I’m not your typical politician. About nine years ago, I was fighting to give people the right to know where their food comes from. NH already had a bill to label genetically engineered foods, but no grassroots organization supporting it. I saw the need and took on the challenge of starting a grassroots organization to get in done. I built a grassroots organization that had over 2,000 followers.
In retrospect, I had no idea what I was doing. It is amazing how successful we were: State Reps were calling me, asking me to stop the calls to them!
At that time, I thought politics was too confusing and too time-consuming to keep up with. I thought our elected officials were looking out for us; and that I could trust them, and the people like I have become, to do the right thing for me. But at the executive session for that first bill I worked on, a State Rep said, “I know what my constituents THINK they want; I’m going to vote the way they SHOULD want.” I found out that, while our State Reps are representing my town, some of the ones we have elected are not representing me, nor are they representing many of Salem’s voters.
The more I learned about what was going on in our State Capital, the more involved I became. As I exchanged information with those who were working with me on food safety, I started to learn about other issues that matter to our town and state.