The 2013 session of the NC General assembly convened at the end of January and is making quick progress on several fronts.
AAUW NC has reorganized its public policy leadership committee for the following purpose:
To help our members further AAUW NC’s advocacy on issues that affect the life of NC women and girls. We will do this by helping our members focus to act on a limited number of bills which this committee will choose.
The committee decided to group bills of interest under four headings:
- EDUCATION – which will be monitored by Suzanne Rolland and the Brevard branch public policy committee
- HEALTH – which will be monitored Maggie Parish of Wilmington branch
- SOCIAL JUSTICE, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND EQUALITY – monitored by Mari Pino del Rosario of the Greensboro and Tar Heel branches.
- ECONOMIC SECURITY – presently not covered.
Again this year, the public policy program will use two email lists for communications:
- pp-alerts @ aauwnc.org: short, focused messages with instructions to write legislators or take other similar action
Subscribe | Archive - pp-info @ aauwnc.org: longer messages, perhaps forwarded from our allies, and discussions of issues that may not have any immediate action
Subscribe (limited to AAUW members) | Archive (open only to subscribers)
In 2012, issues were assigned to different branches. Specific embers of those branches (the “senders”) were then responsible for posting messsages to the pp-alerts list and were the only ones subscribed to pp-info. For this year, the pp-info list is open to all members who wish to receive that level of detail. The new leadership committee, in addition to any branch members who want to contribute their expertise, will be the ones who will be posting to the pp-alerts list.
Aside from the members mentioned above, Judy Balsanek of the New Bern branch is also a member of the committee.
Two other members of the AAUW NC leadership team are supporting this work. Mary Peterson is providing overall guidance and coordination. Nancy Shoemaker is providing technical assistance and data analysis to produce the Key Issues Tracking Spreadsheet, as described, along with other resources, on the page “What’s happening in the NCGA“. Please direct program questions to Mary and technical questions or updates to the tracking list to Nancy – find their information at Contacts > State.
On its first teleconference, the team was joined by Kristina Romines, who is working part time for AAUW as an “in state organizer” assigned to help with efforts in VA, MD, NC and TN. She is based in northern VA, but plans to attend Women’s Advocacy Day in Raleigh on April 9. We hope there will be a large delegation of AAUW NC members at the event to give her a warm NC welcome.
Kristina pointed out that April 9 is also the 2013 Equal Pay Day and that has prompted some conversations with other members of the NC Women United coalition to see if how and Equal Pay component can be wrapped into Women’s Advocacy Day.