide, engage young people in the political process, and create a grassroots progressive movement to take their state back.

To do this, they would buy a bus.

"Oregon's a big state," explains Caitlin Baggott, longtime Bus Project volunteer and founder and editor of the project's magazine, The Zephyr. "Especially for people in Portland, we just don't know what people are thinking outside the valley. So the conversation turned to, 'Wouldn't it be cool if we could just take a busload of us over there to talk to them to figure out what's happening?' And then someone said, 'Maybe we could. Maybe we could get a bus.'"

If You Dream It, It Will Happen

Although Jefferson Smith, the initiator of the bus project, had originally approached other friends and even the governor to take the lead, he finally realized that he and a group of young activists would have to start the project. The plan was to get young people on the bus once it was purchased, drive them to campaigns across Oregon, and canvass for progressive candidates who needed help.

The group "begged and borrowed" money, spreading the news about the Oregon Bus Project by word of mouth and asking friends to donate as little as $5. Around 20 people involved with the project began meeting at the "Smith Compound," where they broke into groups and hashed out ideas for the project.

Finally in 2002, after much planning and fundraising, they had a kickoff ceremony, where Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon tried twice to break a champagne bottle against the newly acquired 1978 charter bus. The second time, he dented the metal, the bottle bouncing off the bus like a kickball on pavement. He eventually grasped the bottle and shattered the glass on a lug nut -- a tense but triumphant launch of the Oregon Bus Project.

Nice Idea, Kids

After their champagne bottle kick-off, the Oregon Bus Project quickly got rolling on their mission to support progressive candidates -- much to the surprise of politicians.

"A well-known politician said to us, 'That's a nice idea kids. I'd love it if you could bring out 10 volunteers to work on my campaign. That would be huge,'" Baggott relates. "On our very first trip, we brought out 150 volunteers. It's not that people didn't support us. They were genuinely excited about the idea of us brining out 10 volunteers to help. So when we were able to bring out 10 times that many, I think it really startled people."

People quit their jobs to work on the Bus Project. In the beginning, they volunteered 60 to 80 hours a week, stealing time from sleep in the middle of the night. According to Baggot, "There were 20 or 30 of us committed at that level. It became a driving passion for us. It quickly took over our lives."

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