Hear from a VSA volunteer on turning her outrage into action

I’ve always cared about politics, but the fight to save the Affordable Care Act in 2017 was the first time I saw how that care could change people’s lives. So when Vote Save America was born the following year with that same goal, it became the perfect home for my volunteer efforts. 

It took me three tries to make it to my first canvassing shift. The first time I made it about half a block. The second time I didn’t even get off the bus. But the third time, accompanied by a veteran canvasser and the brisk fall sunshine, changed my life. 

In the eight years since then, I’ve talked to hundreds of voters. Some of them were strangers. Some of them were friends and family. Some of the conversations were hard and some full of laughter. Many were both. 

I couldn’t have done any of it without Vote Save America, the place where I first learned how to turn my outrage into action. What started as an incredibly useful set of resources on how best to use my time, energy, and money to fight for the things I care about quickly became my favorite community. When the anger and the fear threaten to become overwhelming, there’s nothing quite like a smart, generous, and inspiring community to shore you up and get you back out there. 

And boy do we need that right now! A morally bankrupt desiccated husk runs our country, driven by his own personal, petty grievances, and a deep and disturbing need to gild the nation in gold accents. Our groceries keep getting recalled, which is fine because we can’t afford them anyway. The list goes on. 

Sometimes the news makes it hard to get out of bed, let alone sign up for a volunteer shift. But like so many hard things it’s also the most likely to make us feel better. We’ve had to fight to stop our hard-won rights from being stripped away and we still need to hold the Trump administration accountable for the vast and varied harm it’s caused. But politics is also our dream for a better world made manifest. It’s how we show our love and care for our communities, how we connect with our neighbors, how we fight back against the isolation and the fear. 

Every volunteer shift, conversation, and connection we make—with friends, with family, with neighbors and strangers on the other side of the country—is a reminder of the incredible things we can do together. When we show up, listen, and fight for each other, we can build something better. 

Volunteering in the 2026 midterms will help us take back Congress, flip state legislatures, and elect people across the country who will fight for us at every level of government. It will help us hold this corrupt administration accountable, and set ourselves up to build something better out of the elections that come after. 

But more than any of that, this election cycle is an opportunity to remind ourselves and each other that the world is ours to make, that nothing is out of our hands. It is a hard fight, and it’s never over. But we’re about to take back the upper hand. I’ll see you out there.