Jay Brown is a retired physician in Ames.
The enemy of authoritarianism is community. Our country needs more community. Now there’s a simple way to resurrect childhood friendships in the battle against President Donald Trump and his efforts to ruin our beloved country.
Hallways.vote is a free website that uses public voter and public donation data crossed with high school yearbooks. The result allows the user to effortlessly find former classmates who share their convictions.
The origins of this tool date back to January 2025, when my longtime friend and high school classmate, Peter Hedges, a venerated writer and director, began commiserating on Zoom calls with some former classmates in the wake of Trump’s reelection. They met every other week. I joined in the spring of last year, when I heard about the gatherings. Initially called (Valley) Tigers for Democracy, we changed our group’s name to Iowans for Decency.
Conversations included discussion of old times and current events. However, along the way, political activism became the core. Turns out, Ashley Hinson (the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Iowa) went to West Des Moines Valley High School as well, and that race has been the focus of our activism.
Our Valley alumni group began as emotional support but now has hundreds of members, has raised nearly $100,000, made calls, written letters, and staged several events. It’s been a blast. We still meet every other week on a Zoom call, allowing participation from people across the country. While I love seeing old friends, I’ve also met awesome new friends. We will continue with these meetings well past this November’s election.
Hallways.vote can be used to connect with old friends. Logging on requires only your name, city, school and graduation year, and from that, lists of your former Iowa high school classmates organized by the likelihood you know them based on home rooms, participation in sports and clubs. If you log on and we don’t have your yearbook, please let us know! Together we’ll find it.
The calls are fun. This is not the typical political cold call; these calls are made to like-minded people. Some are tickled to join our group, and while some are fully divested of politics for whatever reason, the calls still can be uplifting. Connecting with other people is rewarding, even if there is no political gain.
Our group now is robust and diverse, with a broad spectrum of incomes, ideologies, ages and skills. There are even some disaffected Republicans in the mix. Our shared belief is that Donald Trump and his policies are terrible for America.
As the election approaches, our Valley team will shift from calling like-minded folks to grow our group, and instead call classmates identified as independent voters. Imagine if a relatively apolitical voter gets a few calls before the election from three different classmates. We think that will have much more impact than calls from strangers.
So if talking to old friends in an effort to build community and strengthen our democracy sounds interesting to you, log onto hallways.vote, and help us build this network with your former classmates to save our state and country from the politics of hatred.