Labor Leader of the Week: Carla Insinga

Carla Insinga has been with AFSCME for over two decades and took up the reins as Director of District Council 90 in 2017, after working as the Education Director. She is also a Vice President of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Executive Committee. Carla’s experience in developing new and innovative ways to share information have led to some very inventive ways to engage members for the upcoming election.

In the virtual world of campaigning, a unified approach to the work has been helping to ensure safe and effective events. This work takes hundreds of volunteers week after week, and week after week AFSCME and Carla show up and show out to be sure their sisters and brothers are ready to cast their votes.

"The campaigning piece has been challenging for everyone because we can't do our traditional door to door campaign so we have been doing a lot of different things that we're trying to engage and excite folks about the upcoming elections," Carla said.

A few days a week, members of AFSCME District Council 90 are out around the Harrisburg area doing typical outreach with voter registration tents at events where they assist people with applying for mail-in ballots, checking their voter registration status, and registering people to vote.

"Some of our locals have been doing some creative things to get their members registered to vote," Carla said. "They're calling members that are not registered voters and some of the locals have also done parking lot events to practice social distancing.” She helped organize a drive-through voter registration event on Saturday, September 12 in the AFSMCE conference center parking lot.

Union members and members of their households were able to drive through and get access to all of the services they typically provide to members on voting during an election as well as information about endorsed candidates, lawn signs, and those kinds of things. To keep everyone safe hand sanitizer and AFSCME masks were distributed as people arrived.

"As folks exit the parking lot they receive a little grab and go lunch, our staff is going to be out there, Carla said, making sure to note that none of this is possible without dedicated sisters and brothers volunteering their time. They work long days, many in new situations, and manage to get out every weekend to volunteer to register fellow members to vote or even give out basic necessities during these trying times.

Carla said it all comes back to something very important, "talking to folks about the importance of doing their civic duty and being a registered voter."