Throughout this election cycle, we’ve stressed the importance of making you voice heard at the polls in person or via absentee because it’s truly the starting point for all of us engaging in our civic duties and aligning our values and interests with our votes, especially on behalf of children and families. It’s your all around engagement, including but not limited to, calls and messages to family and community members, candidate outreach and even attending or collaborating to host candidate forums – like we’ve done at Michigan’s Children – that were the true catalysts to record voter turnout, not only in our state, but nationwide.

Yes, let the feeling of engagement and mobilization resonate, but also use it as fuel to energize the people and actions to follow in our pursuit of policy change that looks out for all our children, families and communities, no matter who they voted for this past Tuesday; there’s more work to be done!

We know that advocacy is fueled by the mobilization of people who support the cause. Let’s capitalize on both the moment and momentum by engaging the same network of family and community members who voted, towards our advocacy goals for the rest of 2020 and beyond. We encourage you to continue having those conversations that led to people taking action at the polls and move them to joining our united front of Michigan advocates for our most vulnerable populations.

At Michigan’s Children, we’ve provided policy briefs, news coverage and even produced a ‘playbook’ outlining our policy initiatives that we believe will change lives and outcomes for the most vulnerable amongst us.

We’re eager to speak more with newly elected officials up and down the ballot, as well as welcome back returning incumbents who have proven to be champions for our youth and families, but without your help as vocal constituents and consistent pressure as active voters, it would be an incredibly more difficult task in forging positive policy change. Simply put, we need you, your voices and your action – now more than ever.

Adam Bingman is Michigan’s Children’s Director of Communication & Outreach