By Graham Bishai, Iowa for Warren Field Organizer

I was listening to “The Room Where It Happens” when I decided to move to Iowa to help elect Elizabeth Warren president.

The song (it’s a bop, from the musical “Hamilton”) details a closed-door meeting where three Founding Fathers cut a deal to determine where the American capital will be located and how the country’s banking system will be administered.

“No one else,” as the song tells us, “was in the room where it happened.”

I made my decision around 11 p.m. in my dorm room, with existential thoughts of our country’s history and my own role in shaping its future swirling in my head. I was a soon-to-be-college graduate, antsy to get out in the real world and apply my studies to make change.

This, I realized, was my shot.

When would I ever get a chance like this again — to work to elect the first woman president? When would I ever again have the freedom to pick up and move to a totally unfamiliar place?

Graduation just happened to coincide with the start of an election cycle — one offering a stark choice between restoring our democracy or doubling down on a hateful president’s catastrophic agenda. How could I pass this up?

I accepted the offer to be an organizer for Elizabeth Warren in Iowa, and as I fell asleep that night, I thought about the history I would get to help write. I had doubts, maybe, about the job itself — what does it mean to be an organizer, and could I actually do it? — but not about the mission and the opportunity.

I wanted the power to shape my country’s history.

I wanted to be in the room where it happens.

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Fast forward five months: I’m living in rural Northeast Iowa and I’ve learned more already than I could have ever imagined.

For one — spoiler alert — there isn’t a singular room where it happens. At least not at Iowa for Warren.

While our political system in Washington continues to be run out of a few invite-only rooms full of lobbyists and executives, our campaign in Iowa happens in living rooms in Oelwein, at a pizza parlor in Jesup, in grocery store aisles in Manchester, and too many doorsteps to count.

And it’s never like that clandestine conversation that took place all those years ago between Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton.

At Warren for President, we pride ourselves on running an equal-access campaign.

That means a campaign where everyone has an equal stake. Elizabeth calls donors who’ve pitched in $5 because it’s their voices she wants to hear, not the billionaires who already have the ears of big-wigs in Washington.

As organizers, we host events in accessible, public spaces, in volunteers’ homes, in cities of 200,000 and in towns of 200. We intentionally and consistently look for new ways to reach people we haven’t reached before and bring them into our movement.

If you come volunteer with us, one of the first things you’ll learn is that when we knock on people’s doors, the first thing we do is listen before explaining or persuading.

Since joining the campaign, I’ve witnessed this power grow in rooms across Northeast Iowa.

I’ve watched people come to campaign events, meet folks with different backgrounds and experiences and realize that the big, structural change Elizabeth is proposing will benefit them all, not one at the cost of others.

I’ve sat around tables with small business owners, health care salespersons, grandparents and new parents, all of whom understand that we cannot settle for the status quo.

I’ve knocked doors with people who “haven’t done a political thing in their life,” who experience for the first time how empowering it is to have a conversation about the issues with your neighbor down the street.

While out knocking doors one time, I met a family experiencing homelessness. That conversation opened my eyes to how degrading the process of losing a family home is. That conversation, however short, mattered because it brought into the room a perspective that was missing before.

I’ve learned that organizing is about making relationships. I’ve met some of the most selfless and tireless activists you can imagine who have never given up hope that we can make this country work for everyone.

This job led me to meet Judy, a lifelong Republican, who is sick and tired of voting for a party that continues to make false promises to working people in order to benefit the rich and powerful. Judy is caucusing for Elizabeth Warren in February.

The paradigm shift I’ve experienced — from dreaming of a coveted “room” out of reach to organizing in rooms where our politics are accessible to all — matches the shift that Elizabeth Warren is trying to enact in American politics.

The big structural change we need can only come when we band together — across our diversity of experiences, variance of needs, and places in life — and demand that our government work for everyone, not just those at the top.

The founders featured in “Hamilton” had both noble ideas and grave shortcomings. A government “by the people and for the people” is a brilliant ideal, and at the same time one that we haven’t quite ever fully realized in this country.

Every day, as members of this equal access campaign, we get to be in the many rooms where we can make that ideal a reality. We get to be in the rooms where it has been happening since before we came, and where it will continue to happen after we have gone — so long as groups of passionate individuals continue, nevertheless, to persist.

Graham Bishai is a field organizer for the Elizabeth Warren campaign.

Click here for a schedule of Warren events near you.

Follow Graham’s Twitter feed: @GrahamBishai