Roots and Heritage festival and other happenings

The Roots and Heritage festival was lots of fun. KFTC was out in full force. We registered voters and had a chance to talk to people about restoration of voting rights for former felons. For those of you who don’t know much about the issue Kentucky is the only state where felons don’t automatically get their voting rights back. The process is long and arduous a former felon must right an essay, pay a fee, have three recommendations, and than a full pardon from the governor. This is something that dates back to Jim Crow and disenfranchises mostly minorities and poor people. In order making the return of voting rights automatic Kentucky has to change its constitution.

KFTC was out at the Roots and Heritage festival informing people about the issue and getting to them to sign post cards asking State Senate President David Williams to support the issue. Currently he is blocking efforts to bring the bill before the state senate. The state house of representatives overwhelming supported the bill.

Our efforts on campus have started to take off as well. We have managed to register even more students to vote. After some difficulty we finally managed to find a meeting location that accommodated the size of our organization at the Center for Student Involvement at the UK student center.

We have been really active. KFTC is planning on having even more voter registrations tables. Were also planning a huge concert that is set for October 23^rd from six to 11 pm. We’ll have free food and entertainment. Depending on the weather the event will be at Memorial Hall or the amphitheater. WRFL, Greenthumb, Amnesty International, Lasso have all agreed to cosponsor. So come and check it out.

KFTC Internship “The early days”

The first weeks of working for Kentuckians for the Commonwealth have been great.  The main goal of my internship is to reach out to the UK community and the surrounding area. Making sure people are registered to vote, informed on the issues, and mobilized on Election Day. So far I have focused on UK ‘S community.

Over the summer fellow KFTC member Joe Gallenstein and I started a KFTC chapter at UK. We had no idea if this would be successful, but we were determined to try. Having a chapter at UK ,we reasoned, would enable us to reach out to students and get KFTC’s issues out on campus. So we got to work. We registered our organization, created a facebook group, flyered all over campus, talked to students at every welcome event that we could. We set our meeting time and reserved a room in the Student Center. Now all we could do was wait and hope for a good turnout.

Over thirty people showed up to our first meeting. It went great. UK KFTC has been very active on campus so far. We have registered over two hundred students to vote, and plan on having one voter registration drive a week until the registration deadline.  We are working on hosting a concert to promote issues like stopping mountain top removal, restoring former felons voting rights, and implanting a state wide progressive tax code.

Today my good buddy Joe and I are heading to the Roots and Heritage festival to reach out to the larger community.  We plan to register voters and promote restoration of voting rights. More on this in my next post.