TakeAction leaders, members, and community activists have sent more than 67,000 text messages and made more than 475,000 calls to Minnesota voters ready to take action and create the joyful future we deserve this election season. During a recent voter outreach event, volunteers shared their experiences of caregiving, distance learning, the caring future we deserve, and the change we’re creating together. Read their stories below.
Megan Boyle, Woodbury:
I am an essential worker supporting people with disabilities. I have close contact with people every day. My daughter started kindergarten this year, and in an effort to protect her health and well-being (as well as the health of other students, teachers, and school faculty) we chose to enroll her in our district’s distance learning program.
Since I am working out of the home, this leaves my husband to facilitate our daughter’s learning while also working from home. Learning has been challenging and I have some grief that my daughter is missing out on a “normal” milestone kindergarten year.
I also can’t help but be angry at the weak responses of lawmakers to the global COVID-19 pandemic that have put us in this situation of making impossible choices to keep our families and communities safe and healthy.
We are an exceedingly wealthy country, and we have enough resources and money to make sure that everyone is cared for. Lawmakers should be prioritizing plans that protect our health and safety. They should demand that wealthy corporations who have made huge profits during this pandemic pay their fair share, and they should stop playing political games that threaten to keep our communities at risk.
We are all connected and we are all in this together. What effects one of us resonates to all of us. It’s time to support families, essential workers, and each other to keep our communities strong and get to the other side together.
Dolores Voorhes, Minneapolis:
I have grandchildren in St. Paul Public Schools who are learning at home. Their parents are both working from home and, except for their WiFi not being adequate for four people on Zoom, they are doing OK.
But I have other people in my life that are struggling. They do not have the support they need when they are an essential worker, and can’t help their kids, and they worry about bringing the virus home. My single mom niece had to pick up and isolate a child who sneezed at school. Most parents find they need to home-school in order for their children to a benefit from the online classes from school.
We are told that there isn’t enough money to support caregivers, parents, teachers, kids or people who are unemployed. That isn’t true.
If wealthy corporations and individuals paid their fair share, families would have the support they need to care for each other. Our elected officials should prioritize our safety and health.
Sabrina Mauritz, St. Paul:
As the school year starts, our family and so many others are making such terrifying choices. We are choosing between working and caregiving, giving our kids our presence or financial stability. For folks who have been laid off, or who are paying sky-high Twin Cities rents, these choices are that much worse.
Where I live in St. Paul, I see so many courageous people offering their brilliance as educators, their support as neighbors and friends.
But we didn’t have to be this desperate. Constant divestment from our communities and schools in favor of securing profits for corporations has brought us to this crisis.
When we vote in November, I hope we as Minnesotans will vote for candidates that put the care of people first. The Minnesota GOP has taken every opportunity to undermine efforts to keep us safe, while seeking to further divide us by race.
What we need now are solutions like Universal Basic Income, Medicare for All, support for caregivers of all kinds, the kinds of things that honor our bonds, not tear us apart.
Linda Peterson, Minneapolis:
I’m disheartened, to say the least, at the lack of support for the parents and caregivers who need to work and deal with the difficulties of distance learning.
There are families where one person is an essential worker and it falls to the other parent who is at home to help with schoolwork on top of their own work to bring in a paycheck. This is never an ideal situation when learning is the goal.
We are consistently told there are not enough resources to help but this is not the case. There are resources available. We are told nothing can be done, but that’s not true.
We can come together and help each other. We hear people say, “that’s not my problem.” Our collective safety and wellbeing is everyone’s problem. We need to buckle down and fix it.
