With diligence, you can find out about town hall meetings or other public forums that your members of Congress are planning in your area, during the August Congressional recess.
Seven tips:
Go to Congress member’s website, where they may announce upcoming meetings through RSS Feeds, Press releases, Announcements. The Congressional websites will typically be updated as often as every day. There may be nothing on Monday, but there may be something on Tuesday announcing a meeting taking place on Wednesday. The announcements are often on short notice, as short as the day before. We recommend that you look at the website of your member of Congress daily and then share the information with your network (via e-mails or phone calls) and encourage people to come to the meeting and speak about Peace for Iraq.
Sign up now for Congress members’ e-mail updates. You can do it through their websites. All members of Congress have this available. They do not necessarily announce meetings in e-mail updates, but some members of Congress may.
Another avenue of finding out about meetings and forums is to sign up with a political party’s e-mail list, whether Republican or Democrat. Congress members often send announcements to those lists because they usually want supportive people at the meetings.
Of course meetings/forums are frequently announced in newspapers, but, sometimes only a day or two prior to the event. You will have to search for the information. It may be more prominently displayed in small town papers, less in regional papers or large city papers.
The most direct way is to call one of the local offices of your member of Congress (the district office). They may not tell you about tentative meetings, only about scheduled meetings. Once again, you will need to call frequently, whether that is once a week or two or three times a week. Call the staffers frequently, since they often get updates at the last minute as well. These events are usually handled by schedulers and other staffers and that information don’t always get to the other staffers.
We can’t emphasize enough, that meetings, formal or informal, are often only announced on short notice. Therefore you will have to be diligent in finding out when they are happening.
Once you know about a meeting, share the information widely and encourage others to attend and talk about Peace for Iraq.