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Advocacy365: San Diego Mayoral Forum
By Amanda Stratton, Manager, Grassroots & Advocacy Outreach

To navigate this slide show, please click on the icons at the bottom. Photo Credits: Matthew Geaman

Last week, we introduced our AIA guide for sponsoring candidate forums. This type of event allows AIA members to hear the views of both candidates on issues that affect the built environment. Now we want to show you a real-life, recent example of how the AIA toolkit helped a local component to pull off an extremely successful forum. Matthew Geaman of AIA San Diego recent organized a mayoral forum for the chapter members. Here is how it went in Matthew’s own words:

AIA San Diego host[ed] a mayoral forum this past Monday, Oct 15th. The mayoral candidates, Congressman Bob Filner and San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio, debated a series of questions that we had collected from Chapter members in advance, and a few questions that were submitted by the audience.

We hosted the debate in Balboa Park. Balboa Park has been the center of a very controversial park planning discussion for the last several years so it was a fitting venue for an AIA event. The debate was moderated by Tom Fudge, a reporter/host from KPBS, our local National Public Radio affiliate.

During the planning of the forum, I followed the recommendations outlined in the AIA Candidates Forum Kit very closely. As a result, our program went off without a hitch (aside from a very late arrival by the Congressman, which was out of our control)!

Now that you have heard a real-life example of how the AIA Candidate Forum guide can help you in the future, make sure that you utilize the guide for your events like this in future election cycles!

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