(Note: As we prepared for this issue on the 2008 General Assembly, virginia.organizing asked some VOP staffers to tell us their personal experiences with first visits to the “GA.” These are their stories.)

During my first visit to the General Assembly Building, I remember going to a Senate committee meeting. I was surprised to see committee members strolling around the room, talking to people or eating lunch. The chair called the meeting to order, but most of the members were not in their seats. The chair started talking. It seemed as if no one was paying attention except the people in the audience. This was so perplexing! Legislation was read, the chair called for the vote, action was taken on some legislation that the committee members seemed to have no interest in. There seemed to be one or two pieces of legislation that were more important. For those, committee members took their seats, spoke, voted and then started moving about again. It was clear to me that the main work to influence a bill had happened before the actual committee meeting. I have never forgotten this lesson. — Cathy Woodson

The first time I ever went to the Virginia General Assembly, I organized a carload of leaders from Charlottesville public housing to talk to our legislators. I had no idea what I was doing, but we were taking part in someone’s Lobby Day. So really we just had to show up and find a place to park.

We joined a gathering of people from across the state who were there to talk about affordable housing. We met first in the big church across the street, St. Paul’s Episcopal, to get a pep-talk and a policy briefing. Then we took off, laughing and joking, across the street and up through the doors of the rather imposing General Assembly office building. It took forever to get through the metal detectors, and then we milled around kind of lost in the lobby for a few minutes before we got in line for the elevators.

It turned out neither of our legislators were around when we got there. We had called ahead for appointments, but both of them had subcommittee meetings so we settled for a talk with their Legislative Aides. Emily Couric was our senator at the time; she has since passed on. I remember a few of us stopping her as she went by and getting five minutes to talk about affordable housing. She was nice to us, but didn’t make any commitments. Mitch Van Yahres, our delegate, was another story. We went back by his office that afternoon. He was nice AND made a commitment to vote our way. He gave us some education about the inner workings of the General Assembly, too. — Ben Thacker-Gwaltney

Last year, I went to the General Assembly with two carloads of people from the Shenandoah Valley. One group came from Harrisonburg; three of them were students from James Madison University who had never been to the General Assembly. The other group, from Winchester, also included a couple of “newbies.”

We were there to be part of Latino Lobby Day. The three students had been interns at New Bridges Immigrant Resource Center, and had had a lot of personal contact with immigrants and their issues. All of the other folks worked professionally with immigrants. They wanted to get that experience across to members of the General Assembly. We had a list of Delegates and Senators we wanted to reach from the Shenandoah Valley, and as we went from one to the next, I encouraged the students to speak up and tell the stories they had experienced.

After a while, we ran through our list of legislators. I turned to the students, and asked them where they were from. One was from Ohio, which didn’t do us much good. But it turned out that one of the others was from the district of Delegate Morgan Griffith, the Majority Floor Leader of the House. I explained to her how important Delegate Griffith was, and asked her if she would be willing to try to meet with the Delegate or his staff.

She was willing, and we headed for Delegate Griffith’s office. I first visited the General Assembly in 1981, and thought I knew it well, but we soon found ourselves in an “inner sanctum” area where I had never been. We told the administrative assistants that guarded the doors that one of us was a constituent of Delegate Griffith, and found ourselves going past various lobbyists who looked at us enviously. When we reached Delegate Griffith’s aide, he quizzed the student. When she answered “correctly” what high school she had attended, and where her parents lived, he immediately warmed up, and listened carefully to what she had to say. Of course, she had to do most of the talking for all of us. The aide was polite to the rest of us, but we all knew he never would have met with us if one of us had not been a constituent. Did we change his mind? Probably not. But at least he could no longer say that our concerns were not those of his constituents. And one of his constituents had learned who Delegate Griffith was and what kind of power he had in that inner sanctum. — Larry Yates

I first descended upon the General Assembly about three and a half years ago at age 19. Unusually dressed-up in wool pants and a tie, I had left the comforts of campus life for Equality Virginia’s Lobby Day. Although I had been a lesbian activist for a couple of years, I had never spoken to a non-student about my experiences, much less gay and lesbian issues. I was nervous in a new setting, yet remained confident because regardless of to whom I was speaking, my message remained the same: I am who I am and deserve to be treated fairly. Even an older, powerful, legislator could not tell me otherwise.

My most memorable experience from that day was with the legislative aide for a conservative Republican who represented the district in which I was raised in Fairfax. I never realized how difficult it was to find and speak to a delegate until we waited a half-hour for him after our scheduled appointment. I walked in intending to share that I was a long-time constituent with family still in Fairfax concerned with his solidly anti-gay record. From there, his aide spent the next 10 minutes explaining why he thought the gay and lesbian movement was not legitimate — explaining that gays and lesbians do not demand equal rights in other parts of the world and have not done so in America until recently. We spent the remaining 10 minutes arguing back-and-forth about gay/lesbian identities, and how the movement developed over time. When it was clear that we were getting nowhere, I ended the conversation and bolted out the door.

Three years later such a conversation probably would not take place. So much has happened on the national and state levels with gay rights that an aide would probably know better than to question why I was there and instead, would focus on the issues. Since, I have learned more about the “art of lobbying” and more importantly, my rights as a constituent. I have the right to be heard, the right to be taken seriously, the right to stake out issues which concern me, and the right to expect a legislator/aide to have an informed conversation about my concerns. I would never have such a demoralizing conversation now. But I would not have learned all of the ways that conversation would have been better if I had not returned back each year. They expect me back each year, always with a few new friends. — Richael Faithful

One of my more memorable trips to the General Assembly actually has more to do with what happened once we returned home. We were very early on in the one-to-one and chapter building phase with one of our local chapters in 2003-2004. A couple of the women leading some of that effort agreed to go to Richmond to meet with our local legislators about VOP’s statewide issues that year. These two women had been active in local government and efforts for many years, but had not been to see the General Assembly in action before.

We struck out in the morning. We had set up visits with two local delegates and the local senator, but none of them showed up. Instead we had to settle for short conversations with their aides, and had felt very hurried (and not very listened to) in each of them. We decided to sit in the gallery for part of the main session of the day, and then to sit in on a Senate Commerce and Labor Committee hearing dealing with minimum wage. This was the first such committee hearing for all three of us.

We walked in and the room was already almost full. A few minutes later, with people standing in the aisles because there were no seats, the hearing began. As people got up to speak for or against an increase in the minimum wage, my companions (who had been quiet most of the day) began to react to what each person was saying. They’d say, “She’s exactly right,” or “that guy has no idea what it’s like to live on $5.15 an hour.” They really got lively when the senators started responding. One Senator from Northern Virginia in particular said he agreed completely with raising the minimum wage, but then he voted to pass by the bill indefinitely. The bill was effectively killed 12-2 even though 90 percent of the testimony in a packed room was in favor of it.

We walked out of the room disappointed, but in a different mind frame — these two women were fired up. On the hour-long ride home we talked nonstop about how a group of senators could listen for over an hour to overwhelmingly favorable testimony about raising the minimum wage, and then vote to do nothing. We talked about power and how that works, and the similarities between legislators locally and on the statewide level. Most importantly, over the course of the next several months, these two women used what they had seen at the General Assembly as fuel and did countless one-to-ones to set up their chapter. They realized that in order to change what we saw that day in the capital, we had to build power for all people across the state, starting in their own community. — Brian Johns