June Volunteer Spotlight: A New Call with Marylin Silverman

Image Description: Marylin Silverman, a smiling, middle aged white woman with shoulder length dark brown hair and dark eyes, standing against a neutral colored wall. She’s wearing a black shirt and ivory sweater on top with matching ivory earrings.

by Alec Appelbaum

Marylin Silverman, a pioneering woman in marketing and advertising and a community activist in 1960s’ Greenwich Village, started phonebanking for us in 2019 and built on that experience during lockdown. Now, she's bringing her media savvy to the comms team at Sister District NYC.  

SDNYC: When did you become politically active?

Marylin: I’ve always been active in things that have interested me. In the 60s, there was a lot to be interested in, and a lot to care about, and a lot to get involved with. It started with Kennedy, but what I remember most clearly is the Obama campaign. I did have a nice experience with meeting someone who said, well what can you do?  And I said, well I have this whole background in advertising, and he said, “Oh great!  You can do media placement and messaging for me.”  And so basically that’s what I did for that campaign. It made me very happy to feel that this energy that you put [into] things that you care about really does matter, and that’s what makes change happen.

SDNYC: Had you been less inclined to volunteer until Obama came along?

Marylin: I think I was interested in other things. When the kids were little, I was very involved with Washington Square Park, and getting the park renovated, and getting people out of the park who were not good for the kids. I was involved in a big art program out in Long Island when they were interested in those things, and we put together a consortium of artists who happened to live in the area. And I was doing pottery at that point so I became the pottery instructor. And so I have gone through the different ages and stages, and of course politics moves me in this time because it’s just so important, and it’s coloring the way we live. 

SDNYC: What was it about Sister District that appealed to you?

Marylin: Well, I was introduced to Sister District through Emily’s List. It just sounded so right on, so absolutely the right thing to be doing at that moment, [so I joined]. I initially started working d[on]phonebanking, which interestingly I had never done before. And I guess that’s why I have some sympathy to the idea that there’s a ton of people out there, who are probably not as gregarious as I am, that are pulling back from this because they’re just afraid of doing it. You usually have a script. I’m not sure everybody knows that.  

SDNYC: You hadn’t done any phonebanking before: did you find you liked it?

Marylin: I did it for a while. But I kept thinking to myself, ‘you know what, there are other things I could contribute that might be more useful.’ Something for people to know, together with a lot of the good things that go along with Sister District--it’s very welcoming and you don’t have to talk through layers to get someone to listen to an idea. It is an organization where you have a lot more latitude to decide what would be your most helpful contribution. And that’s really good. 

SDNYC: Is SD different from other groups that you’ve volunteered with?

Marylin: Yes. I love the energy, and I love the energy right now, because I think we all have tons of stored-up energy that we would like to use for something good. And there aren’t that many outlets.  There are a ton of older, incredibly capable adults walking around who have had incredible success in [their] careers, doing nothing. Fascinating. And my sense is they’re not all lazy slugs.

SDNYC: So you started with us in 2019--do you have a favorite experience or memory?

Marylin: My favorite is just that I really enjoy writing. It's lovely to get with these candidates, and then write stories and pieces about them. And so that as an experience has been a really nice thing for me. 

SDNYC: Last year had all these seismic setbacks and frustrations: what do you do to keep yourself going?

Marylin: Some of it is about just pausing. I allow myself to just stop: if I’m trying to write something and it’s not writing itself, I allow myself to just stop and pick it up when I’m feeling less spent by the whole thing. I think political things are episodic: the push for a candidate is a finite period of time: and you can always tell yourself that it has a beginning, a middle and an end. 

SDNYC: Is there something people don’t understand about state level campaigning? 

Marylin: I am not sure that people realize that it really is the beginning of things. It is the place where so many of the really important things that contribute to your own well being really, really start. It’s the place where all the health care discussions start. It is the place where all the educational things start. It certainly paves the way for how we deal with racism, how we deal with minorities, how we deal with immigrants, how we deal with policing. So much of it starts here. And if you follow it out to its logical conclusion, if you get it right in the state legislature, you’re going to have a federal government you’re going to be a lot happier about being a good citizen for. It’s really simple because it’s a building block.  

SDNYC: Is there an issue or cause that jumps to the front of the line for you?

Marylin: Is there an issue that doesn’t jump to the front for you?  I just feel that we are at such a turning point, we have had awareness of things that whether you wanted to be aware or you didn’t want to be aware [of] in previous years, there was no place to run away from this Covid crisis. It is up close and personal, it is out there for everybody, [even those who don’t want] to see.  Everybody saw whether you wanted to or not, it didn’t matter if you read a newspaper. I am not foolish enough to feel that everybody will feel that you have to fix everything for everybody, but I do feel that there’s a sense of lack of fairness, for the lack of a better word, on the part of so much of our history. And it may be Pollyanna to me, but I think that people are going to do something. I think people don't have endless imagination, I think that's why you need good leaders. But once people are shown the results, or how they can be part of the results of making it better, I think something will happen. 

SDNYC: Anything you want to do differently this year or add?

Marylin: It’s interesting, because I am joining not too far into the thing since it hasn’t been around that long. Some of my business experience had to do with consumers and psychology and measuring. I know there is an analytic group and that is an interesting thing to me. Because numbers and analytics are always interesting and they are interesting to write about. I’m not sure that’s what I’ll do immediately but it will get there. 

SDNYC: We ask everyone: Yankees or Mets?

Marylin: I grew up a block from Yankee Stadium in the Bronx so you know the answer to this one.