Jesse Gottschalk, a rising senior at Swarthmore who’s from Charlottesville, hadn’t planned on working for a campaign this summer. He was the president of his school’s Barack Obama campaign and came away wanting to learn more this summer than what he thought a political race could teach him—he wanted to live in rural Virginia and work for a nonprofit.
“I really get the feel for what college students want, a lot of what general organizing is like, but I realized I had no grasp of local issues,” Gottschalk says. “I had no grasp of what really motivates people who aren’t surrounded by academia.”
But here he is on a Thursday afternoon in June with a Tom Perriello for Congress button, finishing up a day of volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity as part of Perriello’s innovative "tithing" initiative. Perriello, a Democrat running against Virgil Goode, has pledged that 10 percent of his campaign staff time will go to volunteer projects in Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District, which stretches from Danville to Charlottesville. On June 19, about a dozen college students who have volunteered for Perriello this summer are helping install drywall and shovel gravel for two Habitat for Humanity projects in Charlottesville.
“People are impressed,” says Jessica Barba, Perriello’s communications director, about the tithing program, which has already involved work at soup kitchens, senior homes and domestic violence shelters across the district. “On a campaign, the most important thing is time. And the fact that we’re giving our time to the community, it shows that we’re not just talking about this, we’re really doing it.”
Gottschalk, despite his reservations about working on a campaign, was so impressed by Perriello’s background fighting genocide in Africa and the way he talked about issues that he joined up for Perriello’s Common Good Summer Program. He’s staying in Bedford for the summer, fulfilling his wish to live in rural Virginia.
“It’s as much about living in the community as it is about doing the phone banking and the canvassing,” Gottschalk says. “There’s no better way to get in touch with what a community needs than by working with the organizations that address those needs.”
Earlier that day, the Perriello campaign received good news: The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has moved his seat into the “emerging races” category. That leaves Perriello one step away from qualifying for the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” program, which would provide him with “financial, communications and strategic support.” In 2006, that program meant $404,000 on average for the 56 campaigns that qualified.
The label is official recognition of the progress the Perriello campaign has made, outbattling Goode in several quarters of fundraising and setting up six offices, located in Charlottesville, Danville, Bedford, Farmville, Smith Mountain Lake and Martinsville. Perriello recently released his first ad, designed for Christian radio stations—a way to appeal to religious voters who weren’t swept away by Al Weed, Goode’s challenger in 2004 and 2006.
To be sure, Perriello still faces an uphill battle against an incumbent who has held the office since 1997 and who beat Weed by 19 percentage points in 2006. But regardless of how the race turns out, Gottschalk hopes that the tithing program can inspire a new era of politicking.
“It’s not just that it’s a really cool idea that will get a lot of attention,” he says. He points to the millions of dollars that go to TV ads and campaign staffing. “It’s just a very self-contained thing. So I’m kind of inspired by this hopeful image that someday people can look forward to election years as the year that people don’t just talk about civic engagement because they’re people running for office, they actually get involved.”
