Remarks from Katherine Hennigan, LACYD President, at the 2009 Laurel Awards reception:

This has been a year of change and progress. Throughout 2009 lacyd has met with and supported more than thirty democratic candidates and important legislative measures. Some of the candidates include:

♦       Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa

♦       City controller Wendy Greuel

♦       Los Angeles City Councilmembers Richard Alarcon, Janice Hahn, Paul Koretz, Ed Reyes, and Bill Rosendahl

♦       US Congressperson Judy Chu

♦       West Hollywood Councilmembers John Duran and Jeffrey Prang

♦       LAUSD board members Monica Garcia, Nury Martinez, and Steve Zimmer

♦       Los Angeles Community College District Trustee candidates Kelly Candaele; Angela Reddock; and Miguel Santiago

♦       State Assemblymembers Steve Bradford and Paul Krekorian

♦       State Senators Gil Cedillo and Curren Price, Jr.

In addition to these candidates, we continually support the many LACYD members who run for elected office and for state and national Democratic Party positions.

LACYD does more than endorse candidates, however. In the past year we walked precincts, contributed money to campaigns, organized phone banks, hosted candidate forums and debates, and created a popular speakers’ series that included such themes as “faith in politics” and “youth involvement in the labor movement.” We’ve helped to educate young voters about democratic values. We continued the fight for marriage equality, sending LACYD members to camp courage and co-sponsoring the “out west” campaign training to prepare our members for the important next round in the fight for equality.

Further, in 2009 we had close to a dozen LACYD members elected as delegates to the California Democratic Party convention.

LACYD brought policy discussion to our members, endorsing bills in the state legislature ranging from voter registration to water recycling. With other young democrats clubs, we lobbied our national representatives to support the employee free choice act.

Our top legislative priority, Senator Curren Price’s Assembly Bill 30, was signed into law, allowing 17 year-olds in California to pre-register to vote.

We did all this…and still found time to recapture the trophy in our annual softball game against the San Fernando Valley Young Democrats.

We are proud of our accomplishments, but we understand that we have a lot of very hard work ahead of us in 2010 - and we ask for your support to get this work done:

We need to bring more democratic votes to the state legislature to wrest control away from republicans hell-bent on derailing vital budget negotiations;

We need to make sure our legislative agenda is furthered including the fight to make affordable healthcare available to all;
 

And, we need to work as hard as we can to put a democrat back in the governor’s seat of our great state.