Event Update: 1/21/2009

EMPOWER:  CANVASS VOTERS THIS WEEKEND
We’re turning out voters for the city council special election in District 2!  Help us canvass this Saturday and next Saturday, from 10am-2 or from 2-6pm.  Read why special elections are important.  Help get out the vote! 
Sign up here, or email  mac@paleague.com to volunteer for a shift

ENGAGE: “SIGNS OF CHANGE” political activism art exhibit
Opening this Friday at 6pm: Admire the posters, photographs, audio clips, and ephemera of over 40 years of political activism from around the world.  Visit our table there  PA League on Thursday, Jan 27th and Friday Feb 27th from 3pm - 6pm as we register voters and pass out voter rights information at the “Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now” art exhibit at CMU’s Miller Gallery.  Learn more about the exhibit and see some of the art at their website,

LEAD:  GRASSROOTS ORGANIZER INSTITUTE
Save the date:  The PA League is back with its series of grassroots organizer trainings that are free and open to the public.  If you’ve always wanted to do more for your community’s political situation, there are three dates coming up this spring that will give you the skills and insight you need to be a leader for change.

Click above to sign up to receive additional agenda information for any of the trainings above (space is limited to 24 attendees per training)

Tags: art, Carnegie Mellon University, Civic engagement, grassroots organizer, green jobs, pittsburgh, political activism, registration, rights, Upcoming Events, voter, young, Youth

Standing up for America

Standing Up for America!

Terry and I spent the morning with our friends Jerry, Andy, and Kelly from the United Steelworkers at the US Steel Clairton Works making sure that everyone there was registered to vote before the registration deadline Monday. Thanks to the USW for bringing us in.

You may be wondering, why, standing up for America, is Terry crouching in this photo? I suggest spending a little time out talking to voters with him, and you will see that he does things his own way. Not that he is any less effective for it: there are a few people who will be out at the polls November 4 who would not have been able to vote this year without Terry’s dedication this morning!

Mac

Tags: 2008, canvassing, election, new voters, Pennsylvania, registration, steelworkers, voter

Registering Voters makes the News!

We got a spot in the Post-Gazette for our jail registration work in conjunction with Just Harvest; Goodwill of Southwestern Pennsylvania; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN; the Community Voters Project; Work for Progress; and Duquesne University nursing and political science students last week!

“Spearheaded by inmate program director Jack Pishke, it was the largest registration effort to date at the jail and the only one jail officials knew of statewide, in anticipation of the last registration day: Oct. 6.

In a dizzying two hours, the group helped to complete 456 new registrations and about 700 absentee ballot applications.

Unlike most of the younger volunteers, Ms. Rabinowitz, 67, of Park Place, had been in jail before. She was locked up with a group of organizers for two separate stretches in 1963, after the group was arrested for registering rural black voters in the south with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Those voters, she said, were scared because “they’d never had the right to vote before and we couldn’t tell them it wasn’t dangerous.”

The jail inmates today were just eager. And hopeful.”

Read the full article

Tags: allegheny county, Allegheny County Jail, disenfranchised, election, ex-offenders, inmates, pa league of young voters, pa league of young voters education fund, Pennsylvania, registration, unlock the vote, vote, voter, Voting