It’s a sunny August afternoon in downtown Santa Cruz, and teenagers are strolling to the movies and eating ice cream cones while young mothers push baby strollers down Pacific Avenue. Ken Hietella, 49, is standing on the corner arguing with a college-aged man holding a clipboard about the specifics of Alaska’s fishing regulations. Apparently it was the question “Do you have a minute to save the environment?” that set him off.
Hietella, a fishing enthusiast and resident of downtown Santa Cruz, has a term for political canvassers downtown. He calls them aggressive panhandlers. “There are so many of them downtown, it makes me sick. It’s just another version of panhandling harassment,” says Hietella, who lives in the Saint George Hotel.
“Remember when everyone complained for a long time about the panhandling? This is worse.”
In a town that two years ago passed a raft of ordinances prohibiting people from seeking handouts from passersby within 14 feet of a trash compactor, ATM or public art statue—to name just three of some 15 public objects that enjoy a city-sanctioned panhandler-free buffer zone—canvassing runs mostly unregulated. The result is unavoidable gantlets of clipboard-wielding twentysomethings stationed at key areas throughout town, seeking handouts from passersby on behalf of nonprofit organizations. They set up at the entrances of stores like Safeway and Whole Foods. Those canvassing downtown for organizations like Greenpeace stand on street corners in groups of two or more (a privilege denied panhandlers), often sporting neon vests normally associated with the also well-intentioned, blank-faced employees who pick up trash from downtown sidewalks.
And a lot of people resent the intrusion. In fact, one might say street canvassers do the same thing in the 21st century for a pedestrian’s casual midday stroll downtown or a busy person’s after-work grocery stop that telemarketers have been doing to family dinners for years.
Felton resident Steven Robins says the downtown canvassers bother him more than the panhandlers. “I think they are a subtly, insidiously benign parallel to the scummy, disgusting, freeloading panhandlers,” says Robins. “I think it’s really a version of the same thing. I don’t want you asking me for something. I don’t want you asking me for anything.”
Even the panhandlers have a critique. Leo Brown, a regular Pacific Avenue panhandler, says he doesn’t resent the unregulated competition from canvassers. Still, he takes a more passive approach based purely on principle. “I really dislike them because they don’t wait and ask people,” says Brown, who can be seen most days standing with his long black dreads pushed back, holding a sign that says “Diabetic Change.” “They push people.”
Other people who live, work or shop downtown express similar sentiments. They say that, however worthy the causes espoused, organizations like Greenpeace and Grassroots Campaigns Inc., which fundraises for Save the Children and The Nature Conservancy, are obnoxious.
“The guilt they put on you is just annoying as hell,” says Anders Steele, who works at Forty Three PR, a public relations firm on Front Street. He says he sometimes avoids Pacific altogether and walks down Front Street in order to dodge questions to which the answer has be “yes.”
“When someone asks you a question like, ‘Hey, do you care about the environment?’ or ‘Hey, do you care about the air?’ or ‘Hey, do you care about the children?’ you can’t say no,” says Steele.
People find other methods of getting past political blockades on Pacific. Some zig-zag through crosswalks; others stare straight and walk full steam ahead, approaching breakneck speeds.
Jasmine Castro, who also works at Forty Three PR, uses her own trick to sneak past the Greenpeace canvassers outside O’Neill Surf Shop on Cooper and Pacific. The 23-year-old account associate holds her iPhone to her ear, up against her long blonde hair, so they won’t ask her any questions.
“It’s annoying as fuck. I don’t have any money,” says Castro, who adds that she used to make monthly donations of about $15. “I can’t afford that. I’m working my ass off to pay my rent.”
The View From The Corner
“The aggression just comes out of being absolutely desperate,” explains Dana Burd, who canvassed for Grassroots Campaigns Inc. on behalf of Save the Children for less than two weeks in July.
Like many canvassers, Burd, who has a degree in Film and Digital Media from UC–Santa Cruz, took the job because she couldn’t find anything else. She decided to take her shot at a job paying $8 an hour from an organization that is always posting help wanted ads on Craigslist. (Greenpeace posts entry-level job openings for between $12 and $14 an hour.)
Political canvassers come in all shapes and forms. Some stand with ballot petitions and get paid per signature. For canvassers such as Burd who work for groups like Grassroots or Greenpeace, memberships complete with monthly contributions are the goal. They also take donations.
Burd once suffered a tear-filled emotional breakdown on a sidewalk curb when she realized she wasn’t going to make her fundraising quota of $135 for that week. It wasn’t helping that people were ignoring her or just holding a hand in her face as they walked past. “People were being a little bit rude, and I just couldn’t deal with it,” says Burd.
Shortly after starting, she stopped coming into work out of fear that she would be let go after missing her quota. “If people are desperate, it’s just because they’ve been standing there for five hours, and four people have stopped and talked to them and given them a total of a dollar,” says Burd, currently unemployed. “And when you have to make $135, that’s just not enough.”
Those are the kinds of conditions that make for high turnover. And where there’s rapid burnout, there’s often exploitation.
Joe Smyth, a spokesperson for Greenpeace, acknowledges that the organization’s foot soldiers are fighting an uphill member-seeking battle, but he says it isn’t exploitation. “Oftentimes young people that are involved with Greenpeace as canvassers are our most active supporters,” says Smyth, who grew up in Santa Cruz and is now based in Washington, D.C.
No one in the Grassroots Santa Cruz office is allowed to talk to reporters, says canvass director Rallie Murray. Officials from the organization’s national office in Boston did not return phone calls or emails for this story.
Burd says the hardest part of her time at Grassroots was learning to think of it purely as a job. If she had begun to ponder what she was telling passersby, the work would have been unbearable. She was unable to let herself think about how, for example, 26,000 children under the age of 5 die every day, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund. Burd also struggled not to take things personally when people blew her off as they walked into the grocery store she was canvassing.
“You get people saying, ‘Go get a real job’ or ‘I save kids every day’ or ‘I don’t like kids’ or ‘Where are their parents?’” says Burd. “Oh my God, that was the most ridiculous one. I ran into this 60-year-old guy and asked him, ‘Do you have a minute to help save some kids’ lives?’ and he said, ‘Uh, where are their parents?’ It’s like: ‘Well, their parents are probably dead.’”
Retail Democracy
Some critics of street canvassing have a bottom-line concern in mind: business.
“I don’t think there’s a person that would deny that they occasionally go out of their way to avoid these people unless they enjoy getting into an argument or something,” says former Santa Cruz Mayor Tim Fitzmaurice. “Nobody would deny it.”
Fitzmaurice, who lives on Washington Street, does not think people who go downtown on a mission—perhaps to CVS or New Leaf—are deterred by canvassers. But those who just want to browse their way down Pacific might instead stay home or take side streets to avoid harassment. That’s, of course, bad for business. “If someone’s standing in front of their door, then people are going to avoid going there,” says Fitzmaurice.
Not everyone agrees. Melanie Otts, assistant manager at O’Neill, says she doesn’t think the Greenpeace canvassers frequently stationed out front distract potential customers at all. “Growing up in Santa Cruz, I’ve always gotten used to it,” says Otts.
(It’s worth noting that the Downtown Association and business owners have, for the most part, offered little comment for this story. Chip, executive director of the Downtown Association and a past supporter of various anti-panhandling ordinances, didn’t return phone calls or emails about downtown business and canvassers.)
Regardless of the effect on businesses, there are crucial differences between street canvassing and panhandling, says Chase Cooper, who helps run Fund for the Public Interest’s Santa Cruz office. It’s “comparing apples and oranges,” he says. “We have nonprofit tax status with the IRS.”
Fitzmaurice, who also drops money in the hats of panhandlers, sees important distinctions too. “The problem is, free speech about politics on the sidewalk is something you can’t interfere with,” says Fitzmaurice. “It’s much different than someone who’s collecting money. Maybe it doesn’t seem fair, but it’s a different story when you have a political message than when you have a commercial message of some sort. Police aren’t going to interfere with politics.”
An important moment in the constitutional rights of canvassers was shaped just over the hill, at the Pruneyard Shopping Center in Campbell. In the late 1970s a group of high school students was soliciting signatures for a petition against a United Nations resolution that deemed Zionism a form of racism. The shopping center, irked by the students’ use of its pathways, decided to take them to court.
In a landmark 1980 decision, Pruneyard v. Robins, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the students’ right to petition on private shopping centers under the state constitution. The decision set a precedent for petitioners’ free speech in California, one that has been invoked several times, including by the state Supreme Court.
Canvass Morass
One can argue that, at a moment when the U.S. Supreme Court just paved the way for even greater corporate control of the political process by lifting restrictions on corporate contributions, the grassroots process—annoying street canvassers and all—represents at least some kind of counterbalance in the political system.
Greenpeace, the organization that helped ban whaling and spread awareness about global warming, draws on a broad base of 3 million members, says Smyth. That broad support, he explains, frees Greenpeace of any possible special interests. “It allows us to carry on in our campaign without thinking, ‘Oh, is this going to upset a powerful corporate funder?’”
Even vociferous critics of canvassers—Fitzmaurice and Robins included—say they would never advocate for curbing the clipboard-wielders’ activities. “It’s not that I want it to be illegal for canvassers to exercise their reasonable rights to ask me a question,” says Robins. “I don’t think you could.”
Robins adds that he would be much more likely to respond to a passive presence, perhaps someone holding up a sign.
But Smyth of Greenpeace says that passive presence won’t work. Canvassers need to be vocal in order to take people out of their normal routine. “It’s why it’s more powerful, but I can see it’s why it’s also more controversial,” says Smyth. “People are being interrupted.”
The market may solve the problem. While Smyth says Greenpeace’s street canvassing operation has grown steadily over the past 10 years, Cooper, of the Fund for the Public Interest, says street canvassers may have reached a critical mass.
“Street canvassing, generally speaking, has begun to get oversaturated. We’ve taken a market and a population and oversaturated the population, and [canvassers have] sprung up too quickly,” says Cooper, a relaxed-looking boss with flip flops, bedhead hair and light stubble.
The Fund does street canvassing, in the sense of setting up on corners, in other towns, says Cooper, but its Santa Cruz workers only go door-to-door through affluent neighborhoods. On the streets, Cooper adds, tensions between pedestrians and canvassers are running high.
Ultimately, Cooper says that canvassers—no matter how pushy—deserve respect, and a few kind words can go a long way. “If you don’t want to stop, say, ‘No, sorry. Have a nice day. Good luck.’ Be a decent human being,” Cooper says. “On Pacific Avenue I get waved at everyday. I’ve stopped and signed up monthly, and I haven’t stopped. And when I don’t stop, I say, ‘Oh, no, not today. But good luck with it, dude. Good luck.’”
