Thank you for thinking of me, Skylar. I am very happy to meet with others
at that time. Hopefully the details will come this way as well.

Also, here is my reposted candidate statement.

Hello! My name is Mark Ruzon, and I want to represent you at this year’s
national convention.

The main reason I am running is to move the party in the direction of
building power while remaining true to our principles and maintaining
respect and decency for those with differing opinions.

And what is power? For a number of years I was a leader with Peninsula
Interfaith Action (PIA), part of the PICO Network (now Faith in Action (
https://faithinaction.org/ ) ), a faith-based community organizing
non-profit. PIA taught me that power is “the ability to act,” and is
neither good nor bad. Our party has a philosophy and a platform that
resonates deeply with my worldview. What we lack is the ability to act to
translate that platform into meaningful political change.

My experiences with PIA have given me insights that will help me advocate
for the changes needed to bring this about. Within a month of joining PIA,
I was founding a committee at my church, which soon became a member. I
learned how to have effective one-to-one conversations with friends and
neighbors to understand local issues that mattered. I attended meetings
with city council members, county supervisors, and state legislators. I
helped organize and spoke at action meetings where we asked our officials to
commit publicly to specific plans for addressing local issues. My own
committee played a role in creating the Palo Alto Opportunity Center (
https://www.lifemoves.org/directory/opportunity-services-center/ ) , which
provides permanent housing and drop-in services for the homeless.

After a year of leadership within my church, PIA asked me to join their
Board of Directors. A year after that they appointed me co-chair. During
my tenure our charismatic founding executive director retired, and I
co-chaired the search committee that hired an interim executive director
before settling on a permanent replacement. I am qualified to select
members of the National Committee who will get things done.

Since we’ve already selected a presidential ticket, the purpose of this
convention is to set the goals that we want the National Committee to
achieve in the next year, including the fall election, the best time to
build momentum as a party. These goals should not be focused on drafting
high-level statements; we already have a platform and our four principles to
do that. Instead, I want to focus on practical goals like nominating
candidates for office, helping bring about change in specific areas of
legislation, and increasing political participation by our members.

Because I had experience through PIA in gathering signatures for a
California ballot proposition, it was easy for me to organize local
signature gathering to support Desmond Silviera’s 2018 gubernatorial
campaign. If we set goals for volunteering during this fall’s campaigns,
and put in the work to achieve them, it will be easier for party members to
envision running for office themselves, and they will know where to find
experienced people willing to help run their campaigns. If we can make
progress in jurisdictions that are, for example, considering ranked choice
voting, it gives our party more chances to compete against Democrats and
Republicans. We must make these ideas into priorities.

If this plan sounds good, then I’m the person to carry it out on your
behalf. Vote for me.

Bio:

Mark Ruzon was born in Illinois and grew up Republican. He graduated
valedictorian of the University of Southern California School of Engineering
with a B.S. in computer science and later received his M.S. and Ph.D. from
Stanford University, also in computer science. During that time he became a
pro-life Democrat. He is currently a Senior Software Engineer for Google,
working on the processing of satellite and aerial imagery used in Google
Maps and Google Earth. He has held numerous leadership positions in
multiple parishes and is a graduate of the Institute for Leadership in
Ministry in the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Jose. He lives in Mountain
View, California, has been married to his wife Lesley for 23 years, and is
the father of four children ages 12-19. He found the ASP while reading an
article in America magazine and hasn’t looked back.