Vote down the ballot.
Yes, the presidency is important.
Yes, the governor is important.
But, again, in your day-to-day, the people that matter the most
are those that are running for these most local of races.
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My name is Charisse Davis.
I am on the Cobb County School Board.
And I'm a mom.
No, I'm glad that you do say bye,
so your teacher doesn't think she's in a class by herself.
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I never, in a million years, thought I would run for office.
I was a kindergarten teacher and a media specialist,
and it's just not something we typically do.
When I did look at our school board,
we had one woman on the board.
She was not running again.
And I would be the only woman, the only mom
on the school board.
And so, you know, while it was something I never thought
I'd do in a million years, I said yes,
and then just kind of covered my eyes
and just went right into it.
It was a pretty wild idea, though.
Even people that love me dearly just thought, oh, wow,
that's cute, you know, like, this is--
you know, you can't win this race against this person
that's been there eight years.
It turned out the voting district had changed so much
over the years, but nobody ever ran against them
just to even test it out.
And so the demographics were there.
The people, the voters were there.
OK.
Well, I'll take a closer look.
I think I went into this just thinking about how
representation matters.
It really is just that simple.
We know that if you look around at a PTA meeting,
you're going to see a lot of moms,
and to think that that perspective
would not be on a school board just did not seem right.
And there's a reason why I won.
And people wanted to see change, and they
expect me to bring that change.
I did tell him if he's coming back to school--
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I think, a lot of times, we have looked at elected officials
and just thought that these doors were not open to us,
that there's a reason why certain people keep winning.
And while we thought that might have
had to do with the voters and the voting bloc,
it's really not true.
It's simply because, a lot of times, no one else
is even running for these seats.
We are completely dismantling that and that notion of who
should be running for office.
Representation was very important to me.
It's something that, when I go and visit kids,
it is just awesome, because the kids--
you know, I will put a picture up of the entire board,
and, inevitably, there's always a young girl
who raises her hand to point out that I'm
the only girl on the board.
What happens, a lot of times, is that when that diversity is not
reflected in our leadership, a lot
of topics that affect large groups of people
don't even get discussed.
I think just that perspective of making sure
that we're not leaving people behind
has been really important.
And we see it also with our city council, our representatives
at the state level.
You know, who is speaking for the community?
Hi, neighbors.
My name is Charisse Davis.
I'm on the school board, so we can talk
about what you guys are doing.
What we know is that at the most local level, that
is what influences your day-to-day the most,
and so it's really important that we
put just as much energy and effort
into these local elections.
So we're filling out postcards for Lindsay Terrebonne.
She is running for Cobb County School Board, District 7.
For us to be coming into this next election
with three women running for our school board seats,
I'd like to think, you know, my race
had something to do with that.
And that is pretty incredible.
In order to be the most effective--
We know that we have leaders in this country
who don't want you to vote.
They don't want you to.
And so, for me, that makes me do everything I need to do
to make sure that I do vote.
Voting is a matter of life or death.
We are at a time where we are seeing the largest
movement for racial justice.
We are in the middle of what we hope is
a once in a 100-year pandemic.
And we have seen how a lack of leadership
has impacted us and the people that we love.
And so voting is really that important.
It is the most powerful thing that we can do.
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