Now Tweeting: NAACP

The venerable local NAACP unveiled some new-media tools to attract young professionals like Sharece Sellem: a new website, a Facebook page, and, of course, tweets.

At the organization’s holiday party at the Elk’s Lodge on Webster Street at Dixwell Thursday night, Sellem signed up. Then she asked if she could use the site to network and promote her business and activities. (Click here and here to read about Sellem’s adventures as a teacher and as a performer.)

Sellem is the kind of young recruit to whom the historic (and often older-dominated) organization is reaching out.

“The technology is going to make the NAACP more proactive,” said Jesse Phillips (pictured with Sellem), executive assistant to the organizations’ president, who organized the site upgrade.

Membership in the Greater New Haven NAACP averages between 850 and 1,000, said the organization’s first vice president, Dori Dumas. The membership does include some tech-savvy grandmas. ​“We do need to tap into the 30 and under” population, Dumas added.

Phillips noteded the new site’s more graphic, brighter, and user-friendly features, including the links to Twitter and Facebook as well as ongoing ​“Agenda” bar.

“Every year we’ll have a legislative agenda,” he said.

Sellem was at the holiday party not because she’d heard about a fancy new site but for old-fashioned reasons. ​“I’m a history buff,” she said, and I love the Harlem Renaissance and W.E.B. Du Bois.” Sellem assigns some of her students to write and perform monologues about African-American historical figures.She said it just seemed right that she join such a storied, 100-year old organization.

Dumas said bringing the branch into the 21st century technologically was something being done not only because members have for two years now been lobbying, but that she was modeling the national NAACP.

She said that the organization, with its new site, will help get word about the New Haven Promise scholarship program and local economic opportunities. ​“We have a lot of people who want to become business owners,” she said.

Then she brought Sellem a membership form to fill out.