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During COVID, when a friend and I were bemoaning our frustration at being in lockdown and unable to do anything to counter Trump’s presidency, she mentioned that a woman in Mountain View was putting packets on her own front porch containing everything volunteers needed to write postcards to voters about why their votes mattered. It seemed like a good use of my time, so I picked up a packet, not thinking much about whose porch it was or who had initiated this massive undertaking. Fast-forward to this election cycle, when I wanted to profile a community member who was a standout in terms of mobilizing people to help salvage our democracy, and I immediately thought of my Covid-era excursion to that front porch. I did a bit of research and learned that the organizer of the postcarding effort—and, as I soon discovered, many other civic actions—was Mariya Genzel. This is her story.
“I build stuff that people use.”
That’s how Mountain View resident Mariya Genzel describes herself on her LinkedIn profile. But she’s not building stuff for consumers. Rather, Mariya (pronounced Maria) builds systems, campaigns, and organizations that give people opportunities to strengthen our democracy.
The result is a dizzying array of civic actions—protests, letter-writing campaigns, parade floats, vigils, and art installations—all under the aegis of Blue Turn Indivisible, an organization Mariya founded in 2019 whose activities exploded after Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory.
Mariya, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union when she was 13, is well suited to the leadership role she has taken on. A product manager with years of startup experience, she’s equally comfortable envisioning actions and executing them. Her technical know-how also means she’s got the skills to implement the ideas she and other community members dream up.
“I can write code, do graphics, plan an event, create an app. I have a startup mind. When I have an idea, I don’t have to wait for other people to help out. I can make it happen myself, so I do,” Mariya says, seemingly unaware of how unusual her skill set is among activists.
Mariya has a warm, welcoming style. She’s also an introvert, which may make her especially relatable to would-be activists in Silicon Valley.
“I do this work completely and entirely out of a sense of call of duty. I’m an introvert, so this is not fun,” she tells people new to activism. The implication: If she can put herself out there, they can, too.
668,452 postcards and counting
Mariya is best known for single-handedly creating a get-out-the-vote campaign in which community members from as far away as Gilroy and Napa pick up packets from her front porch. The packets contain everything they need to send personalized letters and postcards encouraging people to vote. Each packet includes materials for 40 mailings, and Mariya typically prepares about 200 packets a week.
Mariya started the Front Porch campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic, when people were stuck at home, bemoaning Donald Trump’s presidency but not knowing how to respond. Since 2019, volunteers have mailed 668,452 postcards and letters—roughly equivalent to sending a personalized letter or postcard to every resident of Vermont.
But that campaign was just her opening salvo. Mariya’s activism took a giant leap forward soon after Trump was reelected, when she invited people to her house to discuss what they could do to counter the possibility of our democratic institutions failing. The response was overwhelmingly positive. “After that meeting, I felt like I had personal responsibility to help people take action,” she says.
Working with other organizations on the Peninsula, Mariya has been a lead organizer in numerous civic gatherings and demonstrations, including Mountain View’s first Trans Day of Visibility; Good Trouble Lives On, an event honoring the late voting-rights champion John Lewis, Constitution Day, and multiple No Kings events.
Event planners will tell you that organizing even one such event is a major undertaking. Mariya has led about 18 in the past year.
In addition to demonstrations, Mariya has spearheaded several less conventional ways for people to voice their concerns.
Participants in Signs of Fascism Street Theatre stand along busy streets, silently holding signs, each communicating a warning sign of fascism. In Chalk for Democracy, people use colorful chalk to draw pro-democracy messages in heavily trafficked areas. An initiative called Rear View Resistance encourages people to turn their cars into mobile banners by painting voting-related messages on their rear windows. A crocheting group makes red hats like those crocheted in Norway during World War II to symbolize resistance to the Nazis.
Mariya has no set criteria for the activities she takes on, many of which were developed by other groups around the country, explaining, “I do pretty much anything that I can get my hands on and that I can get people excited about.”
Mariya also focuses on local issues, encouraging residents to be part of a regional coalition speaking out against Flock cameras. Her emphasis on developing processes—one member of Blue Turn Indivisible describes her as “the most organized person I’ve ever met”—means she’s ready at a moment’s notice to respond to breaking events. When Alex Pretti was shot in Minneapolis by Border Patrol agents, Mariya organized a vigil in Mountain View that took place the day he died.
“It’s almost like you can’t believe she’s only one person, given how much gets done,” says Karen Scarpelli, a Los Altos resident who has worked with Mariya tabling, writing postcards, and canvassing for Prop 50, an activity Karen was loath to do. But then she changed her mind based on Mariya’s gentle persuasion, which included admitting that she didn’t like to canvas either. “I thought, ‘Mariya is asking people to do this, so I’m going to do it’,” Karen recalls.
Measuring impact
Determining the impact of individual actions is challenging. Research Mariya has compiled suggests that personalized letters and postcards can increase voter turnout, with studies finding gains ranging from 0.1 to 3.4 percentage points. While the difference is small, Mariya points to elections decided by razor-thin margins as evidence that letter-writing campaigns can make a difference. A case in point: former Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian lost his primary bid for Congress by just five votes.
Mariya recognizes the difficulty of measuring the impact of most of the actions she supports, but is adamant that that doesn’t take away from their value.
Her philosophy is that you can believe an action is worthwhile, even when you can’t directly measure its efficacy. Then too, she says there are times when our sense of morality compels us to speak out again injustice – when we think, for example, that our democracy is being threatened – simply because we feel it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether we can predict the impact of our actions.
Finally, Mariya notes that political movements often produce results that aren’t apparent at the time. For example, one goal of Freedom Summer was to register thousands of Black voters. Although the effort fell short of its goals, the movement attracted national attention and helped pave the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mariya has helped hundreds of people parlay their anxiety about the state of the country into actions, a strategy which, at a minimum, helps people stay positive. Michael Belef, a recently retired technical writer from Sunnyvale who frequently participates in Blue Turn Indivisible activities, describes Mariya’s impact this way: “Although people have deep concerns about the state of politics and how it impacts healthcare, the environment, the legal system, we all feel energized because of Mariya’s leadership.”
As Karen sees it: “Thanks to Mariya, you can involve yourself and take action instead of just being depressed and doom scrolling all day.”
When a home becomes a gathering place
Mariya believes that successful activism depends on building a sense of community among participants and that, to do that, people need to gather. For Mariya, that gathering place is usually her 1,700-square-foot house.
While many political organizations publicize fundraisers and speaker events that take place on Zoom, Mariya turns online events hosted by other organizations into watch parties in her living room. Her living room also is the meeting place for monthly Blue Turn Indivisible meetings and postcard parties, which now take place twice a week. All these gatherings are billed as potlucks. But, in the spirit of leaving nothing to chance, Mariya often prepares extra portions of whatever she’s making for dinner that evening so she can share the leftovers with attendees. She also takes time for niceties. During postcard parties, for example, she plays her favorite singers. But the songs she plays are in French, having learned that, if she plays songs in English, people will unwittingly write the lyrics they hear on their postcards.
For Mariya, civic responsibility is a family affair. Her husband, Dmitriy, senior director of engineering and research at Otter.ai and also an immigrant from the Soviet Union, helps with postcard parties and oversees the organization’s finances. Before heading off to college, her two children frequently attended events, as do Mariya’s parents, who also live in Mountain View.
Mariya believes in involving children in the political process from an early age. Her kids knew the presidential candidates when they were in preschool. When she’d deliver her ballot to the polling place on Election Day, her kids accompanied her, flags in hand, so they’d view voting as an event worth celebrating.
She has even created a page on the Blue Turn Indivisible website with ideas and activities for parents who want to get their children involved in the political process.
Fleeing the Soviet Union
Mariya grew up in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, when the country was still part of the Soviet Union. Her mother was a librarian, and her father was a computer programmer. Her father had wanted to attend graduate school in physics but wasn’t admitted because he was Jewish.
Mariya describes her family as poor, even by Soviet standards. Their apartment was about 300 square feet, and she had five dresses to her name. But her family had plenty of books, in part because of a childhood enterprise: Mariya and her brother pulled a wagon around their apartment building, collecting old newspapers that they exchanged for books through a recycling program.
Mariya sees her early education in the Soviet Union as pivotal to her motivation for the work she does today. In elementary school, every student had a Brown Book, a notebook that included a list of values such as honesty and bravery. Its overriding message was that everyone had a responsibility to put the public good first. Although the book was clearly propaganda, Mariya says it left her with a lasting belief that being a good citizen of the world means refusing to be a bystander.
Mariya’s parents decided to leave the USSR to escape antisemitism and because the political liberalization they had hoped would accompany Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership never materialized. Each family member left the USSR with a single suitcase. The family of five—including Mariya’s grandmother—then spent nine months living in a garage in Italy before moving to Baltimore.
Despite knowing no English when she arrived, Mariya finished high school in three years. She then attended Goucher College and later earned an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. During her career, she worked primarily as a product manager at several companies, including Amazon, UPS, and several startups.
Mariya moved to California in 2005 and about a decade ago, quit her job in tech to home school her kids. Now that both are in college, she pretty much works on civic actions from the time she gets up to the time she goes to sleep.
When asked what she’s most proud among the dozens of actions she has initiated, Mariya gives a surprising answer: her success remembering people’s names.
“I’ve actually put a lot of effort into it, to the point where I know most of the names of people I’m working with. I’m very proud of this. I know that, in the end, despite being efficient and organized, this work is all about people feeling connected and appreciated.”
