Volunteer hands by Tumisu licensed under Creative Commons.

Want to get more involved with GGWash beyond just reading and commenting? Here are a few ways!

One of Greater Greater Washington’s key values is to be volunteer-driven, in our actions and our decision-making. We’re a community of people who learn, advocate, and act together on shared issues. Volunteer committees shape many of our policies and actions and volunteers are the bedrock of much of our content as well.

Join our Elections Committee for DC races

As volunteer Drew Dupuy said on the WAMU Kojo Nnamdi Show recently, our endorsements aren’t my decision, or the staff’s — they come from our volunteer Elections Committee. Each election cycle we create a new Elections Committee made up mostly of people who live in the areas with races; for this year’s primary, that was Virginia. Last year, it was mostly Maryland and DC.

DC doesn’t have elections until June 2020, but given the ethical controversies around Jack Evans (Ward 2), the race is already heating up with, thus far, five challengers and an independent Sack Jack website. Rather than wait for the official start of primary season (or for Jack to resign), we’d like to constitute a DC group of the Elections Committee to determine what actions we might take regarding this race this year.

There was also news recently that one person has filed to create a committee to run for council in Ward 7 against Vincent Gray, and other early candidates could emerge in some or all of the seats up next year: Ward 4, Ward 8, and two at-large seats.

If you’d like to be a part of our Elections Committee for the rest of 2019, please apply here. Elections Committee members must commit to writing a post each month and/or helping with something of similar work level, and staying officially neutral such as avoiding publicly endorsing, donating to, or volunteering for any candidate until GGWash determines its own endorsements.

We also would welcome adding people to our Elections Committee who’d like to work on 2019 general election races, including Virginia General Assembly and the city councils of Rockville and Gaithersburg. You can apply for that on the same form.

Write about big issues in Maryland & Virginia

We are a regional site, and want to be fostering urbanist conversation about the big issues in all parts of our region. If you’re interested in being a volunteer writer on any of the issues we talk about, we’d welcome it! In particular, we’ve identified two big issues we’d love to talk about more on the blog:

495/270 widening: Maryland is moving forward aggressively on widening plans without much understanding of the effects or benefits, and we’re very alarmed. Our Advocacy Committee is watching for good advocacy opportunities, but we don’t only want to run petitions and emails. We want to keep people informed about what’s happening, what the science says, what officials do and say. We’d like some volunteer contributors to write news & analysis articles about what’s going on and why some of the things coming out of MDOT’s mouth or Twitter feed are big problems.

Housing Arlington: Arlington County has launched the Housing Arlington effort to look at, well, housing. It includes a land use component which could be revolutionary in making Arlington more inclusive. Or, maybe it wouldn’t be. We’d like to be paying attention to this and spreading the word about opportunities for people in our community to get involved and push for more housing.

While our community generally has a point of view on these, we’re looking to “inform before you persuade,” as our writing guidelines say. Interested in helping on these topics or others? Take a look at our guidelines there and email gjordan@ggwash.org with a bit about you and what you think about these issues.

Help with our social media

Our team of amazing social media volunteers keep up our Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds. Matt Friedman, a social media professional, helped us out by coordinating that group, figuring out what they can focus on, and helping them learn more. Are you a social media expert, or at least pretty proficient, who’d like to take on that leadership opportunity? Let us know by emailing gjordan@ggwash.org with a little about you and why you are interested in helping.

Women, people of color, as well as residents from the contested wards, are strongly encouraged to apply.

Thank you for helping make Greater Washington even greater!