Amanda Kingsley Malo | Democracy is For You: How PoliticsNow is Getting More Women to Run — and Win

Politics Is Not Over There

There is a version of civic life that most of us were raised to believe: politics is somewhere else. It's for certain kinds of people. It's complicated, polarizing, impolite to discuss at the dinner table. It's not for us.

Amanda Kingsley Malo grew up in a house where none of that was true.

Her parents sat on opposite ends of the political spectrum, debated policy at the kitchen table, and brought their three kids to the polls every election — bickering the whole way about who they were going to vote for, gleeful at the prospect of canceling each other out. They watched election results the way other families watch sports. And the whole time, Amanda thought this was normal.

It wasn't. And that gap — between the civic fluency she grew up with and the civic silence that most people experience — is exactly what she has spent the last decade trying to close.

From Teacher to Campaign Volunteer to Founder

Amanda is a former teacher. That identity has never left her. She describes it as one of the most important acts of civic engagement a person can do — helping prepare good citizens for the future. After she got her permanency and was looking for a hobby, she stumbled across a Facebook ad for a campaign fellowship with a political party. She applied. She was the only person north of Barrie to get in.

Her first political science class in university had put her off the field entirely. It felt out of touch, theoretical, nothing like the conversations about daily life and shared values she had grown up having. But the fellowship was different. It was practical. It was about knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, convincing people to show up.

She loved it. She became the first volunteer on a campaign. She became the most senior volunteer. The candidate won.

And then the candidate went off to govern, and Amanda missed the work.

Someone told her: take everything you've learned and give it to people who need it. That was the idea behind Politics Now — a civic education initiative that, across two municipal election cycles in Ontario, has trained over 80 campaigns and helped elect 60 women to office.

Why Municipal Politics Is Where It Starts

Municipal politics, Amanda says, is the Wild West. There are no party affiliations in most municipalities. There are no big partisan machines or campaign teams. You are quite literally in it for your neighbors — and you have to answer to them at the grocery store, at the school pickup line, when you're putting the garbage out.

It is also, she argues, the most tangible and immediate form of politics that exists.

The council member who got a traffic light installed near her kids' school did that in one term. The one who pushed for baby changing tables in men's bathrooms did that because a young father brought his perspective to a table that had never heard it before. These are not abstract policy wins. They are things you can see and touch and point to.

And they don't happen without people who look like the community deciding to sit at the table.

Why Accessibility Is the Whole Thing

When you trace back why certain people don't participate in civic life, Amanda always asks the same question she used to ask her students: who does this inaccessibility benefit?

Not us. Not most people. The people who benefit from keeping civic knowledge scarce are the people who already have it — who have always had the doors open, the rooms accessible, the vocabulary fluent.

Breaking that open, she believes, is not complicated. Civic engagement is not as hard as people who want to keep it exclusive would have us think. Once you give people the language, the process, the encouragement, they discover something important: they were capable of participating all along. They just weren't told.

How She Gets Women to Run

In the early days of Politics Now, Amanda ran in-person campaign schools — a weekend or a day, childcare provided, food included. Women showed up. Twenty-five the first time. Forty the second. Not all of them ran, but many since have — or joined campaigns, or told their friends about a training that changed what they thought was possible for them.

Then she had a baby. And when she came back from maternity leave and tried to do the training herself — filling out the workbooks, making the commitments — she couldn't. Not because she wasn't interested. Because she had a baby and no time and was nursing and up at 2 a.m.

No wonder they're not showing up, she thought. I can't do any of this myself.

So she made a workbook. Something women could do at 3 p.m. during nap time or in the middle of the night when the baby woke them up. Something that translated all the campaign school training into something a mom in motion could access.

It worked. And the virtual options she developed during the pandemic — born the same season as her second baby — opened the training up to anyone in Ontario.

On Overwhelm — and How to Actually Manage It

Amanda lives and breathes this work. She also has to protect herself from it.

Her system: CBC radio news in the morning, ten minutes, while the kids eat breakfast. That's it for the morning. No TV, no scrolling headlines, no breaking news notifications. Notifications for news are turned off entirely. At lunch, she might listen to a podcast — intentionally, if she's in the headspace for it. In the evening, CBC back on for ten minutes at dinner.

That's her complete daily news consumption. For anything bigger, she'll go dig — look at multiple sources, different angles. But only one or two stories at a time. We are not meant, she says, to live inside the inundation. The information is not designed for us to hold all of it at once.

For moms who feel overwhelmed by the current news cycle, her message is not to tune out entirely. It's to find the amount you can handle — the minimum viable dose of information that keeps you informed without hollowing you out — and protect that boundary fiercely.

What Moms Can Do Right Now

Not everyone can run for office. Not everyone can door-knock. That's okay.

Amanda's question for everyone she talks to is the same: what unique gift do you have, and how can you use it?

Her friend who owns a printing business donates lawn sign printing for campaigns she believes in. Parents who can't commit their time can make a few dinners for a candidate's family during campaign season. Someone who can't make it to an event might offer to watch the candidate's kids for an evening so they can go door-knock. On election day, can you spare an hour to drive someone to the polls?

These are not small things. These are exactly the things that make the difference between a campaign that makes it and one that doesn't.

And for those who can't do any of it right now: talk to one person. Tell them why you're voting for who you're voting for. Make the case. Door-knocking, at its core, is just a conversation. If you can have one of those — with a neighbor, a family member, a friend — you are doing civic engagement.

Not Voting Is Still a Vote

One of the most important things Amanda says in this conversation: in the absence of showing up, you're still making a choice. Someone is going to win. And whether 30 people vote or 3,000, the majority decides. The people who don't show up have handed their influence over to the people who do.

She cites a federal election in Ontario that went to court over a one-vote difference. One vote. The people who didn't show up that day made that margin what it was.

You don't have to agree with your candidate 100% of the time. She never has. She would challenge anyone who claims they do. You need to agree enough — enough that your values are better served by showing up than by staying home.

What Her Daughter Taught Her

Amanda's daughter is eight. She recently decided that the way the recess market was handling payment for artwork wasn't fair. So she gathered her friends, pulled their work from the market, and went to negotiate a better deal.

She formed a union. In second grade. In fifteen minutes. In the Canadian winter.

Amanda had never once sat down and explained what a union was. But she had modeled — every day, in the choices she made and the work she did and the way she talked about fairness and community and gathering together to fix what was wrong — something her daughter internalized and acted on.

That, Amanda says, is civic engagement. Not the formal kind. The kind that lives in how we raise our children, what we talk about at dinner, what we let them see us do.

The most political thing she does every day is raise good humans.

The World She's Building

Amanda's hope is a world where her daughter's generation doesn't need to be told to participate — because they've watched it happen their whole lives. Where the rooms are no longer closed. Where the language isn't secret. Where running for office is something you consider not because you come from a political family but because you looked around your community, saw something that needed changing, and knew you could be the one to change it.

Sixty women are in office because of the work she has done.

She is just getting started.