Community Coffee Hours with Elected Officials: Creating road blocks for real community engagement

About 10 years ago now, a dozen activists decided to show up at the Rainbow Grill in Grandville to talk with a Conservative State Representative about LGBTQ and Immigration issues. 

The Conservative State Representative had been using this spot for years to fulfill his community engagement  obligations. However, on one Saturday morning he got more than he bargained for, when 12 activists, sat down with him in a restaurant booth (2 at a time) to confront him on his stance on numerous issues. This State Representative did not stick around to meet with all 12, since he was only there for an hour, so the activists followed him out to his car to continue to share with him their thoughts and feelings about his voting record.

This lesson taught me that elected officials don’t really like to engage with the community, especially if they don’t get to determine how engagement will happen.I’ve thought about this a great deal more recently, since there have been several instances where Movimiento Cosecha has attempted to talk with State Senator Winnie Brinks, but were told by her staff that she was not available.  A similar interaction was had by a continent of housing justice activists who attended the Rent is Too Damn Hight rally in Lansing on September 5th. In this instance, the staffers in Senator Brink’s office had locked the doors and were unwilling to meet with housing justice activists.

I attended a recent Community Owns Safety Coalition meeting in Grand Rapids, where we talked about the Rent is Too Damn High Rally and inability to meet with Senator Brinks that day. We talked about trying to meet with State elected officials when they host coffee hours in Grand Rapids. This tactic was decided upon, since not everyone has the ability to just take off work and go to Lansing during the week to meet with elected officials. The other reason is that there are several proposed state bills that housing justice activists would like to see get passed and meeting with elected officials in Grand Rapids would be more accessible for many people.

Community Coffee Hours

The Community Owns Safety Coalition meeting I mentioned earlier was this past Wednesday, so later that night I wanted to find out which State Representatives and Senators would be hosting their next community coffee hours. I was able to find several upcoming community coffee sessions, but most of them were happening on Friday, September 29th. 

Being that these meetings were happening in less than 48 hours, it would make it difficult to mobilize people to attend, with such short notice. In addition, all of the community coffee hours I came across for September 29 were during the day, which also meant that if you work 1st Shift, you would not be able to attend. Another aspect of these opportunities to tell state elected officials what was on your mind is that they generally only lasted for 1 hour, which really limits how much time you have to talk about specific legislation or the issues that you want addressed. 

There was one other major road block that one of the housing justice people I know encountered, specifically with a community coffee hour with State Rep. Skaggs and State Senator Brinks. They too were hosting a meeting for 1 hour – from 10:15 – 11:15am, on Friday, September 29th. However, they were not including the location of where the event was being held. Instead, they had this link for people to fill out. One of the housing justice activists I know filled it out on Thursday when they found out about the meeting, but didn’t receive a response until 8 hours after the meeting had already been held.

The housing activists then sent a message to a staff member for State Rep. Skaggs stating, 

“You sent the information on the location of the Community Coffee Hour for Rep Skaggs and Sen. Brinks 8 hours after it happened. I submitted the information on Thursday, which would have been ample time to receive information on the location, so I am puzzled as to why you would send this information out after the fact. In addition, why is it that you do not post the information on the location on social media, like Facebook? That is where I found out about the coffee hour. Why make people jump hoops to get information on the location?”

Here is the response the activist received back from Rep. Skagg’s staffer: 

“I am sorry that the email did not deliver to you until after the event. I very confused as to how that happened as I sent out all emails regarding the location early this morning at the latest. I understand that is extremely frustrating and unprofessional. If you have concerns or questions for Representative Skaggs, I would be happy to relay them to him or set up a meeting for you to chat. As for withholding the location of the coffee hour, that was not our office’s choice. Because we were hosting with Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, we had to follow her office’s security procedures which required people to register before receiving the location.”

Ok, so why does Senator Brinks have security procedures when it comes to meting people in her district? This makes me suspicious that the housing justice activists not receiving information on the location of the meeting as a mistake, but that they didn’t want them to attend. 

The text included with the Facebook event for the meeting with Rep. Skaggs and Senator Brinks states in part – These coffee hours are a great chance for us to hear directly from you about how we can best represent you in the capitol. Really? It seems that if elected officials really want to hear from the public about how best to represent the communities they represent, then they would hold community meetings more frequently, at various times to allow more people to participate, and to stop making people jump through hoops to even find out where they can meet with elected officials. Elected officials are constantly telling us that they work for us, but the limited opportunities to even have a face to face conversation with them in the districts they claim to serve, make it difficult for this writer to believe their commitment to community engagement.