Jonathan Cox for Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg Bridgend and the Vale

Every Friday evening from 18:30 to 19:30 I’ll be hosting a ‘Deeds not Words’ Learning, Strategy and Action Session for Labour Party members. The clue is in the name – this is not a talking shop. It’s designed to get us operating as an active campaigning Constituency Labour Party. Here’s what we’ll be doing:

• Introduction Sessions for New Activists – you’ll get a warm welcome, training and support if being a Labour Party activist is new for you;
• Community Connection Mapping – fun sessions building our intelligence on influential communities and leaders across Bridgend and the Vale;
• Mobilising your Branch – we need to get local branches increasing their number of active members – in this session you’ll learn how to do that;
• Resisting the Far Right – drawing on experienced organisations and campaigners from the UK and Europe who have experience of resisting the far right;
• Reaching Beyond Our Base – our voter identification and turnout models encourage us to focus on a narrowing group of voters who are warm to us. There are large numbers of ex-Labour voters who we have stopped engaging. Deep canvassing techniques can help us reach beyond our base;
• How to Win in a Closed List Proportional System – we are moving towards a European-style proportional representation system and politics, so we should learn from sister parties who have decades of experience of this electoral system;
• Community Organising in the Labour Party – there have been several community organising experiments in the Labour Party. What can we learn about what works, and what doesn’t?;
• How to run a Voter Registration campaign – with Automatic Voter Registration not likely to kick in ahead of May, and many new voters, how do we run effective voter registration campaigns that get people election-ready?;
• How to run a Living Wage campaign – we need to show rather than tell voters our commitment to fighting low pay, so how do we do that?