By Ellie Ta, 2025 CLA Intern
While I attended a few community events since the start of CAUSE, I recently went to two Fourth of July events: one in San Gabriel, one of the cities in our Mock Campaign District, and one back home in Cerritos.
On July 3rd, I attended the San Gabriel Fourth of July event with members of my campaign team (go team %!) to collect feedback for our policy platform. We asked a lot of people one simple, yet admittedly vague, question: What’s the biggest improvement you would make to the city? I kept finding myself apologizing: “Sorry, that’s kind of broad.” Some gave me awkward laughs, but others had real concerns: traffic, housing, small business support, and even trash pickup.
Especially after our conversation on Monday at CAUSE about engaging voters, I was struck by how well the San Gabriel event catered to a wide range of people. The crowd was incredibly diverse—across race, age, and language. High school clubs had tables, the police department had an information booth with crafts, and there were concerts, games, and even a watermelon eating contest for various age groups. The space invited all sorts of people to just show up and be present with the community, and that helped us a lot with collecting data.
The next night, I went to the Cerritos Let Freedom Ring celebration. It was bigger, louder, and required closing off entire blocks of road. The event is one I look forward to every year, but this year it felt different—there was absence of energy, of people, of laughter. Most of the programming was catered to little kids, with rides that had age or height limits. For older teenagers and adults, there was nothing to do.
As recently as two years ago, this was the kind of event where you’d run into classmates you hadn’t seen since middle school. You had to get to the park by 3pm just to claim a decent patch of grass two blocks away from the fireworks. Now, people show up promptly at 9pm for the fireworks and leave right after. It felt less like a day-long community tradition and more like a quick stop.
This isn’t to say one event was better than the other—my view of Cerritos’s event is shaped by attending it almost every year, so it’s a bit personal and biased. But CAUSE has pushed me to think more critically about how people are engaged and what factors help make that engagement possible. San Gabriel didn’t succeed because it had better food trucks or a bigger stage, but because it catered to different people, allowing them to show up and simply enjoy the company of others in the community. For me, the key lesson is that engagement isn’t just about scale—it’s about creating real opportunities for people to connect, which starts with how a space is set up and who it’s made for.