I went local, instead of working in Iowa.

8 years after organizing for Obama, attending my local land use committee meeting meant more than watching election results.

This isn’t a rant to talk about national politics not mattering. Because they do. Nor is it a chance to declare that living in San Francisco and experiencing the life of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur makes me ‘above the fray of national debate.’ Because I’m not.

I’m making the case that my generation — millennials — should seriously consider taking a few months to connect with our physical communities, our own neighborhoods. Maybe we should see where that goes — us all giving a damn about what happens on our block as much as we do about what happens in our inboxes— with the same fervor many of us put into, say, electing the next leader of the free world, pulling for the same outcome on some day in November, nearly a decade ago.

Last night, the night of the quadrennial Iowa caucuses, I took actions so drastically different from what eight-years-younger-me would have ever thought was ‘real change making’ that I had to share. Instead of cracking open a beer and debating my like-minded, like-dressed friends about a Trump v. Sanders or Rubio v. Clinton head-to-head — as Wolf Blitzer danced around on the CNN stage with his red-and-blue computer monitors and talking heads — I chose to attend a monthly meeting of a dozen people. It was our monthly Duboce Triangle Land Use Committee meeting to discuss the six development projects shaping the face of our community. And we had a special guest: SF Planning Department Director John Rahaim!

The Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association (SF) meeting prior to Election Day, 2015.

My god! What have I become! An evening like this in my early twenties was spent marking door hangers and rallying campaign staffers to sign-up more shifts of phone-callers or door-knockers to turn out voters for the soon-to-be President of the United States of America. I was organizing for a transformative political leader. At the time, it was the only kind of change that could really, truly matter.

Fast forward to today, and I chose to spend a similar evening eight years later digging into the details of facade aesthetics and lambasting government bureaucrats for not doing more to push for increased affordable housing. Is that really ‘Change We Can Believe In?!’

My team and me during the ‘08 Pennsylvania primary. The cool thing: as national organizers moving from state to state, we were welcomed in by locals at every stop for whom the campaign was their ‘showing up locally.’

And it struck me: I think, yes, it might be. Not as a replacement for caring who are our top policy makers — or even donating our time and money to their cause of getting elected — but as a supplement to getting obsessed with the political horse racing. Instead of placing all our hopes and dreams in decisions to be made by a few far in time and place from us — no matter how important and necessary those decisions are, many truly deserving of our collective energy to figure out — we have the keys readily available to take a stance and take action, today, in the pursuit of intentionally aligning our day to day reality with how we want the world to be.

This got me thinking: what if my friends and people like us, in cities around this country, really showed up as a part of our own communities?

There are people, like my brother Winston in New York, who have dedicated their lives to organizing their communities. Commendable, admirable, and necessary, yes, but possible for us all to do, no.

The kind of ‘showing up’ I’m talking about starts with something as easy as three months of attendance at your local neighborhood association meeting. It means showing up to get to know people who may not be a part of your social network but are a part of your city network.

What if the rest of us, in addition to folks with time on their hands (I’m looking at you my Baby Boomer brethren and sisters!) and the parents of small children deathly afraid that the world’s going to hell, really showed up and engaged the meat-and-potatoes process that decides who gets to move into our neighborhoods, what kinds of activities happen around us, and whether or not we’ll ever be willing to sacrifice our NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) tendencies for a principled stance on how we live our lives?

So, I guess, all of this really leads me to wonder: is showing up at a local level, just like we showed up for Obama years ago, something more of my fellow millennials are willing to do?

I’m trying it out. Let me know if you plan to, too.