Volunteer Spotlight: Rochelle Rubin
You will need a good pair of shoes if you are going to keep up with VNP volunteer Rochelle Rubin. As a VNP Field Coordinator, hiker, tennis player, voracious reader, and educator, Rochelle is constantly on her toes. When Rochelle finds time to sit down, she often finds herself COL (Cat on Lap) with her two 3-year old kittens.
VNP field coordinators are a key part of the field teams. They recruit volunteers, both for day-to-day tasks and for leadership roles. Additionally, field coordinators are responsible for training canvassers and making sure they know what to do when they are out in the field. Training is a task that maximizes Rochelle’s skills and years of experience as an educator. Rochelle was a science teacher in Waterford Public Schools for 30 years. Not only did she teach students in the classroom, but she also facilitated staff development for her fellow teachers and coached other science teachers in schools that were struggling.
Rochelle provides support and communication to her volunteers to make things run as smoothly as possible. Before she sends out training materials and modules, Rochelle tests them herself to make sure there are no technical or accessibility issues that could discourage her volunteers and turn them off from the organization.
Part of it is taking care of my volunteers and making sure they feel successful because if they feel successful, then they’ll keep working. As soon as they feel frustrated, you lose them. There’s no better way to lose volunteers than for them to feel either not communicated with or to feel frustrated.
Rochelle’s commitment to supporting her volunteers was inspired by her own experience with VNP on the 2018 Proposal 2 Campaign. At the time, Rochelle was canvassing and working alongside Amy Mindell, who always came prepared and ready to support her team.
She’s an amazing person. Amy was just so organized and really motivated me. She had always had everything ready for us. If you need a rubber band, she had a bag of rubber bands. Whatever you might need, she had it. If you ran out of something, it was there in the trunk of a car. It was always that whole idea of taking care of your volunteers. She always had snacks for us when we came. She felt part of her job was to take care of us. She was a great role model.
After Proposal 2 passed, Rochelle drifted away from VNP for a few years. While she continued to follow the redistricting process and the work that the Commission was doing, Rochelle was passionate about voting rights and being in the field, as opposed to doing committee work. Rochelle returned to VNP after Regional Organizer Paul Rincon asked her and because of the organization’s shift towards voting rights, which she says is connected to ending gerrymandering.
There is nothing more important than voting. The reason I worked on Prop 2 is because gerrymandering made voting irrelevant. Basically because the districts were so gerrymandered in Michigan our votes really didn’t matter and didn’t count. So VNP resonated with me; the whole idea of making sure that our voices are heard.
Rochelle is committed to the organization’s programs and objectives. Her anger with partisan gerrymandering motivated her to join VNP back in 2017. However, it is the structure and management of the organization that keeps her coming back.
What kept me with VNP is that this whole network has been so effective in the way it’s organized. Everybody knows exactly what their role is and what they have to do and it builds together.
While Rochelle gives to other causes, she is very careful about how she spends her time and with what organizations she volunteers. Rochelle finds satisfaction in the type of work that she is doing with VNP and the organization’s focus on the root cause of societal problems.
In terms of my time VNP scratches my itch because it’s something where I feel like to make sure that we get the vote, to make sure that we don’t have gerrymandering is what empowers people to change the system. We have to provide safety nets for people, but what I want to do is try to make sure that people don’t need safety nets.
Through her work as an educator, Rochelle found a purpose and a way to change the system for the better. However, that sense of purpose was upended in 2020 when the pandemic forced schools to shift online and her skills inside a classroom were no longer being utilized. Ultimately, she found a renewed sense of purpose by taking the skills that served her so well in the classroom and applying them to her volunteer work with VNP.
When Covid started, I was feeling the start of depression because I felt like I didn’t have something that was giving me a real purpose at that point. I learned that there are a lot of ways for me to be useful even if I don’t go back into education after Covid is over.
