Familiar name connects community members through social media to help those in need
Editor’s note: This column has been updated to reflect that Boynton Brown left the Florida Democratic Party in 2017 amid accusations of enabling a culture of sexual harassment.
A familiar name is leading a social media effort to help disseminate information and connect people in need locally with services and resources amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sally Boynton Brown, formerly the executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party, over the weekend started the Facebook group Idaho COVID-19 M.A.G. (Mutual Aid Group), which quickly grew to 8,000 members by Monday morning.
“At first, I thought we’d have just a couple hundred do-gooders,” Boynton Brown told me in a phone interview Monday morning. “I had no clue that it was going to take off like it did.”
By Sunday night, she and other administrators for the group decided to split the group into subgroups. Boynton Brown said it didn’t make much sense, with 8,000 members, to connect someone from Coeur d’Alene in need of infant formula with someone in Boise who could help.
Groups now are splintered off into area-specific pages, including Ada County and even down to neighborhoods, such as Southeast Boise.
Boynton Brown was the executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party from 2012 to 2017. She left Idaho to become the president of the Florida Democratic Party. After just six months at the helm there, Boynton Brown resigned amid accusations that she enabled a culture of sexual harassment by Florida Democratic Party chairman Stephen Bittel, who resigned over the accusations of sexual harassment.
Boynton Brown said she returned to Boise in 2018 to help care for a family member dealing with health issues.
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She said that with her family situation now settled, she was able to turn her attention elsewhere.
“So I said, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to turn my energy to helping other people,’ ” she said. “I’m just so worried about our low-income and vulnerable populations, our elderly, our homeless populations right now.”
She said this group is a good example of how social media can be used for good.
“We’ve certainly seen a lot of misinformation out there, particularly since the 2016 election,” she said. “We’ve seen people able to activate social media either for good intent or bad intent. But people now are much more aware of that and aware of how do we spot a fake post or misinformation.”
She cited a webinar she spotted recently teaching senior citizens how to identify misinformation on the internet and social media.
The COVID-19 M.A.G. groups she’s created on Facebook have relied on users and group administrators to police their pages to spot misinformation, like someone claiming if you drink water every 15 minutes, you can prevent coronavirus.
“We want to make sure we’re having a positive influence on the conversation,” she said. “We empower our moderator group. We empower each other to empower each other. We kind of lean into the hurricane so that we can get to the eye of the storm in a way.”
Boynton Brown is still active politically, having founded Campaign Greenhouse, which focuses on smaller, down-ballot and local races, everything from a school board candidate in Oklahoma to a U.S. congressional candidate in Chicago. Campaign Greenhouse is now in 35 states, she said.
As for the local COVID-19 social media effort, Boynton Brown said the group she’s assembled met by phone for more than 2 hours Sunday to discuss splitting the Facebook group into smaller groups and they’re working on an app that would give real-time information on supplies, symptoms, closures and more.
For now, the Facebook groups are sharing information about emergency day care centers, what supplies are available in local stores and what organizations are announcing closures. Members post news stories about COVID-19, articles about teaching remotely and more. Members are also asking questions and getting responses from other members and administrators.
“None of us knows what this is going to look like,” Boynton Brown said. “At the end of the day, we just need to take things moment by moment and commit to each other that we’ll be there for one another and commit to help one another.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
