Photo by Bill Dickinson.
By DCist contributor Josh Kramer
How do you spend your lunch break?
A few District residents aren’t taking their lack of federal representation sitting down—that is, eating at their desks—and instead are using lunchtime to get involved in national politics on behalf of others.
For the last year, Athena Fulay has been organizing a team of local volunteers to hand deliver thousands of letters to senators on behalf of their far-flung constituents. But unlike similar efforts by other groups, these grassroots are watered by “hacktivism” and civic-minded technology.
The letters are written by users of a volunteer-run app called Resistbot. Users text a phone number or chat with a textbot through apps like Messenger or Twitter. The bot leads the user through a few questions and then generates a message to the user’s Senators, governor or representatives in the House. Especially promising letters can also be routed to local news outlets for publication.
“Having somebody be able to do it directly from their phone, while they’re waiting for something—very quickly, very easily—was something I thought was going to be a game changer in terms of what this country needs to be more engaged,” says Fulay, a Pasadena, California, native who lives in Petworth/Brightwood Park.
After volunteering for the unsuccessful Kerry campaign in 2004, Fulay thought she was done with national politics. She has worked at an international education nonprofit in downtown D.C. for 15 years. But like many Americans, Fulay was called to back to politics by the 2016 election.
Initially, Resistbot sent the messages to the Hill as faxes. According to a blog post by Jason Putorti, a Resistbot co-founder, the app took off like wildfire and quickly overwhelmed congressional offices. The app started as an experiment, he wrote, “but we did not expect the sheer number of users, now around 1.5 million, to send over 5 million pages of faxes.”
Eric Ries, a Resistbot co-founder, said in a podcast interview that the app is particularly useful for Americans with disabilities or those otherwise unable to call their representatives during work hours.
Putorti wrote that by last October fewer than a third of the faxes were actually getting through. Some offices were harder to reach than others. “Senators Markey, Paul, and Warren have no working fax numbers, Senators Blunt, Cornyn, and Cruz have disconnected most of theirs,” Putorti wrote.
“It just comes down to having somebody not have to replace a piece of paper in a fax machine,” says Fulay. “We want to make sure that message is heard, counted, and read, frankly.”
Resistbot switched to email, which is less disruptive and more effective at reaching representatives. According to Fulay, the app now has 4.4 million unique users and has delivered tens of millions of messages.
But for some campaigns, physical pieces of paper still send a stronger message. This is where Fulay and her team come in.
After the app launched, Fulay reached out to help and quickly found herself spearheading the in-person effort.
“And first it was me and a couple friends,” Fulay says, laughing.
Now, Fulay has a list of about 20 volunteers who help with mid-day deliveries.
“Every once in a while,” says Fulay, “When an important vote comes up or we just notice that there’s this especially large surge of people really wanting to voice their opinion and share how they feel about specific issues, we’ll do what we’re calling these hand deliveries.”
Resistbot headquarters will help identify specific senators who might be on the fence before an important vote. Fulay says the D.C. team will “print batches of that for hand delivery, in a pretty quick turn around, at like 24 to 48 hours.”
“The hand deliveries is a very dramatic sort of end point of what we do, but it’s still a very small piece of a very large and pretty robust and amazing mosaic,” says Fulay.
Since last June, local volunteers have made about seven hand delivery runs to Congress. Typically, Fulay will take a long lunch and ride her Yamaha Vino scooter the 10-15 minutes over to the Hill from her office. If there are lot of letters, she might take the day off and drive her Chevy Volt. Users can even watch their letter being delivered live.
One of the logistical hurdles to regularly volunteering during your lunch hour is finding a time to actually eat. “There is a bagel/coffee place across the way from the 2nd Street entrance to the Hart Senate Office building,” says Fulay. “Sometimes I grab a bagel and iced chai before deliveries, sometimes after. I’m a fan of the Dirksen Cafe, because they have surprisingly good chicken tenders and fries.”
Recently, Resistbot users surged into action with messages about family separation at the Mexico border. Fulay and her team stepped away from their desks and headed for the Hill.
On June 21 and 22, they hand delivered 12,781 letters to 62 Senate offices, breaking all of their own records.
While delivering letters to congress, Fulay has been careful to not express her own opinions. “We don’t engage in conversation about the issue,” she says. “We’re being respectful of the fact that we’re a service for constituents in their district.”
If Resistbot is tech in service of citizens, then the local volunteers are citizens in service of tech. “We’re an extension of the botnet in that regard,” says Fulay.
But dispassionately delivering messages for out of towners is still meaningful to Fulay and other local volunteers. “A lot of us live in the District,” says Fulay. “I mean, we could write Eleanor Holmes Norton and get replies as well from her, but it’s not going to have the same leveraging effect as people with representation that has the vote. Our form of democracy is not a spectator sport.”
