I won’t kid you, Democratic Fashion Institute (DFI)
began as a off the cuff joke I made in 2004. I was commenting on Blog
for Democracy and I started to refer to my organization as DFI.
2004
was a big year for Georgia politically and for me personally. Activism,
political awareness, and Democratic Party dis-organization all collided
and it has never been the same for me since. I met people that year who
I can’t image how I did without them before. Meet ups, start up
organizations, message boards, blogs were quickly replacing the more
staid Democratic structures and a new community was emerging, it was
very exciting.
In Georgia, after 130 years of being
“Democratic”, we flipped hard into the Red column. Things looked bad
for us as a party and a brand. Those of us who were new and had little
or nothing to loose took this opportunity to jump into with both feet
and pitch in where we could. Looking back on it, it’s easy to see that
as a group we all had very different strengths but each in our own way
we complimented each other. What were my strengths, well you could say
I was all about the “visuals”. I ‘d hear about someone who had arrived
at an event looking like one hot mess, and they would be given a DFI “fine”. Then in 2006, I was asked to help someone, and it was a lot of fun.
Working full time in an unrelated industry and volunteering with various boards keep me pretty busy through 2008. I’d write DFI
help columns, offer advice, work with campaigns and watched the
political tide turn nationally. In late 2008, I too became a casualty
of the economic downturn, and after 14 years working for a
manufacturing company I was out of work. It was a good news bad news
kind of thing, and has freed me to explore various opportunities, not
the least of which is carving out a small space of blogosphere for DFI.
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