Our initial discussions began as a group of Alaska neighbors who met over Alaska Twitter back in 2022 and began discussing a vision for a new Alaska Party. 

We hosted out first Zoom chat on July 28, 2022 with 11 strangers with a common goal.

We shared a bit about our own feelings, local issues, and our reasons for gravitating towards this idea of a potential new party.

We had overlap/resonance around the following ideas:

• We’re organized year round
• We organize for the long game
• We create community, have meet ups for people to feel good, find friends
• We embrace transparency with leadership, money, structure
• We find common ground by using intentional communication and looking for shared experience 
• Our plans are Alaska-specific, we pursue policies that resonate with Alaskan issues
• We are bottom up and determine our priorities democratically
• We meet people where they are and listen
• We get started by assessing what other orgs are doing and find gaps, work collaboratively, look to score small wins and build on those in a way that will draw more people to us
• We’re very well organized and have the capacity to train volunteers, build skills, educate voters

We formed a signal chat and then hosted out second conversation in August of 2022 and discussed further:

• We address the grief of losing democracy/climate by building organized community around positive social change
• We are organized and practice/train in solid relationship and communication skills so we can be effective in terms of emergencies / disaster response 
• We fill in organizing gaps and add value to what exists already
• We are action-oriented, our processing leads to action in real life
• We make use of RCV strategically
• We are committed to transparency as our core value
• We are committed to being representative of our communities demographically and we will pause and course correct if we veer from that. We don’t talk for groups that aren’t meaningfully represented in our membership
• We allow for small groups to form around members’ interests with decision making and support from the larger group.
• We are in it for the long haul, we repair relationships and organize for longevity of the group
• We are open to non-hierarchical structures and are engaged in healthy discussion to find the structure that works best for us
• We are committed to course correction and continuous improvement
• Our meetings are a microcosm of what democracy should look like 

Our To-Do’s

• Develop an elevator pitch for what our group is, what are our three main goals/points
• Create a google group for email communication 
• Create a Discord for organizing our conversations & side conversations 
• Shift contact info to private documents to protect personal information 
• Possibly modify our intake survey for phase 2 (i;e. Busy people)
• Work on creating a google spreadsheet for project / subcommittee management- you can recommend a group / project and sign up for ones you’d like to work on

November 2022, the elections came and went and momentum for the project stalled for a bit…