On the Job

The following is a brief account of what exactly it is I do at my place of work. It was my attempt to present it in the least partisan way possible, but I’m afraid I have likely failed. Anyway, here it is:

Monday thru Friday I am an intern from 9:30 to 6:00 with the Eleison Group. Our group also helps oversee the development of a non-profit organization, the American Values Network. You can click on those links to learn more about the groups themselves. Eleison is a political consulting firm specializing in progressive faith outreach. We are beginning to work with a few congressional offices to prepare for the 2012 elections, and we also work with a number of different congressmen on both sides of the aisle on specific projects, such as climate change and the gulf oil spill.

The American Values Network (AVN) has specifically directed its efforts at climate change, healthcare, and nuclear security over the last few years. AVN teamed with a coalition of pastors and army veterans in 2010 to help encourage the passage of the New Start treaty. Currently, AVN is working with veterans in the Los Angeles area on a lawsuit against the city (land was donated to care for homeless vets and it has been misused and turned into other facilities, leaving the vets to sleep on the street in front of the property).

What exactly do I do? For both groups I do a lot of social media work. I was in charge of creating and maintaining the facebook spacepage for the conference the AVN partners are attending this weekend. I made a DVD of AVN’s projects for this conference. I have also been assigned the task of compiling facebook and tweeter (twitter) profile accounts for media relations in a specific state in which we are about to sponsor a candidate (not sure if I am allowed to name the state yet?).

Perhaps more interesting is all the emails I get to respond to after we put out videos and blog posts. Some are nice and thank us for our work, many ask questions about how we approach certain issues (what our stance is), and some are mean, nasty, and explicit. I’ve also written a couple of blog posts, but those mostly just ask for donations and are a bunch of fluff language.

Anyway, here is a video AVN recently put out about the doctrine put forth by Ayn Rand. We’ve received quite a few responses, both positive (donations) and negative, and a couple days ago Glenn Beck, a FoxNews host, attacked our video on his radio show (and then after listening to our ad changed his view point on Ayn Rand). Thus, we have had an even busier couple of days. That article, by the way, is by my boss, Eric Sapp. Here’s the video – I won’t go into what it is intended to mean as there has been plenty of discussion already, in the office, on youtube, and around the blogosphere.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TxCWbTqz9s&feature=player_embedded

I suspect that after this conference at which AVN has a panel most of my work will turn to Eleison stuff. Still, it has been interesting doing this much with a non-profit organization and learning how non-profits work.

That’s all I got for now. Feel free to email me questions for clarification or whatever: jpeterson@eleisongroup.com. I’ll probably post again pretty soon (maybe this afternoon/evening?) as my dad has been in town for the last couple days so I should probably report on that. Also, given the number of links in this post, I’m not putting in pictures (except one). Plus I haven’t uploaded them from my phone yet.

Hallstatt, Austria.  Katie Mixon (yeah, this it is a little annoying having to differentiate between the two) and I went through a couple of photo albums last night just looking at pictures.  I miss Europe a little bit.