Running for National Office
Natalie Hildebrand, NJCL Communications Coordinator
This summer, at National JCL convention at Miami University in Ohio, I got the opportunity to run for NJCL Communications Coordinator (abbreviated “CoCo”). The process was fun and rewarding and I am so excited to have been elected to serve on this year’s NJCL board! The first step to run was being approved by California JCL at state convention.
As you may remember, I gave a speech at general assembly at CJCL convention along with the other candidates for office. I also took part in candidate’s open forum, where I was asked questions about the CoCo’s job and why I would be a good fit. Schools then voted either to approve me to run on California’s behalf or not to do so. At the end of California convention, when the new CJCL board members were announced, I also found out that I had been approved by the schools throughout the state to run for national office.
Between state convention and national convention, I had lots of work to do to prepare my campaign. I began thinking about the materials I wanted to hand out to students with information about why I was a strong candidate for CoCo. I created brochures, flyers, posters and tags with information about me.
I only had a $50 budget for campaign materials, though, and had to be sure to keep track of receipts for everything I printed out, bought or used. Another part of my campaign was social media; it is free and is good publicity, so I didn’t need to account for it in my budget.
I planned out an Instagram account that I would make and planned each of the posts I would share with information about my campaign. There is a rule for candidates for national office that they are disqualified on the grounds of pre-campaigning if anyone from outside their state discovers they are running before the second day of national convention. Thus, I had to be sure not to share any information about my campaign online until the commencement of convention.
At convention, there were many campaign events. The first one was on the second day, called the Nominations Committee Meeting. This was the event at which the candidates were first announced. Thus, as per the pre-campaigning rule, I had to make sure that all of the California delegates didn’t share that I was running.
Cali for CoCo: Natalie awaits questions at Meet the Candidates.
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