 So again, so for today's event, we're going to be talking about what the California Legislature does and how to get involved. And so this is of course leading up to our biggest advocacy day in the year, which is the Muslim Day at the Capitol, which is usually, we happen in Sacramento and we go there every year and we usually have hundreds, you know, six to 700 people coming, but John, we're going to be doing this virtually. And so this is going to be a great opportunity to to do this online and virtually. This is will be the second year that we're doing this. So now me and Samina are going to take a few minutes to share a little bit about what makes one of the really crucial tactics of engaging our legislators successful, and that is when we are able to go ahead and actually speak with our legislators in meetings. And this is something that, you know, care has been doing for years. And some of you have actually participated in and that's going to be the focus. This is the tactic that we're going to be focusing on today. And, you know, we aren't going to go into everything super in depth. Like Mohammed had said, it's meant to be a very broad overview. We want you to be able to actually, you know, digest this information. And then we can always talk about other things more in depth in future workshops. But as far as this tactic of meeting with legislators, so just to go over some of the basics, there's three general phases that you're talking about, right? So somebody needs to actually coordinate the meeting and schedule it and set it up. And then you actually have the meeting and then you have meeting follow up afterwards, you know, to send your thank yous and to follow up on the discussion. But what we're going to be focusing on is within the actual discussion of the meeting, what should that look like? So if you all, you know, continue participating with care, we generally take care of the scheduling, the follow up, right? But where we really, really rely on community members just like you is in the actual meeting execution. There are several roles that are really important. And that is because we have a pretty big endeavor that we're trying to achieve, you know, in this tactic, which is in that 15 minutes, you know, or sometimes less that we have with this decision maker, we're asking them for their support or opposition of something that is a proposed policy that could become law, and either we support it or we oppose it. And because they are the decision makers and they are going to be taking a vote, we need to check in with them, let them know our perspective and ask them to either, you know, support or oppose. And so in that, you know, you have somebody who is the meeting lead, who's kind of facilitating the conversation, opening it up, you have somebody who's taking notes and you have somebody who is, it could be one person, it could be a couple of people who are really telling the story. And so that's the, that's what we really want to focus on for the rest of this workshop is what is that role of the storyteller. But before I say a little bit more about that, I'm going to actually allow Simina to share some other general tips about making a successful meeting happen. So yeah, I mean, I think basically I think what was really helpful is actually not just helpful, it's crucial is to really know about the issues and to read some of the tips and tools that we have to offer prior to the meeting. And so care will be, you know, sending you information about the bills, about the legislation, whether it be fact sheets, whether it be like a sample script or whatnot. So please like make sure to, you know, look through the emails with care staff, that care staff is sent, you know, with that, that information. And then also with the call in information, which will let you know, okay, who are you speaking with? And when you're, and when you're meeting with them again, you are going to be addressing, well, if you're meeting with staff, you address them by their first name. But when you're meeting with legislators, you're going to be addressing them by their title. So you would say, okay, Senator Skinner or some member Bonta, you don't call them by their first name. So again, you know, we need to keep our, you know, keep ourselves professional and, and make sure that that we address them with the respects. And then, you know, usually most of the meetings that we're going to be having are on Zoom, but sometimes you also have Microsoft Teams, but make sure that your tech is ready to go and that you're logged in. So try to log in early so that, you know, we know that your camera's working, your microphone's working and whatnot. Also, make sure that you look as professional as possible. I'm not, we're not expecting you to wear a tux or anything, but, you know, make sure that, you know, you are, are cleanly dressed and, you know, oftentimes men feel more comfortable with the suit or at least with a button down shirt or a tie. So business or business casual would be really great to have. Make sure that also the location where you're having your call, it's quiet. So there's no like kids banging on their toys or I usually have a problem though, because my cat usually jumps in and Zoom bombs all of my calls. So I'm actually quite surprised that he hasn't yet. But try to keep the place quiet. Make sure that it's well lit. You know, what I end up using is this, this light over here, because without it, it's quite dark. So I have this little light and I think that it's helpful. So yeah, also, you know, make sure that there's like nothing, no clutter in the background. What's great with Zoom and also Microsoft Teams is that they have like a way in order to kind of, you have different backgrounds or to basically, what is it called? Fade out the background. So that's what was really helpful. So meetings generally are about, like they can take anywhere between 15 minutes to a half an hour. So make sure that you see how long the meeting is scheduled for, and that way you could plan to say what you want to say. So, you know, oftentimes people don't look at it and end up going off on like a long tangent and not realizing that wait, we only have 15 minutes for the speech. So let's, or for the meetings, let's just keep it clear and concise. And so, you know, just make sure about the meeting time. It's, you know, and I think that this is really important, especially given that if you have a limited time to speak and you're speaking on something that's very, like emotional or very triggering, I mean, it's just important to know like how much time, but if you have like a longer time than please, by all means, I mean, take that time and really share how this piece of legislation does impact you and impact your community. So again, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to prevent you from taking the time to share that, but again, just knowing how much time you have is really important. So again, you know, I think that these are just really kind of no-brainers, but I think it's just important to remember this that like, you know, smile, like say thank you, be pleasant, you know, because again, what I say is that this is, this might be the first interaction that they're having with a Muslim or the Muslim community. So we always have to put our best foot forward because we are representing the California Muslim community, which is like one million, you know, or more Muslims. So I think it's, it's, I know that's a lot of pressure on your shoulders, but just, you know, to remember that again, we are a representation of them, and so we need to make sure that we behave in that respectful manner. We also need to stay on track and just, and take up just enough time to allow for other people to speak. So, you know, if we're finding ourselves speaking for like 20 minutes and we only have like 10 more minutes left and five other speakers, that's not very helpful. So we want to make sure that we kind of give people like a chance to speak, kind of divide up the roles. So that's really helpful. Also, give enough time for the legislator or the staff to be able to respond to your comments or questions. Oftentimes, like we might have a meeting that people, the community is talking for 29 minutes and you only have one more minute left and we're like, wait, what, what did the legislator think and what were the thoughts on this? So, you know, yeah, so make sure just pay attention to the time. If you forget to mention something, and that's oftentimes happens to me, we could always follow up with them later. So please like mention that to care that, hey, I forgot to mention this, please like, you know, follow up them or, you know, or you can follow up with them as well. So I think, you know, when in doubt, follow your group lead. So we should have, you're going to be having one group leader for each group. And so they're not going to be the ones who are going to be taking over the whole meeting, but they are going to be there to help you and chime in if there's any like technical issues or any tricky questions or any awkward stumbles. So, but again, I have full faith in you. We've been doing this for, you know, so many years and it's been an incredible experience for so many people. So honestly, I truly believe that we're going to have a really great time and we're both going to, it'll be a fulfilling experience for you. And I'm going to pass it over to Elisa. Thank you, Samina. And, you know, Samina and some of our staff have been doing this for so long. And I just want to say that we are really in good hands with our entire team. They're really awesome. And you all as community members have a lot of experience, you know, and as partners, you all have a lot to offer as well. So again, we're in this together and everything that we're going over right now, super quickly and rapid fire, you know, we will continue to review this information time and time again, you know, to encourage more and more people to get involved and just going back to the different roles of what is involved in a meeting. So I want to focus on the role of the storyteller. So again, the lead is going to open the meeting. They're going to actually introduce the bills that, you know, we want to discuss. And then the person who goes next is the storyteller, which again, it might be one person or if you have time, it could be two or even three people. And what they're really going to demonstrate is why do we care about this issue, right? What are the universal values that are implicated in promoting this policy? And what are examples that, you know, different storytellers could bring up, either from their personal lived experience or somebody that they know, someone in their family or friends, or just something from your personal perspective, trying to really show, right, not just telling the legislator, please support this bill or please oppose this bill, because as they say, right, that could have been done over email, right, with the whole purpose of having the space time and sitting down or having the Zoom and talking to people is to share your stories so that they have more, so that their knowledge is, you know, really deep and they have a sense of what would the impact be to the community. And then again, the most important thing at the end is to make sure that you make a clear ask. Make sure that you are saying, can we count on your support, you know, to either vote yes or no? Otherwise, you told the story and there was no, there was no sort of like point of saying, yeah, and based on our story, we are asking you to take an action, right, with your power to vote. So again, this was a lot and we don't want to take up too much time. So I'm going to go ahead and ask Muhammad to get us to the next slide and I'm going to hand it over to one of our esteemed colleagues up in Sacramento, Amir Rashid, who is our government and legislative affairs manager for Care California and what we're going to be doing is Amir is going to be telling us about one of the bills that is the major legislative priority for Care California and we are going to actually be doing a little practice of what we were talking about with storytelling after we learn about this bill and this topic. So Amir, over to you. Awesome. So now I welcome everyone and really awesome to see everyone here and kind of see this audience and see this number of people really interested in engaging in advocacy, right? So I'm really, really excited for what that means for our community and how to see that grow, that number of people grow. As Elisa said, this bill here is going to be kind of one of our primary focuses, one of the bills that we'll be looking at during MDAC and it's something that we are sponsoring this year. So we're kind of leading the effort on in the legislature and helping kind of build the coalition and get that support, make sure the votes are for it. So that's going to be part of why it's in this MDAC capacity. When what we're going to kind of do here and what I'm going to walk through in these bullets is basically what I think is what everyone might want to do any time you're trying to analyze any piece of legislation. So maybe you identify something just in your own time that's federal legislation or a different state bill. I think these are the types of questions and things you want to look forward to really get that full picture of any piece of legislation and so I think for the first part is the why. Like why is someone backing this bill and in this case why are we backing this bill, right? And so what AB 412 would do is create a California Commission on Human Rights. And so this commission would be an independent body that would be able to oversee and report on the status of human rights across California looking at you know how are we operating in human rights and certain department programs that we're running in our schools and in police force all of these different areas and interests where public dollars and public interest is at play and then we'll get to review that and then report on it and say hey legislature we've identified these problems that maybe you want to you know legislate on to fix those problems or mitigate for those human rights concerns or hey department X Y and Z you know we noticed that because of how you were monitoring this particular program this issue arose and this is how you can fix for it and so it'd be a commission of those experts and that's obviously really tied back to kind of our core values in a lot of way right if we're fighting for for human rights if we're an organization that really wants to end things like discrimination right increase equality defeat Islamophobia be anti-racist and all these other things this is you know going to be an incredible vehicle for us to be able to do that advocate through currently in the state of California there's no entity that actually even defines human rights right so we have civil rights which are often tied to our constitutions things of that nature but human rights are often much more expensive and allow us to really get into the nitty gritty of a lot of this anti-hate initiative that we really want to focus on right the next big question is you know that kind of covers I guess the motivation impact the next big question is movement and so something that anyone can look at when they're looking at a bill is you have access to where that bill is at in real time to what that language is currently looking like or what folks are currently voting on all of that is available to you on in California on something known as ledge info and I think someone might be able to drop the link in a little bit to that but ledge info is a public website for folks to access to look at any piece of California legislation including this one right here ab412 and in that space you'll actually be able to identify and see where the bill currently stands and so for example most bills or all bills will have to go through committees to get voted on and you know through that process before they ever end up in the floor and finally voted on and that's where this bill is currently and that's where you'll find all legislation at this stage of the year and this bill is in the committee the assembly committee of accountability and administrative review it's always I always mix up accountability and administrative there but that's what it is and it's kind of the committee that oversees that normal policy so all of the different commissions all the different structures of government you know all these different governance issues are going to be reviewed by that committee likewise if you had a bill that was focused on education it would go to the educational committee and so on and so forth and so knowing where that bill is important because it knows how to focus and who to focus on when you're advocating the next question is you know who's involved who's having a stake in the game and who's having a conversation it's always important to know on any piece of legislation who the sponsors on because most often not always but a lot of the time bills actually start with the sponsor and are then shopped around in the legislature and say you know hey assembly member or hey senator this is an issue that's really important to our community this is a policy that we think can really assist here's the research and the community organizations that support it is this something that you would be able to work on and maybe that community member or that assembly member has a history of working on those issues is familiar with that issue and then that helps move that policy right and so recognizing who to sponsor is means where is this idea really who's really leading that effort right alongside of course the author because at the end of the day the bill is the authors and so the author may decide you know what I'm going to change this bill entirely or I disagree here I disagree there and so whoever's the author of the bill is also incredibly significant as you can imagine because they're the ones really doing making the decisions at the end of the day on what's in the legislation and lastly are all the others and by others I mean who's supporting and who's opposing and so you have a lot of organizations maybe they're not sponsors maybe they're not actively engaged in the coalition but you know that they've supported officially the support of this piece of legislation they'll probably have a reason or analysis as to why and actually maybe even more importantly is who's opposing right who is taking the time to say this cannot happen and taking that energy because that takes a lot of a lot more labor than sending in just a letter and saying I support this effort right so who's opposing and why and developing those arguments give you a good idea of where the bill is at in our case for AB 412 we have no position to the California Cushion Human Rights which is good to know at this point in time our author is majority leader assembly member Eloise Gomez Reyes and as sponsors alongside of us we were actually really grateful to have the western center on long poverty and churla the coalition for human and immigrant rights um oh my gosh now I'm forgetting the L and the A churla is the acronym I work in acronyms now after working with policy for so long um are both co-sponsors with us on this piece of legislation and then as with anything you want to look at potential obstacles and the things like this building a new commission means more money right it's an extra cost right looking at all these different analyses um so I'm gonna stop there I think I went well over my time um I think when we're going again like Samina had mentioned you know we actually ask that people hop on to the zoo at least 15 minutes early when we actually are having these meetings so that we can practice right so um the more you practice the more kind of um confidence you build is our experience and um we're gonna go ahead and start to close out so if we could go to the last slide please for the next slide um but yeah thank you so much everybody for joining again um we really appreciate you kind of um uh you know participating in this sort of experimental uh zoom interactive um that we that we've done today and again we really encourage everybody if you have not if you have not yet signed up for um Muslim Day at the Capitol so um what it is is it's going to be happening virtually it's going to be happening over a week at the end of May after Ramadan well after Ramadan and so um if you haven't signed up and you're not really sure what it's about and you are still thinking about it you can definitely go to carecapitalday.com um and learn more and and get signed up um we would love to have you and that's open to anybody um you know from our community in California it's not restricted to just Muslims um we welcome our friends and allies as well and uh you know we would really love to see you again so um you know we appreciate you taking the time to be with us today and giving us that feedback we're definitely going to be you know using it and um again we're going to be having multiple workshops from different local care offices like ours um and from Care California so please stay tuned for that and if you haven't yet you can sign up for updates um on our website so you can go to ca.care.com um if you are outside of the Bay Area or you can go to care.sfba.com um if you are in the Bay Area and you're not already connected