Grand Rapids Grassroots by Ashley E. Nickels

Author:Ashley E. Nickels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Published: 2017-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

Finding My Progressive Community

by Melissa Anderson

As a liberal transplant from the East Coast, I spent the better part of my first two decades in Grand Rapids keeping my head down, working, and raising a family, until the Progressive Women’s Alliance (PWA) came along in 2004 and I found my people. Over the next seven years, I became increasingly involved in this brand-new grassroots organization, including serving as its board chairperson from 2007 to 2010. The opportunity to be part of PWA’s development and growth into an influential force in the Michigan political landscape, to finally have an outlet for my political energies, and to actively engage with the community, was life-changing for me and deeply fulfilling.

My husband and I met in graduate school at the University of Michigan and moved to his hometown of Grand Rapids in 1986. I was a liberal northeasterner and developed an impression of West Michigan that may have included stereotypes, but they weren’t all wrong. My sense was that the local population was much more socially conservative, church-bound, and narrow in its experience than what I was used to. We settled in Cascade Township, in part because it was similar to the semi-rural town where I grew up in Connecticut. Every Election Day served to quantify the extent to which my philosophies about the role of government and our collective responsibility to one another and to the common good were a minority viewpoint. I resigned myself to not being represented by my elected officials, and to focusing on the more immediate concerns of career and children.

In early 2004, an acquaintance told me about a new organization, a political action committee (PAC) called the Progressive Women’s Alliance of West Michigan (PWA).1 She persuaded me to buy a ticket to its first fundraiser, held on May 24, 2004, featuring Michigan’s first female governor, Democrat Jennifer Granholm, who had been in office just over a year. An article in the Grand Rapids Press later quoted Governor Granholm as saying that when she was invited to speak to a group of progressive women in Grand Rapids, she thought, “Okay, thirty women or so.” When she walked into the room of more than 450 people at the University Club in downtown Grand Rapids, her first words were, “Unbelievable…What’s going on here? Am I in the right place?”

Governor Granholm and I had the same reaction—wow! I was impressed by the crowd, and also by the fact that I ran into a couple neighbors that I didn’t know were at my end of the political spectrum. If you see yourself as a minority, you don’t take the risk of speaking up, but here was a safe space with like-minded people in significant numbers. Maybe Grand Rapids was my community too, after all. News accounts said the Granholm event netted $30,000 for this new PAC, and called PWA a force to be reckoned with. I wanted to learn more about this new organization.

It turns out that, while some of us were squelching our political views, other women were gearing up to make an impact.

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