The Cannabis Defense Coalition is a member-based volunteer organization. We have many volunteer opportunities. This page lists a few of them. If you are a CDC volunteer, remember to track your hours, as potential donors understand that volunteer labor is the same as money.
Community service hours
All volunteer service for the Cannabis Defense Coalition is applicable to court-mandated community service hours. Not only will we sign off on your community service, we'll do it on pot leaf letterhead! Click here to print community service form.
The main way to gain hours is court observation. A court session typically lasts 2-3 hours, plus travel time. If you are working for court-mandated community service hours, please contact us first at 888-208-5332 or email info@cdc.coop.
Legal observer
Our core activism is legal observation in courtrooms throughout the state. It is our goal to track medical marijuana related cases, and have at least one CDC volunteer in attendance to bear witness. We are tracking medical marijuana cases in Kitsap, Pierce, King and Snohomish counties. We have court dates about once per week.
We have identified donors willing to reimburse gas money, if that is helpful to a potential legal observer. Please contact us if you can help with our most important activism.
Media distributor
We make posters, flyers, and other materials. We need to distribute these across the state cheaply and effectively. We seek a team of volunteers in different cities and regions of the state, who can distribute flyers and posters on short notice.
Writer and editor
Much of our work is written. One of our goals is to inform the public, and to do that we must distill complex situations into something transferable (written), understandable (well written), and digestable (well written and short). We produce press releases, web site content, email alerts, position papers, official correspondence, etc.
Fundraiser
The CDC is an organization comprised of fundraisers. Every single CDC member is a fundraiser simply by paying their membership dues. We recognize the importance of money (and we strive to recognize its limitations), and we intend to raise a fair amount of it. We believe there is enough money in this state, that there are enough willing donors, to accomplish any project we set our mind to.
Translator
It is our desire to translate our materials into languages spoken widely in Washington State. First and foremost, we intend to support spanish. The state's web site supports these additional languages: russian, chinese, vietnamese, korean, and cambodian. King County Elections seems to also support laotian.
Drupal plumber
We run a handful of open source applications, including Drupal, MediaWiki, and Mailman. If you have moderate administrative knowledge of these applications, we would love your help. We'd especially love someone who could customize the "theme" or "skin" of our web site, perhaps interfacing with a graphic designer who would handle the art work.
Social networker
If our goal is to bear witness and inform others about what it is we have seen, we must be especially adept at the latter part of the equation -- informing others. If you can work facebook, myspace, digg, and other social networking tools, you can be a large part of that. We'd love to give you our passwords! :)
Facilitator / NVC trainer
Our community is particularly strong-willed and independent, and we recognize that it is often our personalities, not our politics, that keep us apart and create conflict. We seek a facilitator trained in the principals of Nonviolent Communication to guide us in our meetings, communications, etc.
