Next Steps: Taking the Campaign to the Next Level

After you've gotten your group on board, set out to recruit others!
How?

Alert your entire membership. Tell them that the resolution passed and encourage them to find other organizations to pass resolutions. Publish the resolution in your newsletter or send it in an email alert along with a blank resolution.
Start a resolution drive. Give talks about a moratorium on executions at other groups, faith communities, or schools in your area. Ask them to pass a resolution and share the process from your group.
Send an email with a link to EJ's sample resolutions to listservs in your area (we can write an email alert for you).
Be strategic. What group would really make heads turn if it passed a moratorium resolution? Which organizations do the media, governor, legislators care about? Take the resolution to those groups and be sure to publicize when they pass.
Take a resolution to your city council. Depending on the position of city council members, this can be easier or harder than getting resolutions from faith communities and grassroots groups. Some pass easily, others take some lobbying. See our additional tips for approaching city councils.

Thinking Long-term:
Using resolutions strategically

Collecting resolutions gives people something concrete to do. For volunteer or people new to the group, it's something more interesting and more rewarding than stuffing envelopes. When you set goals for collecting resolutions, you give yourself a structure. You can decide to collect a certain number of resolutions statewide each month, or a certain number by the end of the year, or a certain number from each city, or a certain number each from churches, activist groups, and city councils. Collecting resolutions gives your group a concrete vehicle for reaching out to other constituencies and talking to them about the issue.

Ultimately, you want to spark the introduction or help the passage of state legislation calling for a moratorium. If there is already legislation pending in your state, find out who supports it. Find out who doesn't yet support it, but might based on other issues they've supported in the past. Focus on getting those folks on board first by demonstrating popular support for moratorium in their district.

By passing resolutions! Go to the biggest churches, synagogues, key local businesses, and community groups in that Senator's district and get them to pass resolutions. Have members of those groups then send a copy of the resolution to the Senator with a letter asking for support of the moratorium bill. Or get the city council in that Senator's district to come on board. Then, when you ask constituents to write letters to that Senator, be sure each and every letter includes a copy of the city council resolution and a copy of any articles in the local papers that featured the resolution's passage. Who supports that particular Senator? Which groups in that district are influential? Which helped to get the legislator elected? Those are the ones to approach for resolutions. And if you arrange meetings with state legislatures, bring copies of any resolutions you have from their districts. Also bring a copy of the portion of the National Tally covering your state (or bring the entire tally!).

The resolution campaign builds support like a pyramid--starting from a broad base of grassroots organizations and faith communities, working up to municipalities (city and county councils), until enough support exists to influence a moratorium at the state level, and finally, going national.