I knocked on hundreds of doors last summer. Here’s what I learned.

In the summer of 2025, I received Richmond Guarantee funding to support an internship with a statewide political campaign in Virginia. The position meant knocking on doors and making hundreds of calls per week to potential voters and dedicated volunteers. A Minnesota native, I found myself thrust not only into the unrelenting Virginia heat and humidity, but a tradition of off-year elections that made stirring up civic enthusiasm a challenge in and of itself.

By late June, though, I was accustomed to the rhythm of grassroots organizing. Every week, my supervisor would “cut turf,” or map out a section of a neighborhood to knock. It being my first time in Richmond with a car, I spent quite a bit of time those first few weeks just getting a lay of the land, learning street names, and getting some parking tickets.

Making my quota of phone calls in the morning meant I’d be out in the peak heat of mid-afternoon to knock on doors, constantly battling the humidity that had me in a perpetual state of sweat. For those who haven’t canvassed, it’s pretty typical to ring 10 doorbells before someone finally answers — usually peeking out from behind the screen door with a suspicion you’re selling something — and you get to give your spiel.

For this campaign, “What do you like about living in this neighborhood?” was the first thing I’d ask. It seemed to disarm a lot of folks, and as an introvert myself, asking it didn’t fill me with too much dread.

“I’m close to work,” or, “The people are really friendly,” were the typical answers. From there, I’d ask either what they did for work or why they decided to move here, mostly out of curiosity. Then, I’d ask what they didn’t like so much. This usually gave people more pause.

I remember one woman in particular, a young mom, who said the nearby public school her kids attended was short-staffed and lacked funding. My training taught me that at this point I should pitch my stats about my candidate and her record on improving education resources, all of which were true and, to me, certainly compelling. But instead, I asked what wasn’t working.

Maybe I was just making the most of the shade of her front porch, but the two of us ended up chatting for over half an hour about the public school system in Richmond, and what my experience was like back home in Minnesota. While we leaned against the doorway, her kids crept out to weave through our legs and drive toy cars across the welcome mat.

Finally, she asked who I was campaigning for. When I passed the literature from my clipboard with my candidate’s platform, she laughed a bit. “You know, I don’t normally vote that way, but you’re doing some good work here.”

I couldn’t help but smile too. We had made a genuine connection, and whether she ended up voting my way or not, we came away knowing a bit more about each other and being better for it.

It was because of conversations like these, under other covered porches, at townhall meetings, or postcard parties across the city of Richmond, that I started to feel like an actual member of the community — not just a student or temporary campaign staffer but someone with a vested interest in making it a better place to live.

When I first told people what I was doing over the summer, I got quite a few empathetic sighs. “Well, that sure is important work right now,” they’d say while sucking through their teeth. In other words, glad it’s you and not me. But this internship, one of three I’ve had in Richmond since I started at UR, nurtured a budding passion for talking to people about how government can work better for them.

Whether meeting with constituents in a delegate’s office at the Virginia General Assembly or assisting with casework from the district office of a U.S. House member, it has been the personal conversations and work that isn’t inherently partisan that have spurred me on and sustained a healthy level of optimism in the democratic process.

Particularly when phrases like “productive dialogue” try to capture aspirations that feel exhaustingly out of reach, it’s reasonable to question what it sounds like, or how it even starts. With what limited experience I have, these conversations seem to begin with things that have nothing to do with civics at all.

As an intern at the General Assembly, I was introduced to the idea that progress in politics is best achieved through politeness and genuine relationships outside of the chamber, where stretching a hand across the aisle isn’t just a strategy reserved for close votes, but for everyday business. While some say that this tradition has lost its currency in the past few decades, I’ve seen it as a model for productive conversations about the very problems public policy attempts to solve.

If I had shown up at every door with a pitch that didn’t change based on who answered or what they said, I would have struggled to break through, let alone been able to hear about the genuine issues people were facing, particularly those that couldn’t be solved in one election cycle.

Even though it was a feverish sprint toward November 4th, with every voting metric hand-recorded and meticulously analyzed, I tried to keep sight of why I took this role to begin with.

It wasn’t to change people’s politics (I’ve already learned that it’s a fool’s errand) or even to start a career in campaigns — I’m still open to a lot of career paths. Instead, I think I wanted to prove to myself, and maybe anyone else feeling equally wary of the state of our civic discourse, that there was still the potential for engagement without compromising our humanity.

Sure enough, in these everyday relationships, under porch lights and across kitchen tables, the slow, sincere work of building trust and mutual respect seems to begin. Here, far from rigid agendas and stump speeches, lies the chance to foster a vibrant, resilient democracy — one conversation at a time.