Sam's corner!

Hello website visitors! Sam here! I'm not an original member of the Citizens Action Brigade. In fact, I'm not even one of the people who built this website. But I did bring it to life again, and I'm now the person on the other end of citizensactionbrigade@aol.com. If you want to hear about how I first got involved in all this, read on. If not, all you need to know if that if you want to get involved yourself, head over to the Volunteering page to fill out a form.

Towards the start of the pandemic, the nonprofit where I worked (which shall remain unnamed) was looking for stuff for us to do, since we couldn’t really operate as usual. I got the task of clearing out storage rooms in the basement of the building, which we’ve owned since 1996 and have apparently just been accumulating stuff ever since.

I found some boring stuff (so many boxes of records from doorknocking in the early ‘00s), some puzzling stuff (a 24-pack of Sprite that had mostly evaporated apparently?), and some cool stuff (the record collection of someone who really loved classic rock). But there was one room that seemed to be just packed full of stuff from the nonprofit who owned the building years ago: the Citizens Action Brigade.

There were shelves with a few dozen briefcases and a bunch of bankers boxes. There were documents about the founding of the Citizens Action Brigade, records of their budgets and operations, a photo archive, and lots of training materials. Total time capsule.

The more I looked through the stuff, the more I started to feel like the people who founded CAB were a lot like me--people who felt sad and tired and scared about the state of the world, and wanted to do something about it. Their mission made a lot of sense to me, and their training materials had a lot of good stuff to say. My boss didn’t think they were worth keeping, but she didn’t mind if I took the stuff home, so whoops, mess from work became mess shoved into my hall closet.

Not long after I finished the basement clear-out job, I got furloughed, along with prettymuch all my coworkers. So I had a lot of time on my hands. I’d been telling my friends about the stuff I’d found from the Citizens Action Brigade, and they agreed they’d be up for trying out one of the training kits. Before we were halfway through the training, we knew this was something other people might want to try, too.

I found a disk (yes, I had to get an external disk reader, because my laptop doesn’t even have a CD drive any more, get out of here) that had the HTML from the original website, plus the password info for some accounts, including their AOL email (I’d forgotten that actually stood for America Online, if I’d ever known it). We got things up and running, almost like Citizens Action Brigade had never shut down at all.

Anyway, here's my recipe for lentil soup!

J/k, sorry you scrolled all this way and there's not even a recipe. But I hope that if you feel like I do, you might volunteer to become one of the next generation of Citizens Action Brigade volunteers. From the musty-ass basement of my former employer to you, here’s an opportunity to try something a little different.

- Sam