The power of writing a letter to a stranger this month

Join me and tens of thousands of people writing letters respectfully encouraging folks to vote

The other day, me and two of my housemates spent an hour handwriting letters to strangers. I wrote to Maya and Rocky and Ananda. To Moses and Jason and Antoinette. Sometimes I added a little smiley face or sun-burst, other times not. When addressing an envelope to Florida, I sealed it with a silent prayer, imagining this human safe, dry, warm. We listened to slow, transparent Mozart, then to sacred polyphony, letting the letters bathe in beautiful sound. 

Our stack is now about 4 inches high. That’s 120 souls across the country that we’ve written to. We are part of a beautiful, simple, effective voter mobilization effort, encouraging low-propensity voters to share their voice in the upcoming election.

Envelopes we prepared, asking folks to participate in democracy

I have always believed that the human hand has unique power to heal, to reach, to connect. My own heartfelt words written in my own hand, carries the tint of my spirit. My name, signed with sincere wellwishes, brings a bit of me into someone’s home. I am sending a message to Maya, to Moses, in which I’m risking sharing a little bit about myself (why I vote), and respectfully inviting them to step into a new identity: the one who participates, the voter. 

Since 2017 almost a quarter of a million people have done this. With our chicken-scratch salutations, our inkpen flourishes and curlicues, our occasional exclamation marks, we are weaving a kind, crisscrossing net, one American to another.

And, according to extremely sound research, the result is that thousands of people who previously hadn’t planned on voting, will vote next month. Data from randomized controlled trials is pretty compelling for a research nerd like me.¹

But data (and here’s more from 2020) is only one part of the story. I believe that whether or not the people I write to vote, there is some meaning in what I am doing. I am choosing this as an act of magical activism, a choice to send a little package of positivity from my kitchen table, to the kitchen table of each of these people I will never meet. 

Change theorist Otto Scharmer has said that the success of a change effort depends on the inner place from which we operate. As I write these letters, I attempt to attend to that inner place, reminding myself to focus on qualities of humility, kindness, and possibility. I’m not always successful — sometimes I’m distracted, rushed — but I keep returning to my intent. If you join me in writing letters, I invite you to do the same: to allow the energy of your heart to flow through your hands, and to use this as a simple excuse to spread lovingkindness across our land.  

The next election is four weeks away. How about spending a few hours between now and then preparing envelopes to add to the beautiful tsunami that will take place on October 29th?

Ideas for how to participate in voter mobilization this month

1. Once you register, think about when is the best time for you to write. Some people prefer to write 3-5 letters each morning, others prefer to hang with family friends and write 20 letters once a week. Pick a cadence that is actually doable.

2. Try inviting one or two people to join you — either you can get together (online or off) to write, or help each other stay accountable by regularly texting your prepared-envelope counts to each other. You could forward this post to someone and start the ball rolling!

3. Create a beautiful environment for writing! Play your favorite music; heck, why not light a candle? You know what I’ll be playing…

4. You can write even if you’re a kid, or even if you’re below the voting age. Just adapt the letter-writing template (“I vote because…” turns into “I would vote if I were 18, because…”). Parents, you can use letter-writing as a concrete way to spark family conversations about participatory democracy.

5. To make it easier, Vote Forward will send you a whole kit, complete with printed letters, stamps, and envelopes — all the supplies you need!

6. If you don’t have time to write letters, you can also support Vote Forward with a financial donation.

7. Writing letters for voter mobilization is a complex contagion. If you’re interested in geeking out on change-making, consider ways you might apply Damon Centola’s groundbreaking thinking on how these kinds of behaviors spread, to this context. (I did, and that’s why I wrote this post.)

1. I am also very proud of the excellent pro-bono qualitative research that my colleagues at AnswerLab have done on behalf of Vote Forward, and the voter mobilization letter-writing we do as a company.