Saturday, January 25
LWV-RMA Annual Advocacy Program Planning Meeting
Wondering what the League does and what you can do in the League?
Be part of the all-member meeting when we plan
our Advocacy Action for the upcoming year
10am – 2pm, Saturday, January 25, 2020
Lunch included
Tuckahoe Public Library
1901 Starling Drive, Henrico 23229
We will do several important things in this meeting.
We will consider whether we support LWVUS’s continuation of the Making Democracy Work Campaign, which is focused on voting rights, improving elections, campaign finance/money in politics, and redistricting. If we support that, we will need to consider how we want to shape our local programming around the Campaign. As in the past, LWVUS suggests that local Leagues take up this charge in the upcoming biennium, rather than proposing new national studies or reviews, though we are nonetheless free to make such recommendations.
We will consider whether we support via “concurrence” the LWVUS position on Voter Representation. (“Concurrence” is agreement with a decision reached by another League). The Voter Representation Position in Brief is: Support electoral systems at each level of government that encourage participation, are verifiable and auditable and enhance representation for all voters. This link will take you to the background and detail of this new position: https://www.lwv.org/league-management/recommended-concurrence-lwvus-board-2020-22-program-planning. This approach to a new position is new to the LWVUS Board, as it pilots new ways to adopt and/or update LWVUS positions.
We will review LWV-RMA advocacy positions. Do we have positions we want to study (that is, add), delete, update, restudy, and/or advocate over the next year? Remember that our current broadly structured positions can encompass a wide range of advocacy, and that updates, studies, and restudies require leadership and Leaguer participants. (Someone will be asked to do the work!). If you think you will recommend changes in the positions, let us know so we can organize the meeting to maximize discussion of that. Here is a link to our LWV-RMA positions: http://www.richmond.va.lwvnet.org/about_action.html
We will plan our LWV-RMA advocacy activities for the year. Advocacy activities could include educating ourselves through our committees or in Hot Topic meetings, providing public forums for discussion and education, developing educational materials, organizing letter-writing efforts, providing guest commentary to newspapers, testifying to local boards and commissions, developing educational materials, lobbying local elected officials, and more!
We will also hear from the two RMA members who have been participating in LWV-VA studies that we initiated and strongly support – Jane Newell on Election Security and Alice Tousignant on Affordable Housing. They will talk us through the process and progress of these studies. We don’t often have our own members in the leadership of state studies, so this promises to be an informative discussion.
Finally, we will get a mini-tutorial from RMA members Donna Granski and Mary Crutchfield about how to advocate at the General Assembly,
And of course, we will have some fun, a nice lunch, and a chance to catch up with League friends.
For more information, contact Karen Rosenblum, 1st Vice President for Programming president@lwv-rva.org