Car horns echo through the intersection of Brier Creek Pkwy. and Glenwood Ave., as people in bright rain jackets lift signs reading “Protect Medicaid” and “Save Our Democracy.” A truck driver leans on his horn in thanks, adding to the rolling chorus at the grassy corner, site of the weekly “Freedom Fridays” demonstration organized by Kathryn Pollak.
The sign-wavers are members of Engaged Durhamites 4 Democracy, a local network that Pollak founded and leads. Pollak, 55, is one of Durham’s most reliable voters, having voted in every local general election since 2005. At the heart of her political life is the belief that steady, ordinary civic action adds up.
A professor in population health sciences at Duke for nearly three decades, Pollak has been voting for so long she can’t even remember the first time she did it. In her family, it was as natural as breathing. “You voted, you gave blood, you volunteered,” she said. “That’s just what you did.”
Her electoral participation began in high school, when a civics teacher pulled her into campaigning for an Arizona gubernatorial candidate. “I started canvassing when I was 17,” she said. “I couldn’t even vote then, but I wanted to be part of it.”
That early experience, and a later irritation when her father refused to mail her an absentee ballot, hardened a conviction: voting is not a private duty but an act of civic muscle. “We lend them our power,” she tells people, “and if they don’t represent us, we vote them out.”
Pollak’s activism is a blend of old-school retail politics and modern organizing. She remembers walking a precinct one evening with her young daughter on her back and toddler beside her, eating a quick dinner in the car before talking to voters, one household at a time. That night, after hours of leafleting for Durham District Attorney Satana Deberry, she learned Deberry had won the precinct by just 17 votes. “We were there,” she said. To her, the memory is proof that small, sustained efforts matter.
That ethic drives the weekly demonstrations, where her organizing style is deliberately inclusive and upbeat. Her group encourages positive messages at Freedom Fridays — “Protect research funding” instead of “Stop defunding science.” Pollak also encourages volunteers to have one-on-one conversations with counter-demonstrators. “We ask people to stay kind,” she says. “You want them beside you, not fighting you.”
Pollak sees them as part of a larger strategy: keep the conversation alive, keep people connected and build the kind of community that makes people more likely to vote and stay engaged. She runs a Substack that started with a handful of friends after Trump’s reelection and now counts more than a thousand subscribers.
For Pollak, local races are where the abstract becomes immediate. She talks about district attorneys and city councils with the same practical urgency she brings to phone banking. She cites narrow margins — a North Carolina Supreme Court contest decided by 401 votes — as concrete proof that turnout and attention matter. “If you don’t vote, the wrong people get in,” she says. “And the maps, the rules, the laws they pass affect people’s lives every day.”
She emphasizes how down-ballot races — the ones people often skip — decide judges and local officials who shape everyday policy. “Your vote is one of the only powers you have,” she tells first-time voters. “Use it.”
Pollak points to other countries where attitudes towards voting are very different. “In Australia, you get fined if you don’t vote,” she said. “In the U.S., we just beg people. It shouldn’t be that way.”
At the edge of the intersection, Pollak weaves between clusters of sign-holders, her green T-shirt a blur amidst the traffic. She laughs with an older neighbor who’s come for the first time and pauses to help a woman balancing a stroller and a flag. Her voice is calm and unhurried. There are no microphones or spotlights here — just the steady rhythm of small conversations that, to Pollak, are the real work of democracy.
Photo above, Kathryn Pollak by Valentina Garbelotto – The 9th Street Journal
