Oh what a difference a long holiday weekend makes! The Richmond Review & Sunset Beacon helped get the word out, and that pushed us past 350 signatures! We can't thank you enough for your support. It's incredibly exciting to see how many of you think this is important enough to sign and to get the attention of Caltrans. Thank you for your support.

Fun fact: Letters to the editor of your local papers are a GREAT way to spread the word and anyone can do them. Local newspapers, both in print and online, always need letters to the editor. If you've got five minutes and are inclined to jot out a quick letter, you too can send one of your own to your own newspaper. 

How do you do that? 

First, identify what paper you want to contact. The large metro newspapers usually have a lot of letters to choose from, but smaller local outlets regularly struggle to find good letters to print. If you've got a small neighborhood paper or newsletter, think about them, too. You're more likely to get printed there.

Next, go to the paper's website and look for an email address to send letters to the editor. You can usually find it under the "contact" tab (which is occasionally buried at the bottom of the page). Sometimes it's in the "About Us" section. But do a little digging to find the right email address. If they run letters to the editor, it'll be somewhere on their website.

Finally, and this is the important one, keep it short and to the point and do your best to make it clean. The less editing the paper needs to make to your letter, the more likely they are to use it. Use complete sentences, spellcheck, grammar check, and reread it before sending. Especially if you're using your phone, which can be really prone to autocorrect errors, give it one or two careful reads before you hit send. Make sure to include your name and don't forget to include the link to the petition: www.change.org/robinwilliamsrainbow 

If only 20% of us wrote one letter to one paper, that would be dozens of news outlets getting the word out. 

Thanks for everything you've done and everything you can do to help us get the rainbow colors flying for the Robin Williams Tunnel.