Judy Cyprian and her partner, Tom Kelly, live on a remote dirt road in Plainfield. There are lovely meadows, a pond, a tidy gated garden. In this idyllic setting it would be easy to check out and leave the mess people are making of the world for others to straighten out.
But every month a dozen people gather at their house to do precisely the opposite.
“There’s food and wine,” Cyprian says, “and then we vent! We talk politics and everybody gripes. And then we talk about who the new Giving Circle recipient is. Brook Nadell is the Giving Circle person for Lean Left, and every month she’ll send all of the Giving Circles information.”
Cyprian and her monthly guests, plus perhaps 60 others who maintain contact through email, constitute a modest but steadfast rural cohort known as Spruce Mountain Lean Left. They formed when one of their members, Betsy Allen, was asked by August Burns, a founding member of Lean Left Vermont, whether she would be interested in starting a Giving Circle in Plainfield.
“Then Betsy asked me,” says Cyprian, “and I said sure. I mean, it was to do something! To stop sitting around and complaining. I would go to rallies and stuff, but donating money is political action!”
The Plainfield group has bought into Lean Left’s conviction that Vermont and the nation will more fully recover and protect democracy if swing-state community groups can nudge their states toward the blue. Giving Circle recipients are selected largely for their potential to do that.
“No one asks how much they’re giving,” Cyprian says. “The money is pooled, and it speaks for all of us.”
Pick up the phone
Once in Lean Left Vermont’s orbit, Cyprian and a few others from Spruce Mountain took the next, daunting step. They started phone banking. She’s done it about 15 times.
“You have to learn to do it,” says Cyprian, “and Lean Left is really supportive. I had sessions with Rebecca [Davison] and she’d tell me, ‘Press this button, and go here, and look at this, and press this button,’ until I got it.”
The platforms for phone banking vary in terms of how much information they provide about call recipients. “Also,” Cyprian says, “you follow a script; you can obviously tweak it so it’s comfortable. And you usually answer some questions.”
You have to get used to it, Cyprian says. “You’re calling someone in Virginia, and asking, like, ‘Hi, I’m just curious if you know what’s happening in your state about Medicaid. Or Medicare.”
Sometimes, though, you strike gold.
“I remember this conversation with a guy in Wisconsin. It came up that I was from Vermont and I was like, uh-oh. But he says. ‘Thank you so much for doing this work!’”
Cyprian has spread her wings even further with Lean Left, traveling to New Hampshire with Davison to knock on doors.
“State boundary lines mean nothing to political waves,” Davison says. “They can flow right over the river to us. That’s why New Hampshire is so important.”
It’s enough to drive the Spruce Mountaineers out of their quiet rural dens. Recent right-wing victories on voting redistricting knocked Judy Cyprian for a loop.
“This has to stop!” she insists. “Congress isn’t doing anything. Something has to change. And who’s gonna do it?
“Me.”
Then, once a month, “me” becomes “us.”
