It’s been quite the semester at Trinity working with students and the community to alleviate hunger and homelessness and modernizing the vote.
CONNPIRG Students are all about training students on how to be effective activists on the issues they care about. That’s why this semester we’ve worked hard to build up our membership on campus. Sending a special shoutout to our Chapter chair Emma Hersom and to Zeynep Oguzer who raised hundreds of dollars for earthquake relief before coming on as an intern.
Read on for some of our favorite highlights:
Hunger & Homelessness
This semester we were excited to connect with our local community to help alleviate hunger and homelessness. We did educational tabling around hunger and homelessness and raised money through meal swipe donations. We also started working with community partners that work to alleviate hunger and homelessness in Hartford.
Expanding Voting
In Connecticut, we’re one of only four states that still doesn’t have access to early voting. This leads to lower voter participation and representation for everyone – but especially for young people. That’s why this semester, with the help of our community partner Jim Lehey, we worked to modernize the vote here in CT. We raised awareness and support for early voting legislation and collected petitions from supporters. This campaign led up to an Early Voting Lobby Day! It was a crazy day at the statehouse with around 400 people coming to advocate for what they believe in- including us! We spoke to Representative Jonathan Steinberg from Westport and Representative Aimee Berger-Girvalo from Ridgefield who were both very supportive of our early voting initiative! Zeynep, a CONNPIRG intern, said it was inspiring to see so many community members coming together to advocate for such a diversity of issues & she looks forward to attending another lobby day soon!
Thank you!
Special thanks to Joe Barber, the Director of the Office of Community Service and Civic Engagement. He has been a tremendous source of support and guidance and we’re grateful for his commitment to the Trinity community.
Special thanks to Jim Leahy who helped students in realizing their political power by speaking at our core meeting, working one on one with students, and hosting the Early Voting Lobby Day.
Special thanks to Jason Farrell Jr. a past CONNPIRG student and the current SGA president. He provided special support around the early voting lobby day helping us spread the word and connecting us to key people.
Thank you to so many other community members like Hayley Berliner the Sustainability Coordinator, and SGA members like Nik Deangelo.
And thank YOU for your support of our program – we wouldn’t be able to do this work without all the students who pay their CONNPIRG fee so thanks!
We’re so excited for next semester as we have many ideas on how we can continue to grow and develop in order to make the most difference on critical issues. If you want to get more involved, fill out an interest card online or apply for an internship on our website.
Have a great summer!!!
Maria Ayala
Campus Organizer
CONNPIRG Students