Deborah Cox, Field Representative, California State Assemblyman Bill Quirk’s Office
Video Transcript
A field representative is a person that that is in assembly members district office. Assemblymen always has two different offices, one up in Sacramento and that’s where most of all the legislation work takes place and then at the same time they have an office here in the district which is where they’re from and where the constituents are. You need a district office because when he’s doing his job, as in session, they are in Sacramento most of the year, while all the people that elected them are back down in the district. So a field officer represents this assembly member when he is unable to be in the district. How I got where I am today is I worked in the corporate world for many years. My son came along later in life than some of us. I stay I decided to stay home to raise my son but while I was doing that- I had- I needed to engage myself and in some other works and projects and I ended up doing a lot of community work. And in particular working with the school district’s ran 3 campaigns as as not the school district they have to get an a person that’s not in the district to run the campaigns and I ran three different campaigns for a local school district. And at the end of the last campaign I ran I met the woman who was the district representative for the assemblyman coming in and we connected.
Damn I said you know this is something I’m very interested in and that’s how I ended up in the job. So it’s through all the other community work and actually being involved in local campaigns. I do have an interesting role in that I wear two hats quite often as being a field rep as well as being elected city council member. I actually started working for the assembly member in 2012 and had kind of no notion of necessarily becoming a politician myself. In and in my case there is no overlap in the in the district so in other words my constituents in San Leandro are not my constituents in my day job so there’s it makes it a clear and there’s no conflict. Things we do there’s constant overlap like each city has transportation, city has housing, city has, you know, all the local concerns where that actually are are very affected by what happens at the state level. And so for me, this has been a great opportunity to actually understand and be a part of both sides of it. And it really does help me as a local city council member. A lot to be sitting in meetings at a state level that give me understanding of things we can do in in our city.
The best piece of advice I could give to go out and get engaged and get involved and at your local level because change happens an awful lot in cities. That that’s really where a lot can get done is right at your city level. So I would say just in your own backyard and your hometown and maybe if you’re not going to go back to your hometown, if you’re in school you can do that even at you know if you’re at UC Santa Barbara or something, get involved in local politics. And it’s very easy to find because candidates are always looking for volunteers to help on the campaign and that’s the way to start to learn about what does this mean and how do you get involved, how do you start. Understand that while it’s frustrating, you might not be able to make a change very quickly. But if you if you hang in and really work and try to be involved, you can you can be part of the change that you want to see!
