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Seventeen doesn't seem like a very big number, particularly in context of the 1,400 or so people who will attend YearlyKos this week. But there is an inspiring story behind 17 of the bloggers who will descend on Chicago starting today, and given the conversations about diversity in the blogosphere that we've been having here, I thought it was worth spreading around a little more.
Oakland blogger Paul Delehanty, who writes as kid oakland on Daily Kos and founded Blogs United, began organizing regional caucuses for the 2007 YearlyKos Convention when he ran into many bloggers who would bring great regional, gender, ethnic and economic diversity to the convention, but who could simply not afford to go, or just weren't connected to the event. We all know that YearlyKos Las Vegas was not as diverse as it could have been, and Paul set out this year to begin changing that. He teamed up with Howie Klein and Vicki Cosgrove, and on a very short timeframe (about 4 weeks), they designed and executed a matching grant program that could help send bloggers-in-need to Chicago. With generous support from the Daily Kos community, they ended up raising more than $8,000 in donations of conference registrations, airline miles and travel cash for a total of 17 bloggers from around the country, all of whom will add voices and perspectives that have historically been underrepresented in this space.
There is a simple but important lesson here, about reaching out, and about recognizing a need and taking the initiative to ask for something. Paul asked these bloggers to come to the convention, to share their perspective and take back what they learned, and challenged them to raise funds from their own communities to help them get there. And he asked us in the rest of the progressive blogosphere to do what we could to support them. In the end, we all did it together, which is just how it should be. This is exemplary of the kind of work that goes into building successful multi-racial coalitions, which we have also talked a lot about here, especially how we can do more of it in the world of political blogging.
I want to introduce you to three of these bloggers, who are a good representation of the new faces we will have at YearlyKos thanks to this effort, and whose stories represent different aspects of the work we need to do in building our winning progressive coalition. See the extended entry for more, and a complete linky list of the grantees, who are calling themselves "The Chicago 17." They are all bloggers doing some amazing things, who would never have made it to YearlyKos otherwise.
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