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September 13 – We will be returning to Andover City Hall for our September meeting! The topic is Redistricting, an important activity that happens every 10 years following the Census. Learn about the processes, the issues, opportunities for reform, and more.  Monday, Sept 13, 6:30 pm Andover City Hall -- Council Chambers 1685 Crosstown Blvd NW, Andover COME IN PERSON OR YOU CAN ATTTEND VIRTUALLY – SEE INFO BELOW This will be a ‘hybrid’ meeting – you can choose to attend in person or attend virtually – we will send connection information to our members on the morning of the 13th. (If you are not a member and would like to also participate virtually, email us at lwvabc@gmail.com.) If you do attend in person, please wear a mask as we are following CDC guidelines. No light supper, but we will have wrapped snacks. Doors open at 6pm.
We will also be presenting our Friend of League Award to Paul Linnell and the Anoka County Elections staff. They’ve been invited to join us at this program to be recognized for their outstanding accomplishments and service to the electorate of Anoka County to ensure safe and accessible elections. (Who has been awarded Friend of League awards in the past? Click here to find out!)
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 LWVABC board members are discussing activities to undertake before the November 2 school board elections. In our LWV ABC service area, Fridley, Spring Lake Park and Anoka-Hennepin school districts will elect school board members. Anoka-Hennepin plans to pose three ballot questions to its voters, as well.
Here are plans from our Voter Service Committee:
Cindy Wetzell and the Voter Registration team are planning their activities leading up to the election. The LWV ABC Newsletter for September 2021 has more detail on our Voter Service work - click this link and scroll to page 4. Transition of the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts LWV ABC Meeting on August 9 in Fridley7/31/2021
 Update as of an August 27 posting to the organization’s Facebook page: “We're so excited to announce that we've found a home for the North Suburban Center for the Arts! We will be moving just down the road to Fire Station #3—a decommissioned fire station that has sat vacant since 2018 when then City of Fridley relocated its fire department to City Hall. The fire station sits at the corner of East River Road and 77th Way NE.” Read about the campaign to fund the renovation of the new building, support staff, and ensure that programming remains accessible to the community at www.northsuburbanarts.org/new-home  LWVMN is proud to kick-off a new ongoing training series for League leaders and members, and it starts with August Academy! These sessions are a great opportunity to brush up on your skills, help orient new leaders, and ask questions related to your work. Each 90-minute session will include a presentation from LWVMN staff and/or board members, and will also provide ample time for questions, networking and information-sharing with peers. Any League leader or member may register for any session.  LWV ABC members are urged to sign up for one of more of these webinars to expand your knowledge of LWV and our work. Each session is 90 minutes and will be a good way to engage further with LWV! Great list of sessions to choose from – Leadership Essentials, Advocacy, People Powered Fair Maps, Voter Service, Membership, Nonpartisanship & DEI, Youth Civic Engagement, and Climate Change Task Force. Let’s join up! Here's the link to sign up: https://www.lwvmn.org/august-academy !   LWV is an organization fully committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in principle and in practice. DEI is central to the organization’s current and future success in engaging all individuals, households, communities, and policy makers in creating a more perfect democracy. Most LWVMN Convention 2021 Workshops and Roundtables were recorded and can be watched on the LWVMN Convention 2021 webpage. DEI related recordings:  Another workshop held at LWVMN Convention 2021, Feminism in Black and White, was a discussion workshop limited to 25 people and was not recorded. Discussion centered on the Duke University podcast Scene on Radio: Season 4: The Land That Never Has Been Yet, Episode 5 Feminism in Black and White. Other episodes of the Scene on Radio Podcast recommended to attendees of the workshop:
Articles recommended on the resource list from the Feminism in Black and White Workshop:
Do you have an article, podcast or video you would like to share with members? Email your suggestions to lwvabc@gmail.com. VIEW THIS VIDEO OF THIS MEETING AT THIS LINK: blob:http://reflect-qctv.cablecast.tv/3247162d-3257-4b5a-9b3c-c7142dd21084 MANY THANKS TO QCTV FOR FILMING THE EVENT!
LWV ABC is upping our voter registration efforts- we need members to sign up to register voters at community events this summer. The list of events will grow, but right now we have openings for the Fridley Community Concert on July 27 and August 24, and Transformative Circle's Night to Unite on August 2. Read below for sign up instructions. And.... we are looking for other venues to set up registration tables. If you know of an event, or would be willing to contact your local library or other venue, reach out to Cindy Wetzell, LWV ABC voter registration coordinator, and she will work with you to get it going. Thanks to Cindy, we have two wheeled carts with a full set of voter registration materials - everything you need! Time to lean in and boldly do what we do as LWV! Voter registration is us!  The voter registration committee is using SignUp Genius to recruit volunteers to register voters at community events. Check out the places we will be at the link below. Events will continue to be added so check back frequently. Volunteers will be provided with signage and all the supplies needed to set up a successful registration table. Volunteer to register voters using Sign-Up Genius at this link -- or go to the home page of our website and scroll down to click on the SignUp Genius Button. This is what you'll find when you scroll down:   Ramsey County Library co-sponsors a number of events with community organizations with some funding from the Minnesota Arts Board through the Legacy Amendment. Many presentations are videotaped but are not all on the same website – see Ramsey County Library Website, Ramsey County Library YouTube Video and NineNorth Cable. Upcoming events can be found at Ramsey County Library Events. Tuesday with a Scholar, cosponsored with Osher Life Long Leaning Institute, is a weekly program in which Twin Cities experts present a wide variety of topics. Some recommendations follow...
The Ask Series was co-sponsored by Do Good Roseville. Some recommendations from the series: Ask an Indigenous Person Ask a LGBTQIA Person Ask a Muslim Woman Part-2  The LWV Upper Mississippi River Region Inter-League Organization is a member of the Mississippi River Network (MRN), a coalition of 57 non-profits and businesses with a goal of protecting the land, water and people of the Mississippi River. MRN is dedicated in supporting their River Citizen community in being actively anti-racist and creating an inclusive, safe, and equitable Mississippi River for all. MRN’s Anti-Racism Hub , added to monthly, includes many resources related to environmental justice. Some recommendations:
Unequal Impact: The Deep Links between Racism and Climate Change – article How a climate plan in Minneapolis fostered racial divisions – article Why Every Environmentalist Should Be Anti-Racist – article Do you have an article, podcast or video you would like to share with members? Email your suggestions to lwvabc@gmail.com. Helping people register to vote is a primary mission of the League of Women Voters. LWV ABC is fortunate to have two new leaders stepping forward to help us build our work in this area as we come out of pandemic-mode.
munity service, like National Honor Society and Key Club, and working with them to find ways to reach students in their schools who will be eligible to vote in the next election. Julie’s shown that this will be an effective way to reach students. By working with a student at Coon Rapids High School, she was able to identify that there would be an opportunity to register students when the graduating seniors came in to pick up their caps and gowns. In two hours they reached 54 seniors to either register on their phones using the posted QR code, or complete a paper form. This is a fantastic success! Voter Registration – Get out into the Community and help register voters! LWV-ABC has a new vice-chair for voter registration—Cindy Wetzell (under the Voter Services Committee chaired by Linda Rodgers). What follows is a preview of what volunteering for voter registration might look like going forward. Thanks to Cindy for this submission to the LWV ABC Newsletter and Blog!  Photo from Sept 2019 LWV ABC Voter Because the next national election is 18 months away, we have a terrific opportunity to build on our current voter registration outreach before the next huge voter registration push in 2022. This year, in our county, there are currently only three elections on the calendar in November—all for school board seats. However, that shouldn’t stop us from building our network of contacts now in all of the cities that we serve. Our goal is to interact with more of our citizens through community events, church programs, festivals, art fairs and even concerts. And there are likely dozens more ways we can be a presence in the community to register residents to vote.
That’s where you all come in. We need to share our ideas and our energy. Because not only do we need to find places to go to register voters, we also need to actually go and do that work—to staff a table; to hand out flyers; to help people fill-out their forms either on paper or online; to answer their questions about registering. To help you do that, we will be providing voter registration training later this month. In conjunction with the Minneapolis voter registration coordinator we have put together a training focused on our communities. That training (on Zoom) is scheduled for Saturday, June 12th from 10:30-11:45. The training is less than 90 minutes and will answer all the questions you have about voter registration. The invitation to the training was sent to your email on June 5 through Signup Genius. We are currently working to request tables at several community events that are occurring over the summer. An email with the Signup Genius link will be sent periodically as more events are available to us. If you know of a festival, an art fair, or a community celebration that might be a good opportunity for voter registration, either find out about the possibility of having a table there or forward the information to me and I can check with the organizer. Sometimes, we can staff a table with another organization such as the Chamber of Commerce, the Lions, or another non-profit. I just ask that you keep me in the loop (registervoteslwvabc@gmail.com) so that we can keep track of all the events we participate in. When you volunteer to staff a table we will provide you with all of the materials you will need. Usually, there are two volunteers per table. Eventually, we will have at least two (and preferably three) complete kits of materials available in different locations around the county. These kits will include voter registration forms, absentee ballot applications, tablecloth, poster and easel, sanitizing tips, individually wrapped face masks, “I Will Vote” stickers, candy, pens and a 3-ring binder packed with information on voter registration. Please consider volunteering at one (or more!!) events to help register voters in our county! Remember, we will be having a voter registration training on Saturday, June 12th from 10:30-11:45. Watch your email for more information! A Conversation with Dave Durenberger and Lori Sturdevant featuring their book, "When Republicans Were Progressives" Join League of Women Voters ABC for this live, virtual conversation on Monday evening, June 14 at 6:30. The public is invited to attend by requesting a Zoom link via an email to lwvabc@gmail.com. The presenters will discuss the book they co-authored, "When Republicans Were Progressive." A planned in-person event in 2020 was postponed due to the pandemic, but participants will find the content of this virtual conversation timely, lively, and forward looking. A video recording of the event will be available later in the week at YouTube @ LWV Anoka Blaine Coon Rapids Area .We thank QCTV community television for making this live program and recording available. A Star Tribune book review commented that the book "...is a fascinating combination of Durenberger's firsthand account regarding three terms in the U.S. Senate, hundreds of anecdotes...a platform for positive change and a skimp yet alluring look into his personal life." Lori Sturdevant is a retired Star Tribune editorial writer and author of several books of Minnesota history.  |
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