Disabilities

Staff:

Name                      Role            Email                                  Phone

• Kareem Dale          Director      kdale@barackobama. com  773-718-2632
• Doug Rogers          Deputy Director drogers@barackobama. com 614-395-4686

Targets:

· Americans with Disabilities

· 40 million voting age Americans with disabilities

· No real concentration in one particular location

Achievements to date:

• Senator Tom Harkin and Mike Strautmanis served as surrogates at the Columbus Ohio Presidential Candidates’ Forum for Americans with Disabilities on July 26.

· The disability constituency has created teams of volunteers in 48 states and D. C. to lead the outreach efforts to the disability community at a grassroots level.

· We have over 200 volunteers in all the states prepared to send out e-mails, act as surrogates and generally promote Senator Obama’s policies for Americans with disabilities

· These volunteer teams have created lists of persons and groups in each state from the disability community, and the total number of persons/groups for all states is approximately 75, 000.

· The campaign was represented by the Disability Vote Director at the Self Advocates Becoming Empowered conference in Indianapolis, where he spoke to over 1, 000 registered voters, 90% of whom are Barack Obama supporters.

· The Disability Vote Director spoke at the National Council on Independent Living Conference in which he was able to highlight that Senator Obama supports the Community Choice Act and Senator McCain does not.

Plan for the next 60 days:

• All of the above efforts with our disability state volunteer organizers will continue through November 4.
• We would like to confirm our event with Senator Obama and 20 persons from the disability community. Essentially, it will take place in mid to late September in Florida, Virginia or Pennsylvania at any time on any day (depending on the existing schedule). The purpose of the event is to obtain video of Senator Obama interacting and suggesting solutions for every day Americans with disabilities and driving home why he has the best policies to change the lives of Americans with disabilities. We will distribute the video widely as a whole and use excerpts from it as well. We hope the video will “go viral” and provide a huge boost in this community.

• We would like to do a similar event with Senator Biden.
• We recommend that either Senator Obama or Biden speak at the US Business Leadership Network’s 11th Annual Conference on October 5-8 in Portland, Oregon (a battleground state). This is the preeminent national event for business, community leaders and BLN chapters that have an interest in hiring, retaining and marketing to people with disabilities. This would be an outstanding opportunity for the campaign to address the business community as well as Americans with disabilities. Corporations that will be represented include some of the largest Fortune 500 companies, including Ernst & Young, IBM, Wachovia Corporation, Wells Fargo, Starbucks and others.

• Congress has designated each October as National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and we should take full advantage of this final month opportunity to drive home the plans that Senator Obama has to increase the employment rate for persons with disabilities. To highlight this month, we should: (1) issue a press release at the beginning of October discussing our employment policies and emphasizing the importance of employment; (2) release a prepared statement/video from Senator Obama; (3) schedule a media interview with Senator Obama and/or Senator Biden to discuss employment; and (4) schedule Senator Obama or Biden to speak at the Oregon event (mentioned above) to kick off the month.
• We also recommend that Senator Biden conduct an interview with key disability media outlets to condemn McCain for not supporting key disability legislation.

• We are recommending approval to purchase media mailing lists to perform outreach, but we need budget approval for this item. The voter lists maintained by the campaign cannot be separated out by disability. Consequently, the only way to increase our reach is to purchase media lists so that we can e-mail and/or call these individuals. These lists range from 250, 000 persons to 700, 000 persons, most of whom have opted in, so they are ideal targets for outreach.
• We will be encouraging our volunteers in the battleground states to utilize the DNC peer to peer outreach system that was presented at the caucus meetings.

• We are severely limited in our voter registration for this community. The primary method for voter registration would be for the 501(c)(3) organizations that serve this community to host voter registration drives. However, according to the legal department, as a campaign, we cannot encourage these organizations to host voter registration drives. Thus, we are only allowed to send out e-mails to our lists in the battleground states informing them that under the National Voter Registration Act, they are required to provide voter registration forms to their members. We already have done so, and we hope this will encourage them to host voter registration drives.
• We are working with the existing DNC team to establish a voter protection team that will oversee voter protection related to persons with disabilities in the battleground states.