Sweet Treats: Bakeries and Patisseries in Romance

Sarah MacLean (0:00)

Hi, everyone, it's Sarah, and I just wanted to come on before we start this week's episode to talk a little bit about something that's going on at the end of this week's episode. We are, as many of you know, in the thick of our Democratic phone banking with our partners over at Indivisible. Indivisible is an incredible organization that we've been working with since the very beginning of Fated States, and we're so excited because today, at the end of this week's episode, I'll be speaking with Leah Greenberg, the co-founder and co-executive director of the organization. We're going to talk about community action, about how Indivisible came to be, and how Democratic organizations are changing the game across the board in the United States today. If you wait until the end of the episode, you'll hear a lovely conversation that I had with Leah earlier this week. Otherwise, please, please consider joining us to Foambank. We are getting our Foambanks going, and we are in the thick of them. Our next Foambank is this Saturday at 1 PM. We'll be calling Georgia for Senator John Ossoff and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms. We love Jon Ossoff here at Fated Mates. He was part of the reason why we started Fated Mates Foambanking back in 2020, and we are so excited to get him re-elected this year. Also, we are raising money with the States Project still. We are hoping to keep Pennsylvania blue and make sure that we deliver Josh Shapiro a blue trifecta to make sure that Pennsylvania is locking in so many important pieces of legislation including the right to choose, the freedom to read, and other things that are really important to us and we know important to all of you. So, all that said, I hope that you love this week's episode. We had such a fun time recording it, and don't forget to wait until the end of the episode to listen to my conversation with Leah Greenberg.

I'm so grateful that Leah made time to talk about Indivisible with us. And if you want to learn more about Indivisible or about any of the other projects that we are working on with Fated States, you can do that right now by heading over to fatedmates.net/fatedstates to learn more. You'll find links to sign up for phone banks there and also links to give to our States Project Giving Circle and more information about Indivisible in general.

We have a lot of fun things to talk about today. We have a lot to talk about today, Sarah. We got to get to business, but first it's phone banking business. Oh yeah, everybody, this is a great story. Okay.

Okay, listen, everybody, right now, you're like phone banking, it sounds so hard, but you will miss the joys of these stories if you do not come and join us. This was really truly a perfect story.

Okay, so just to paint the picture, everybody. So we are phone banking as part of our, so Fated Mates is the main show, the main attraction, that's us. That's where you are right now, everyone. I'm Sarah MacLean, I read romance novels and I write them. And I'm Jennifer Prokop, a romance reader and editor.

Jen Prokop (3:25)

You're all caught up.

Sarah MacLean (3:26)

And this is Fated Mates, the podcast.

But we sometimes get angry, you may have noticed. I mean, we both have big feelings, but one of us has bigger feelings.

Jen Prokop (3:40)

Yeah, it's fine.

Sarah MacLean (3:44)

And in 2020, we got real angry. And we were really pissed off and we started a phone banking initiative. And it was in partnership with Stacey Abrams' organization in Georgia. And it was designed to get the vote out in Georgia for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. Both of those, there were two, because of reasons, there were two Senate seats that were open then. And we got them both elected and we were very proud and we worked with, we were doing phone banking and then there was a big fundraiser that was happening also in romance, because Stacey Abrams was a romance novelist. This is sort of a lore.

Since then, we have continued to pace. Every election season, we do phone banking for Democrats across the country. And we've done it in a lot of different ways. Right now, we're partnering with Indivisible. Sometimes we partner with campaigns directly. We were with Indivisible at the very beginning, like when it was with Nick, it was right. So we've had a lot, yeah. We have reached out and done campaigns directly. We are a full service operation here. We're like, let us bring this. We'll bring you our people. We bring the romance readers to the party and we make the party more fun. We are both, listen, romance readers get shit done. So we, and we can multitask. We can both discuss romance novels in the chat and make phone calls to get out the vote and say, Texas.