Advocate

1.      Send an email to your King County Councilmember by clicking here. The template letter is completely editable, and we urge you to add a few sentences about why Doors Open is important to you and/or your community to personalize your message. If you have already written to your Councilmember, we need you to write again to demonstrate your ongoing support.

2.     Email the Regional Policy Committee. The process to approve Doors Open as King County’s Cultural Access program requires two critical votes. First, the Regional Policy Committee will vote to recommend the program or not at the end of November. In December, King County Council has the final vote to authorize the program. The RPC is made up of several city lawmakers across the county. Email your local rep today in support of Doors Open – click here to learn more. 

3.      Sign up to testify! All of the public meetings invite members of the public to articulate their support or opposition. We need passionate and compelling stories that reinforce our key messages and advance our political strategy. Testimonies are typically 1-2 minutes, virtual or in-person. If you’ve got a great story to share, please sign up to testify here. We’d love to have a broad variety of options and we will confirm your attendance closer to the meeting. We may need to trim the list if the number of speakers exceeds the allotted time or if we have many similar stories.

Critical meetings that we’d like you to attend in person or stream:

  • Nov 1 (Wednesday) Committee of the Whole, 9:30am
  • Nov 8 (Wednesday), Joint meeting of the Regional Policy Committee & Committee of the Whole, 3pm
  • Nov 27 (Monday), Regional Policy Committee, 3pm
  • Nov 29 (Wednesday), Committee of the Whole, 9:30am
  • Dec 5 (Tuesday) and/or Dec 12 (Tuesday), King County Council, 9 am

          * this schedule is subject to change and more will be added.

Most meetings are hybrid and we encourage people to watch virtually by streaming here. 

In-person meetings are held at Council Chambers (516 3rd Ave, Room 1001, Seattle).

Want to do more? Please consider this list of additional tasks:

Educate Your Community. Please get your whole community excited about Doors Open and refer them to the recent Seattle Times article. They will be great advocates for the final vote if we decide to trigger a massive email campaign.

Join the Inspiration League AND Inspire WA’s newsletter. InspirationLeague.org is our political platform where we issue action alerts. The system makes it really easy to send a message to any elected official that represents you. Please also sign up for our newsletter because we’ll have a lot of critical information to share over the next few months.

Share your education sector contacts. We’ve hired Andy Jensen as the Community Organizer for the Education Sector. It’s critical that we demonstrate support from school districts, PTSAs, booster clubs, parents, and students! Email Andy at andyjoe1024@gmail.com with your education contacts and he will bring your folks into our coalition!

Join Inspire WA as a dues-paying partner. Effective advocacy is expensive. In fact, this King County effort is costing us nearly $200,000 in staff, communications, and lobbying expenses. I’m still falling short on our annual fundraising goal, but we need to keep focused on this important objective. Many of you received transformative funding from the state’s Working Washington Round 5 grant and now there’s this big county objective. Advocacy is successful and delivers the support you need! I’m hoping at least 200 cultural businesses will join Inspire Washington to provide us with the resources to secure Doors Open. Partnership dues are affordable and based on organizational budget size. Most pay between $100-250 per year – click here to join!

QUESTIONS?

We imagine you may have lots of questions and we want to bring you up to speed. Join us for a briefing of the Doors Open program and our plan to secure King County approval. To ensure good communications, we will be hosting an Open Office Hour, every Tuesday, 12:30 to 1:30 pm. Click here to register! And feel free to share this invitation with members of your team and community that need more information.