Want to Participate in Government? Don't Want to Run for Local Office?
Here's what to do:
Go to your local city and country government web pages. Somewhere on there, you'll find a page that announces vacancies on various commissions, committees, etc. Apply for a position on one of them. Normally, those are not elected offices, but members are appointed by a city council, county board, or some other entity. If you don't get on one, try again. Keep trying, and you will be appointed to one before too long. See, very few people are really willing to serve in ways like that.
Those commissions, advisory boards, committees, and other local governmental organizations are the real first step. You can get on one, if you are intelligent, have some world experience and are willing. I guarantee it. Here's my story:
In California, County Grand Juries are investigative entities. Yes, they sometimes look at criminal cases, but mostly, they have statutory responsibilities or capabilities to look at other things every year. That's how they work in California. In most counties, grand jurors are appointed by the chief judge of the Superior Court in the county. In some counties, a call goes out for volunteers to serve on the Grand Jury.
So, one year, shortly after I quit working my W-2 job and was getting started as a freelance magazine writer, I found myself with too little work and too much time. I read that a new county Grand Jury was being appointed for a year of service. "Hmm," I thought. So, I got the application form, filled it out, and sent it back. A couple of weeks later, I was summoned to the courthouse to be interviewed by the chief judge, along with others who had filled out the forms.
Guess what? There were fewer people who had volunteered than seats on the Grand Jury, so everyone who showed up got appointed, along with some others later on. There was no pay. Being on the Grand Jury meant spending a minimum of one full day a week serving on that Jury. Beyond that, not much was said about what we would be doing.
So, we all got a packet of information. I read the entire thing closely. It turned out that there were many things the County Grand Jury was charged with doing. Most of them were not mandatory, but were part of its responsibility. So, at our first meeting, nobody seemed to have read that document, so I did my best to explain it. The chief judge was there. When I finished, he said, "Well, you seem to understand this pretty well, so you are the foreperson."
During that year, I looked for things for us to do, since the judge said it was rare for the Grand Jury to deal with criminal cases. We were charged with inspecting prisons in the county, so I suggested we do that. Well, no Grand Jury in that county had ever done that. We did. We even inspected the State prison and State hospital for the Criminally Insane. We even inspected a temporary jail that was set up to handle arrestees from a big protest of the nuclear power plant that was under construction. We issued reports on all of those inspections.
We got a complaint letter from a group of employees of one County department, so we investigated that. We were supposed to supervise financial audits of county government departments, but that had never been done. So, we initiated audits of every department, paid for out of the county budget. That was in the laws about Grand Juries. One department head lost his job. Some money had disappeared somehow....
I was a writer, so I took on the work of writing the grand jury reports. We did lots of them. We also wrote a handbook for future grand juries that was published and passed along to all later grand juries and modified by each of them. We turned the County Grand Jury into something it had never been before. Grand Juries in that county after ours got much more active. The chief judge and I met often during that year. He always laughed and said, "Well, you're certainly stirring things up, but you're right on point with the laws regarding Grand Juries."
That's what happens when you get involved and become part of local government. It turns out that you can actually do some useful stuff, if you understand what you can actually do. A year of that was plenty for me, and I decided not to run for any offices in that county. I could have, and I was on the local TV news often enough to be recognized, but I started getting work more regularly, so I called it quits after that year.
So, if you're unsatisfied with your local government, don't just fret about it. Don't just complain. Volunteer to be on some commission or board or something like that. Get active. Who knows? You might even parlay that into a political position. It's worth a shot.
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That's what I'm talking about. People can do something. It's hard work, but more than worth it. We can make a difference!
