<h2>Pacific Regional Leadership Conference participants</h2>

March 11, 2011

Memorandum

TO:              Pacific Regional Leadership Conference participants

FROM:         Dennis Van Roekel, NEA President

RE:              Sign-Ups for www.EducationVotes.org  Volunteerism

Our union, State Affiliates, teachers, school support staff and public education face unprecedented attacks. Collective bargaining, pensions, fair dismissal procedures and collective bargaining are under fire everywhere it seems.

Now is the time to use every tool at our disposal to fight back, and nothing will be as important as the activist database we’re building on EducationVotes.org. When members sign up to volunteer on the site, they enter into a database that gives us immediate access to up-to-date information in every state about volunteers. Any state affiliate can access these volunteers for phone banks, rallies, town hall meetings and more.

This database will be crucial in the fight to protect our students, our members, strengthen our association and engage in the state battles we are fighting nationwide.  But we cannot do it without you!

Unfortunately, early returns on sign-ups show that right now we don’t have many of you with us!  As of March, only 11 percent of Pacific Regional Leadership Conference participants had signed up on the site.  Eleven percent of you!  We must do better.  Take 30 seconds right now, head to EducationVotes.org and fill out the box on the top right corner of the site that says “Join Now”.

At the regional conferences I challenged each of you to sign up five colleagues when you returned home.  If you have already signed up five people – please email me personally at DVan_roekel@nea.organd let me know who they are. When each one of you recruits five volunteers, you help expand our network in your region by more than 4,000 people.  That’s 4,000 new, valuable recruits ready to mobilize when an urgent need arises.

War has been declared against us, and we cannot lose if we mobilize and act as a unified force.

Members and students across the nation need your support and leadership now more than ever. Sign up is easy and it is something everyone can do to help.

Thank You.