Hi Arena Community,

Earlier this week we wrapped a great experiment in Arena Academy by taking our training virtual. Like a lot of groups adapting to current events, we didn’t have much choice. But we took this crisis as an opportunity to innovate both our curriculum and our teaching techniques.

All the late nights of tinkering were worth it, and our first virtual Arena Academy was a huge success. On Monday evening, we graduated 150 new campaign staffers ready to flip North Carolina blue.

The success of Arena Academy Online allows us to continue to offer trainings virtually for as long as this pandemic lasts, and do so at a larger scale than ever before.

That’s why we’re announcing two changes to our plans for the next Arena Academy. First, we have decided to extend our application deadline by a week to Friday, April 10.

Second, because we are now online, we are opening applications to anyone who wants to staff a state legislative race in one of the battlegrounds where we’re working closely with campaigns -- Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, and Texas.

We are prioritizing applications in Florida, where we had told campaigns to expect the next round of Arena Academy grads when our upcoming Academy was initially planned for Orlando. Anyone who says they’re game to staff a race in Florida will shoot to the top of our admissions list.

That means there’s now one week left to apply to the next Arena Academy -- from anywhere.

At our most recent Academy, participants called Arena Academy “life-changing,” “an amazing privilege” and “generally badass.” Frankly, we feel the same way about getting to know them. We even had a few campaign #powercouples.

This is an opportunity to put your energy to use in a battleground state where one person can have a huge effect. It takes most people an hour or less to apply, and usually around half of our accepted attendees submit in the last week. That means now is the perfect time to 👉👉submit your application 👈👈 and jump into a 2020 race.

We accept people from all experience levels and offer scholarships so there’s no barrier to join. There’s just one week left to apply -- so do it now!

Best,

Ravi Gupta
Arena Co-Founder