By Gia Clarke, Summer 2023 Power in Place Collaborator
Last week, Power in Place had the privilege of meeting Emma Dillon, the Vice President of Voter Engagement of Mission Control. Mission Control is a campaign company dedicated to promoting Democratic candidates primarily through mail-in voting. Dillon has had many accomplishments while she has been working with Mission Control. She helped execute the largest mobilization and voter registration initiatives worldwide.
Prior to her political work in campaigning, Dillon has always been passionate about politics since she was young. As her parents were foreign correspondents for the New York Times, Dillon was always aware of worldly politics. Dillon recalls her first impactful political act when she was just ten years old living in Mexico City, “It was the presidential election and a new party with a surging populist candidate won, and I was super engaged in that election…I just thought that it was really interesting.” Her passion for politics has guided her toward a BA in International Relations and Affairs with a minor in Women’s Studies from Tufts University.
Working at Mission Control, however, is not a cakewalk. There are many tribulations that come with the triumphs. Due to the main way of Mission Control’s engagement being mail-in voting, the Trump Administration convinced a lot of people that mail-in voting was not a great way to vote: “One of the things that happened in 2020, there was a huge surge in vote-by-mail through the pandemic, and the president started to target vote-by-mail, and so that was strategically challenging for us” Dillon says. Despite these challenges, however, Emma loves how rewarding her political work is, and how it feels as though she is making a difference in the world.
Power in Place also had the privilege of gaining valuable insight on how to execute our Day of Action initiatives from someone with Emma’s level of experience. Dillon gave us some great tips, such as ways to effectively message people who might be opposed to your initiative.
Dillon continues to be a powerful inspiration to many who also aspire to make a difference in the U.S. with the campaign work that she does, and she has definitely inspired all of us at Power in Place to make our own Day of Action initiatives as effective as possible.
Gia Clarke is a rising Sophomore at DePaul University. She is a journalism major with a minor in psychology. She is also passionate and heavily involved in advocacy work at DePaul, as she is the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion chair for DePaul’s Planned Parenthood Generation Action Committee. In her free time, she enjoys writing, playing electric guitar, crocheting, drawing, and reading. One day, she aspires to be a journalist that gets to travel and write about current events worldwide.