 Welcome. Thank you for coming to the ACLU of Vermont's 51st annual membership meeting. My name is James Duff Loud, I'm the Executive Director of the ACLU of Vermont, and I just want to thank everybody for coming and spending the afternoon with us. It is wonderful to see so many friends and colleagues here among us. I'm going to just really quickly jump into reviewing the agenda, go over a couple of housekeeping items really quickly, and then I'm going to step aside for the main event. In a moment, I will be introducing our presenters, Nico Amador and Ashley Sawyer, who will be leading things off with a presentation on the ACLU of Vermont's statewide advocacy campaign, Smart Justice Vermont. That is a campaign to reduce Vermont's prison population by half and eliminate racial disparities that are among the worst in the nation. Following that presentation, we will have time for Q&A, followed by a quick, maybe 15 minute break. After the break, ACLU of Vermont President Julie Kalish will deliver a report. I will also have a short report talking about some of the incredible work that has happened over the past year and looking ahead to the work that remains in 2019 and beyond. Following those reports, we will move to the awards presentation. And this year, we are really thrilled and honored to be presenting the ACLU of Vermont's David W. Curtis Civil Liberties Award to the student organizers from across the state who worked to raise the Black Lives Matter flag at their schools this year. So several of them are going to be here with us today representing their student groups. Some of them are going to be coming in over the course of the day and probably around the time that we take a break. But we're so happy to have them here with us and to be able to recognize them and their achievement, their courage and their vision for a better Vermont. So after that awards presentation, we will announce the board election results. We will introduce you to our newest board members and we will adjourn. So, how's it keeping? Oh, let's see. So before we begin, I'd also like to invite our current board members to identify themselves, stand or raise your hand. I would like everybody to have the opportunity to recognize you and thank you for your service to the ACLU of Vermont. So can board members stand or raise their hand please? On that, I'd also like to ask ACLU Vermont staff members who are here to please stand or raise your hand. All the people who planned and organized this event and are also responsible for all of the incredible work the ACLU of Vermont has done over the past year all of the victories and accomplishments. So, if you get a chance to introduce yourself to staff and board members while you're here, please do so and thank them for their work. Finally, I also just want to say a special thank you to all of the ACLU Vermont members and supporters who are here. We could not do our work without you, so thank you again for your support. So, just very quickly on housekeeping, I will draw your attention to the registration table. If you haven't already signed in with Andrea or received your name tag, you can go there. If you need a parking pass for block parking, you can get one there. You can also vote in this year's board election if you have not if your members have not done that yet. I would also direct you to our fundraising team. We're standing in the back of the room, Barbara and Stephanie. There they are. They would love to help you make a gift today. Every ACLU donor who donates today gets a blue ribbon. For any donation over $100, you can choose a thank you gift. Either an ACLU Vermont coffee mug or tote bag. Available all supplies left. So please, there they are. So please go and say hello to Barbara and Stephanie, good chance. I will also draw your attention to the merchandise table where Kate is standing back there. And there you can find a range of high quality apparel that plays into our new and improved logo. Perfect ideal gifts for friends, enemies, and loved ones alike. So tea, coffee, water, and snacks are available at the back. Restrooms are located through those doors. And any other logistical questions, please direct to any of the staff, Andrea, myself, or anybody here. Okay, it is now my pleasure to introduce our presenters. Ashley Sawyer is a criminal justice reform advocate who has been working with the ACLU Smart Justice Campaign as a consultant, organizer, and public speaker since January of 2018. Before joining the ACLU Smart Justice Campaign, Ashley worked with Vermonters for criminal justice reform in their efforts to fight for needed changes to Vermont's criminal justice system. She also sits on a legislative advisory panel focused on using restorative justice to address domestic and sexual violence. Ashley came to this work having been directly impacted by the criminal justice system, and as someone whose life and family has been impacted by the collateral consequences of that experience. So please welcome Ashley. Nico Amhort joined the ACLU Vermont Community Organizer just over a year ago with more than 10 years experience as a community organizer, organizing trainer, and educator. His prior work concludes grassroots efforts to close prisons, fight discrimination, win a living wage, support urban farming, defend the rights of conscientious objectors, and build leadership for trans justice. Nico is previously director of Training for Change where he worked with a wide range of community-based organizations and trained thousands of activists from around the world on skills for making social change. Please welcome Nico. So just really quickly, Nico and Ashley are going to be presenting on the ACLU Vermont Smart Justice Format Campaign. This is part of the national ACLU's multi-year, multidisciplinary, strategic advocacy campaign to cut the U.S. prison population in half and end the racial disparities that have come to define our criminal justice system. As part of that effort, we launched Smart Justice Vermont in January of this year with the same goal, cut Vermont's prison population in half and eliminate racial disparities in our criminal justice system. So we are just eight months into this effort and we are already starting to see the fruits of the incredible efforts of Nico, Ashley, their colleagues at the ACLU, our grassroots allies, our partners in the legislature, and community members statewide. There is no doubt that we still have a long way to go. We often note that it took us decades to get into this mess. The mess of mass incarceration is not something that we're going to reverse overnight. But the energy around this campaign is really palpable and really exciting. It seems every week brings a new development. And so, I mean, I think the momentum that we have generated in a really short time is really remarkable and it is in no small part due to the efforts of Nico and Ashley. So while the road is long, we are definitely on the right path. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Nico and Ashley to share more about smart justice and why it matters. All right, thanks everyone. It's great to be here and it's been such a pleasure to work with Ashley on this campaign for the last six months or so. And today we wanted to give you a taste of some of the things that we've been talking about and working on as part of the smart justice campaign. But before we jump into kind of the big, heavy topic of mass incarceration, let me just start by asking how many people in this room have done something in their life that could be considered a crime? And I'm not talking about like a parking ticket, but like, you know, you took drugs at some point or you trespassed, or maybe you got into a fight. You stole office supplies. Shopping and stuff like that. Yeah. So I saw a bunch of hands up and I think that's important to just look around and notice right in this moment, you know. I don't think anyone would have walked into this room and said, you know, yes, this ACLU gathering room full of criminals. But I think that's part of the problem that we're addressing is that it's very easy to build a definition or an image of who a criminal is and to think of it as these bad people over here, not us, right? When we know a lot of what leads people to become entangled in the criminal justice system isn't just that they've done some harm, but it's also influenced by poverty, by how heavily policed a particular community is, by structural racism, even by disabilities and things like that. So that's part of the goal of this smart justice campaign and we'll talk about a lot more, but just to kind of humanize and bring in the stories of how people end up in the criminal justice system and then how difficult it can be to get out of that once you're actually entangled. So we wanted to start just by showing a couple very short films that highlight some personal stories that are, I think, representative of some of the issues that we've been working on. We'll come back to talking a little bit more about Vermont and criminal justice reform here. Life without parole, 2020, 40, 40, it was like a punch every time he said a number to me. The judge assessed my bill at $250,000. And my entire life was determined right there within 30 seconds. I told my daughter's mother I said I'd be back and, of course, 13 years later I had still to come back. I was a kid. I mean, I hadn't just turned 21. I lost my business, my housing. I couldn't see my kids. My daughter, I came home. She was referring to someone else as her dad. You know, I wasn't a bad kid. I was just a kid who made bad decisions. So in the 1970s, there was only about 350,000 people in our prison system. And today there's over 2 million. And a lot of that growth has to do with the war on drugs, the pressure for people in office to pass harsher and harsher sentencing laws. I think the culture and the belief that the way to solve crime is to be tough, you know, to put people away for a long time and to really build policy off of the worst, most sensational stories rather than really thinking about what is it that causes the most common forms of crime and how do we actually resolve that, that behavior in a way that's effective. How do we address our social problems, not through punishment, but through other kinds of programs and resources and services that are needed to address or can get at the root causes of why people may commit various kinds of harm or get caught up in the criminal justice system. So that's a question that we want to be asking through the Smart Justice Campaign. And I think it's very easy in a place like Vermont to think of these national problems when we hear mass incarceration and we hear structural racism to feel like that's something that's happening somewhere else. I think part of what we're learning is there are a lot of those national problems, a lot of those stories that were highlighted and these videos that also happen here in Vermont. So I'm going to hand it off to Ashley who's going to talk a little bit more about that and then we'll share a little bit more about what we've been doing in the past year. So as you saw in those videos, you know, for example, the first one we watched which was Lebede's Choice talks about, you know, that there are 80% of women incarcerated, for example, our moms. Well, I was one of those. So here in Vermont, it's basically even higher, but it's about 87% of all women incarcerated in the state of Vermont, our mothers as I was. So I received a 14 month to four year sentence. The crimes I committed were false pretense. My felonies were a false pretense and an uttering of forged instruments. So in layman's terms, I cashed two checks that weren't mine. So I got up to four years to serve for that, never having stepped foot in prison and they knew that my crimes are based out of addiction. So I'm also a former heroin addict. So that is one of those things where mass incarceration is fueled especially in Vermont. And it's really easy to watch these videos and think that doesn't happen here or we're mostly a white state. We don't have those problems or, you know, a lot of people watching the media, a lot of the drug busts that are happening lately and talking a lot about out-of-state prisons and how, you know, we only send really violent people there. That's not the case. So anybody in Vermont who's sentenced to six months or up can be shipped out of state. It's not just the violent people. We have first-time offenses who are nonviolent and it's not just people of color coming from out-of-state. Most of the drugs sold in the state are sold by white Vermonters. I was one of them. So that's the reality, is looking at our prison growth, our prison growth follows the national trend. You know, it's triple what it was just a couple of decades ago because of these sort of tough-on crime, you know, ideals, the war on drugs, which the war on drugs was really just a war on poor, disabled, uneducated. I mean, there's just a whole list. It wasn't actually a war on drugs. It was just another form of systemic racism. And now what they've done is they've turned that into segregation and now they segregate anybody they don't want to deal with. So if you have an addiction, if you have mental health stuff, if you have disabilities, if you're poor, this is the end result. So, you know, really looking at racism, it's really easy to look around and think that Vermon is mostly white, that this doesn't happen here, that we don't have a racial disparity and the reality is we have the worst racial disparity in the nation. As you can see, these statistics came out of studies done by Stephanie Suglino. Talking about the reality here is that one in every 14 black men in Vermont is incarcerated and that's much higher than anywhere else based on population. Black drivers are two to three times more likely to be stopped by police but less likely to be found with contraband or in any commission of a crime at all. And lastly, you know, really talking about this starts even younger. So black students and Native American students are more likely to be suspended from school, middle school, high school, and therefore exponentially more likely to have involvement with the criminal justice system further down the line. So these issues are very Vermont-specific. I've suffered many of them. We looked at, you know, Johnny's home and he talked about, you know, the going on 50 or 60 job interviews. While I am flagged as a high-risk employee, it doesn't matter how long I've been clean and sober, it doesn't matter how much education I have, how long I've been free of supervision, I will always be a felon, I will always be a high-risk employee and that will follow me forever. I can't be a chaperone at my daughter's school. I work for the ACLU and I cannot go to the Shelver Museum with my daughter because I'm a felon. So the consequences aren't only for me, they're for my children as well and people who have different charges of the mind are blocked from education, they're blocked from public housing. There's thousands of things that having any sort of criminal background bars you from, for life. So why did we need smart justice and Nico's going to tell you about what it's look like here in Vermont for us this year. So smart justice is a national campaign of the ACLU that has put forward the bold goal of trying to reduce the number of people in prison in the US by 50% and we did feel like because of all the things Ashley just said we need that campaign here in Vermont as well and we want to take that goal and translate it and figure out what would be the blueprint for reducing the number of people in prison here in Vermont by at least 50% while also addressing some of the problems with structural racism and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. So we launched the campaign in January and we have been doing a ton of public education work. We've been meeting with legislators. We've been looking at legal angles and some of things that our attorneys can do to litigate in ways that would support the goal and so some of these pictures are just a few highlights from the past year, our launch in January some of the press interviews that we've done. We did an art show for Vermonters for criminal justice reform showing some of the artwork by people in prison in Vermont to humanize and bring light to some of those personal stories and this is me also mailing a candidate survey that we sent to people running for state attorneys I'll talk more about that in a minute so we're going to click to the next slide. So we did a poll earlier this year to find out what do Vermonters think about our criminal justice system and about some of the goals that we're putting forward and one of the things that we learned from doing this poll is that 68% of Vermonters say it is important to reduce the number of people in prison in Vermont. So we think we are launching this campaign at a moment where there is receptiveness to it and I think people are starting to understand that incarceration is not the way to make our community safer but just a thing that continues to kind of grow exponentially when it's not kept in check that there's a lot of private interests involved in profiting off of prisons and so it's time to start looking at other alternatives so that we don't just continue pouring more and more money into corrections without really thinking about what kind of impact that's having on our communities. So this year we we did our launch and we knew as we started out that this isn't going to be a thing that we can do overnight that cutting the number of people in Vermont's prisons by 50% is going to be a multi-year multi-disciplinary campaign in lots of ways. There's so many different things that we have to look at in order to get to that goal and so I think our focus this year was trying to figure out what's something we have an opportunity to take the lead on in this first year and one of the opportunities in front of us was the fact that all the people who are state attorneys and state trades in Vermont were up for re-election so we decided this year we were going to focus the goals of the smart justice campaign on prosecutors and helping people become more aware about the particular role that prosecutors play in our criminal justice system. So I'm going to say a little bit more about our work on that but we wanted to just show one more quick video to just kind of illustrate this is why we think this particular aspect of the campaign is important for us. So people don't like to talk to me at dinner parties about the death penalty or the war on drugs I'm going to talk to you about things like prosecutors Prosecutors Prosecutors Prosecutors I am here to offer my semi-informed opinions about the power and potential hope in district attorneys and prosecutors to defuck the criminal justice system. There's an acknowledgement now because of a public defender on the front lines that there's something deeply wrong with the way that our system operates. Other than the general understanding of how the system works people have a limited understanding of who the players are and what their actual roles are in the system. It's puzzling to me that prosecutors have gotten so little attention when they do so much I think it's because they sort of operate and sort of this in almost an invisible middle space. But the middle is the most critical part because the middle what happens in court driven by prosecutors and laws that give them a ton of power at the beginning and drives what happens at the end. The prosecutor actually is a huge part of how safety is shaped in the city. What is prosecuted and what's not. What are the recommended sentences for people what does the bail look like the prosecutor is actually the they are the leverage point there. They operate with almost unfettered discretion and have been using that discretion to drive intentionally or not to drive over prison populations over the past 25 or 30 years. The reality is that our justice system is overloaded. We charge people with crimes at a rate that is exponentially higher than we could ever take those cases to trial. The system as it's designed encourages prosecutors to seek these wins that are easily countable. Conviction rate conviction rate. Conviction rate. But when you're just chasing numbers you leave a lot of the humanity out of it. Without thinking about the real harms at that and call it assembly line justice may have on the individual being prosecuted. I wish that prosecutors get to know the people that I represent. I try to introduce them to a person who's not just a criminal who isn't just the product of all the worst things he or she has ever been accused of doing. It takes some vision. It takes some bravery to be a prosecutor who says this isn't right. This isn't how I want an office to function and this isn't the role I want my office to be playing in the deterioration of communities. One of the things that has been powerful over the past couple years is that people advocates have been informing citizens about the immense power that the district attorneys have across the country to actually change the way criminal justice looks. Prosecutors tomorrow could change the justice if they wanted to. The prosecutor or DA has total control of a reform. In fact, we can't have real reform without them. In 2018 over a thousand of those elected prosecutors are up for election. Each of those represents a chance for that particular community to make a statement. What the public wants to have happen is what the district attorneys should be doing. Local DAs respond to the local electorate and they are the only people who have any control over them. And so the way they control who's at the top is to vote. In a democracy, I know it's old fashioned. An elected district attorney has the power to set policy for an office of hundreds of lawyers which in turn has a ripple effect to thousands and thousands of cases every month in the system. One of the things that I'm always mindful of is that people made this system so people can remake the system, people can transform the system, people can undo the damage and build new imaginative beautiful things that actually do work for people. So it's like a big deal. So this year we did a bunch of things around the current state's attorney election and still are. But we thought that this was an opportunity we don't have a ton of really stand out prosecutors running that are the reform champions but we did see it as an opportunity to at least give Vermonters learning and talking about the role of this office. I didn't know very much about what state's attorneys did when I started working on this campaign and so it's been an education for me as well. We hosted and live streamed a candidate forum and invited all state's attorneys who are running in contested counties this year to attend and we know there is thousands of people that watch that online. So we felt like that was a big success for us. We surveyed all the candidates who are running for state's attorney on 20 pretty rigorous questions about their reform positions which we think if nothing else helps to put current state's attorneys on notice to say these are going to be questions that you are going to be held accountable on going into the future. So whether you're telling us the truth about what you think right now or you're saying something that sounds good we are going to be building a base of voters who are going to keep asking and keep paying attention to what decisions you're actually making in that office. Thanks to the help of our communications director and other folks we've done widespread communications via social media, housing videos like the one that you saw doing other things to just highlight the importance of this particular role and we also made a lot of direct contact with ACLU members so I know I had volunteers coming into the office before the primaries we made over I think 300 or 400 phone calls to ACLU members who are living in contested counties for the state's attorney race and also got out and did a lot of outreach a lot of these kinds of public presentations and also did some tabling and other ways just to connect with people to start this conversation so we feel really good about this being a first step and going forward we're going to continue to make this an issue one of the ripple effects that we saw from this work on the state's attorney is even though we weren't necessarily targeting the governor's race and we're really more focused on this a lot of the talking points started to get picked up by people who are running for governor the Democrats here in Vermont revised or changed their platform a little bit to include a goal around reducing incarceration so we feel like within a few months time this message started to get across and we do see people in public office paying attention and starting to really think about how we can translate some of these some of these ideas into policy I see your hand and we're going to take questions in just a few minutes but I want to keep us moving but I promise we'll come back to it yeah so we also just wanted to say a little bit about what's next for our campaign like I said we're still in our first year and so there's a lot more work to be done and I think a lot of momentum to build up off of not just in the state's attorney election but also with the ways that Vermonters are paying attention to some of these big headlines just in the past couple weeks we learned that Vermont is currently sending the couple hundred people who are in prison out of state from Pennsylvania where they have been to private prison facility in Mississippi and we know that's something that a lot of people have reacted to with a lot of concern with a lot of anger and so it's things like that that we want to be building off of and inviting people who are upset about those kinds of issues to be a bigger part of our campaign so one step we want to take over the next year or so is to start developing a blueprint to say here's how we get to that 50% reduction here's how we start addressing problems like the fact that we're having to send people out of state to facilities that we think may expose people to any number of human rights violations we want to figure out a plan to propose to say this is how we actually do bring those people back in state not by building giant new prison complexes but by reducing the number of people in our prison system so we don't have that kind of overcrowding problem we also want to be working for legislative reforms on drug policy on sentencing, on bail reform and on data collection which sounds really wonky and boring but that is actually a really key piece that we're missing right now we don't have enough information from departments of corrections, from prosecutors from other agencies that interact with the criminal justice system that help us figure out where are the problems occurring where are the biggest racial disparities to address those we'll also be looking at winning legal cases that relate to racial profiling prisoner rights and other practices that criminalize poverty, that criminalize other situations that make people vulnerable to the criminal justice system and then finally I just want to say we are also doing this campaign in a moment where there's a lot of energy and racial justice work in this state that is being led by people of color like some of the students who will be awarded tonight and so we also see our role is taking the issue of systemic racism seriously but also wanting to follow the lead and help back movements that are led by people of color here in our state actually is there anything else you wanted to add just about next steps, things you're excited about I'm excited about everything I want to say the shame that the ACLU came out first to notify the public about the prisoners being moved to Mississippi so you can thank deaf for that because being a directly impacted person I talk to people and I talk to families and I talk to incarcerated people and so we get information that way that DOC doesn't want released right off or doesn't want people to necessarily know and if you pay attention to the media I think there was another piece of media that came out that said 917 prisoners are violent they did this little bubble graft in Vermont Digger about the prison makeup and why people are there and I think me and Jay sort of did a good job responding to that asking for the data because since 2015 the DOC hasn't given us any accurate collected data so really working on looking at that looking at bail reform again trying to work on that because about 300 to 400 Vermonters are held daily for lack of bail the prison population out of state is 250 so these numbers seem to match up if you look at the reform measures and if you look at smart justice talking about bail reform prosecutorial accountability the answers to that survey are going to be a tool we use for accountability for you to hold up to those sort of things that you've commented on in the survey and the reform measures that you claim to support sentencing and parole reform ending the war on drugs and definitely the racial justice because the systemic racial justice is where mass incarceration began and started from and continues to today alright so we want to make a little time for questions but before we do that we also just wanted to acknowledge that over the past year we have had the support of a number of partner groups that have helped make our smart justice work possible for marches for criminal justice reform Black Lives Matter greater Burlington, the Rutland area NAACP and the Wyndham County NAACP justice for all women's march will actually be tomorrow in Burlington with the women's march talking about smart justice rights and democracy and the Rue Social Justice Center in Brattleboro so we really do see this as a coalition effort and we want to continue building these community partnerships as we go so with that I think we have a few minutes and Duff you can cut us off anytime you're fine Duff but does anyone have any questions we'll start here since you had a question for your hand up earlier that the district attorney form was available can you repeat the question please sure absolutely so the question was about the state's attorney forum that we held and whether that was still available to watch which it is I think you can find it either through the Vermont law school website and Kate is it on our website as well somewhere on our Facebook page but it is still available thank you you mentioned the poll that said 68% of the Monters think that we should not be on the state I'm just wondering was this an ACLU poll and was it a poll of your members or basically we contracted with a company that does polling so it was a totally independently done poll with a random sampling of our Monters and I think it was about 5,000 people that were serving let's take the question over here in the back talking about prosecutors but I'm wondering if the judges like the sentencing judges are also incentivized to it's a good question what would you say about that so historically here in Vermont I'll use my own sentence for example so they wanted to give me two to six years to serve luckily in my case the judge sort of said that seems really extreme but the judges historically will go on the recommendation so 97% of cases in that includes 97% of cases in Vermont are done by plea agreement so that is all work done before the judge ever gets involved so that's agreements between attorneys work back and forth but most of the time it's really guided by prosecutors so at that point once there's a plea agreement it goes back in front of the judge and the judge just basically says do you agree do you agree and signs it to really give you a simplified version of that process so unless you go to trial from sort of what's been agreed upon between the parties of attorneys does that make sense does that answer your question sort of I mean yes it does judges are just like reverse it to make the judges think about it as in your case where it's like that seems too extreme if we could just get them here that way that could be something to do well the complicated piece with judges are that they're neutral parties so in order to do any sort of training with them that sort of alters sort of where they stand but I think the real key is and because it's more widespread and because there are so many plea agreements that judges aren't involved in until they're already sort of agreed upon is really for state's attorneys in this state to commit to reform measures to commit to changing the way that they sentence people and what they sentence people to and what they're even trying I mean what really getting at the heart of the issue and I would just add to that I think one of the misperceptions that I think average people have about the criminal justice system is because courtroom dramas and things that we see show these really long cases where it's like a passionate prosecutor and a really passionate defense attorney and the trial goes on for a long time and it's you know most people who enter the system it's just like people are being moved through so quickly that it's not like every judge or defense attorney is going to be able to give a lot of sort of due consideration to every single defendant so I think that's also you know part of what we're dealing with is just like the number of people flowing through the system means that there's just multiple opportunities for people to not really treat it very fairly or with a lot of consideration let's see let's take this hand and then we'll come back through here and around the back so in line with that I mean the counterpoint to the prosecutors the public defender often and they're caught in the same mind of having way too big of a caseload to spend any time trying to come up with a reasonable plea agreement or they sort of sign off that whatever goes on to the plea I'm wondering if there's anything within the program that goes to help support or empower public defenders in some way to strengthen the counterpoint I think that really speaks to looking at sort of you know bail reform and sentencing reform as a whole because in the sense that we're just locking less people up right or we're changing some of the parameters about what people are getting even arrested for and sentenced for in the first place to even have to go through the court process and it is common that public defenders especially here as you saw in the videos we know that just there's so many thousands of thousands of cases going through it's impossible and only like 3% of Vermonters can afford a private attorney I mean so that really talks to who's going to jail right so you know it's really looking at why are people getting engaged with the system in general and who are they and really getting some support because luckily they can divert to say we'll use treatment court for example not that that's the perfect solution but that takes some of the weight off public defenders and people trying to do their best because there's not a lot of time I spent 6 minutes with my public defender and it wasn't you know and you don't have a lot of access to them and they don't have a ton of access to you so yeah as you said it's a long game what efforts do you engage in to enlist future prosecutors for election beginning now so that they have the slate yeah I think that's a really great question if you didn't hear it the question was what could we be doing now to engage sort of future group or future crop of prosecutors who are reform minded who are interested in being in that office in a way that really helps us work towards that reduction of the number of people in prison and I think that's part of why we wanted to take the opportunity this year to do a lot of public education around this election because it does it does raise the profile of the importance of that that particular role in a way that we hope engages more people who are attorneys and thinking about running in the future I mean the state's attorney election typically candidates are not really asked to be at forums to fill out surveys it's not written about in the press very much so even just kind of bring more visibility to it we think will help encourage people to run who may be good people to have in that office and I know some of our staff attorneys have also suggested doing some work over the next few years to talk to the bar association to talk to law students and other people who are getting trained as attorneys to also have them think about this as a possible way that they could be involved in addressing mass incarceration I know there's a hand here I was a former judge in one of your courts Do any of the mics close enough? My question is about judicial education it seems to me that the key to helping you find the end solution to your initiatives is through education judges get education every year but it's limited because the era of time is limited but you can get to that program, the educational program for judges through the Supreme Court because they're the ones in charge of all their education so I would recommend that you do that because without the judges being aware of everything that you are aware of it's going to be a harder job to get prosecutors to move in your direction Yeah, thanks for saying that and I think with any of these things there are multiple angles and multiple ways we could go about it and so I think that's one that we can continue to explore I think part of it and I think part of the reason why we have wanted to be so public with this campaign is it's not just it is about these people and individual positions and decisions but it's also what is our culture support and what are the positions that we have to have to buy in from in the general public in order to be successful and I think part of what I mean by that is just a lot of people whether they are state attorneys or judges or sheriffs can really build a career off of that message of I'm going to be tough on crime I'm going to lock the bad people away and we're the ones electing those people so we really have to do the work with our friends and our neighbors to educate people around us to say it sounds good and none of us want to be put in the way of harm but at the same time we really have to think about who it is that we're putting away and if that is actually making us safer and I think there's a lot of studies and things that show that sending people to prison is not necessary of remedy to the harm that they've caused most people are going to come back to their communities and so we want to think about what kind of shape are people coming back into their communities in and we think that people are much better served by getting addiction treatment by having other kinds of access to social services education other things that support people to shift or change the circumstances that may have led to whatever crime they committed and that there is the answer so I've been concerned for many years about the process of this kind of use of confidential informants this charging high and cleaning down middle and all this stuff and it would be great to see if there is someone out there that would be charged either in the administrative process or in the outbreak process of the legislative level with some of this misconduct to make that not an example but to show that they're subject to that recall but I think I just want to urge you to take a food chain approach to what you're doing you've made several great steps but remember that the deputies and the assistants in these offices are the next state's attorneys and some of these state's attorneys are also the next U.S. attorneys and they're all the future judges and I think if they're led to believe that the surveys and these answers and this interaction is going to be made to be used for lower education as they work their way up this food chain but they're going to feel it and see it and sadly have to go to that level to get the impact of those orders but it is an obscure office for most orders that the food chain approach is the way to go which I just can't answer these things I assume they're sort of insulated once you're in an office but we're looking at the problem I definitely agree with the food chain approach and I think that that's sort of where we're starting so as this being our first year of smart justice I think that we were seeing how officials were going to react to us but also how our members, you guys, and how the public is going to react because this is a new approach for Vermont so for example with the survey a lot of some of what we got was that's not the Vermont way but it is. Vermonters are smart, caring look at all you guys, you care about what's going on and you care about doing right by your community and by the people that you love and so I think that the food chain approach is definitely a right approach but it's also going to be we need to change the mindset we need to change the culture you are not any safer because I went to prison I know people who were charged with violent crimes who spent years and years out of state you are not safer because they went through that you're safer because they're not violent people and it was a situation that happened but that was never looked at you know the reality is no one in this room is safer solely because someone went to prison because statistically prison makes people worse and in Vermont I'm clap but I'm holding the mic but that's the reality right and you know we see a lot about the budgets and taxes and we want to talk about that stuff but a lot of these measures and a lot of the things that we want to look at don't take more money it's just a reappropriation of money that's being used to lock people up and throw away the key and then they're getting out and you're not any safer so would you rather someone say go to jail for a year but get treatment and help and get better or would you rather send them away for 10 years and come out after that experience with no support and no treatment and no help and move in next to your child or move in next to your sister or move in next to your best friend that's the reality so we need a mindset and a culture shift from tough on crime so I see there's a lot more hands and I'm definitely going to keep looking to you for a time check okay great so thanks for being here and we'll try to catch a few more just a quick question related to this Vermont has the fifth highest child removal rate from families in the country and I've been part of a panel that talks about that and one of the issues that's consistently brought up about this is the weakness and underfunding of the defender general system I've had two governors and many legislators saying to me it's politically not popular to fund the defender general system even though it's constitutionally appropriate one judge on the panel said I routinely get mothers coming in with about to lose their child and the defender who's been appointed or the appointed attorney has not read the case and as the judge I have read the case and to me this is somewhat related to the overall incarceration piece I just would welcome your thoughts so I have five children two of which I have custody of so I have three children that well four of my children were removed from my custody by DCF through a chins hearing because of my involvement with drugs and keep in mind I had no business having my children while I was getting high and I admit fully to that but you are correct and it's directly related to then again my incarceration with addiction and today my children are all happy and healthy and well adjusted and I see them all and they all know I'm their mom and I spend lots of time with all of them but the reality is the collateral damage so we talked about those collateral consequences when you incarcerate mothers you're incarcerating the whole family and your children is going into prisons to visit their mommies we've got children who then develop things like PTSD social anxiety depression then where do they go and then the schools are trying to deal with how do we support these kids that are going through this and there are more effective tools across the board even if you think that I committed my crimes and I deserve what I got I did mine did my children did my children deserve to be incarcerated as well did they deserve the collateral consequences that they still deal with so you're right, we do need to look at that and we do need to look at the whole picture not just the one person that's committing the crime but the person you know, moms and dads they're the center of these kids' worlds I'm not sure whether I'm just not completely seeing what people are saying but to me it seems like it's not just people it's also laws and the legislature and you mentioned that you've been talking to the legislature but you didn't I didn't hear you talking too much about what that conversation has involved if somebody could tell me more about that piece of it because as just sort of well meaning I do, I think I can do more bugging my legislator than I can talking to a judge or something yeah, absolutely and I do think that that is one way that we want people to engage going forward is to kind of pay attention to what is going through the legislature that we can either be supporting or opposing our policy director Chloe is currently working on the plan for this coming session but just to give some examples of the types of policy things and legislative things that we're looking at at the moment I mentioned data collection which again isn't a really sexy thing to talk about but we think it's a really key part of getting the information that we need to create some of the plans of proposals for reducing the number of people in prison as well as addressing racial disparities in different parts of the system we're also looking at things like for instance, lowering the felony threshold for things like theft so currently you can get or sorry, raising yeah, yeah if you steal something that is worth more than $900 that's a felony and so that charge carries a lot more weight a lot more of the collateral consequences even just bumping that threshold up a little bit means that you end up with more people with misdemeanors and fewer people with felonies which impact sentencing and parole and other consequences coming out of any kind of conviction so that kind of thing we're also looking at what kind of reforms we can make to our parole and sentencing laws because I think part of the issue is not just about sort of people who are getting charged with crimes but also how long are we sending those people away for and then as they're working on transitioning out what are the barriers that we set up that cause people to end up back in prison maybe just for a technical violation of some kind while they're on parole so they missed a meeting with their parole officer or other kinds of situations like that where they haven't actually committed a new crime but they can be sent back to prison because of those violations so we're looking at what those policies are and how we can start to do some of those reforms and then also looking at other things that definitely want to jump in on this one I just wanted to add but it's a great point we are definitely doing this very much as a public education campaign because that's so necessary for all of the reasons that Niko and Ashley have been talking about but there's a huge policy component that you're absolutely right and I mean I just really quickly a couple things I mean first the legislature has been doing a lot of great criminal justice reform over the past several years but most prison population is in decline and a lot of what we're saying is that's great let's keep doing that let's do more of that and let's keep the urgency up we've gone to the legislature with a list of bills some of which have been introduced by us as Niko said some of those examples, bail reform was up in the last legislature and Chloe worked very hard on bail reform we would like to see bail reform go much further there's a sentencing commission there are parole issues so there's a whole host of things there's no one thing there's no magic bullet that's suddenly going to turn the ship around and cut the prison population in half overnight there's a menu of options and the ACLU nationally is rolling out a 50 state blueprint for individualized each state to sort of offer up that menu of options for as well if you cut these sentences for these crimes by 50% that will have this impact if you approach bail reform in this way it will have this impact so we're increasingly looking armed with data eventually to have a more sophisticated policy analysis and recommendations but again I think a lot of the public education and communications work that we're doing is really laying the groundwork so that people are hopefully more receptive to those proposals and understand that the public wants that too, the polling show is that the public is not stuck in the tough and crime era and our legislators need to get out of that so lots of questions I think I'm going to take one more to the side of the room since we haven't come back this way and then I think we may have to wrap it up but Ashley and I will be around at the end of the presentation today if people want to talk to us more so I'm a state rep and involves some of the bills that were referred to but I'm wondering about a couple of other approaches one is getting a court watch program going which doesn't help with the educational effort I'm also wondering about legislation just specifically address limiting how much discretion prosecutors have out of the gate rather than just move it up to and taking also the data which I think financially will make a financial case in addition to other things so the state is making themselves based on accountability and we need to look at how many people that are going back to prison for furlough violations that have absolutely no check and balance without just an individual correction of work people sitting in prison because they don't have housing so if we had dollar signs pictures of dollar signs showing how much tax payers are paying for things that are making matters worse not better I think those approaches could help make another dent in the court absolutely and I think we need all of those things you mentioned the court watch program which other I know there are states and cities that do that and for people that aren't familiar with that that would be like volunteers with the ACLU kind of team to go actually watch court proceedings and take notes on what they're seeing happen within those proceedings as a different kind of data I think to say our prosecutors actually being consistent with what they're seeing publicly their practices are with what's happening when they're actually in the courtroom so we've actually had that on our list as an area to explore I don't know that we'll do it next year but I do think that those kind of innovations that involve community members in creating that oversight and accountability I think are really interesting and then I think a bunch of the other things that you mentioned are really important as well so I'm going to give Ashley the last word in case you want to comment on anything else and then we'll wrap it up yeah in states there is a state that's pioneering so I believe it's New York data prosecutorial oversight committee through legislation so it's starting it's Vermont needs to get on that train because there's a lot of things that once brought out into the light are going to make effective change and the dollar signs like you were talking about furlough it does depend if your probation officer is having a bad day and let's say you get a dirty person but tomorrow he's having a great day because his eggs were perfect the next person gets a dirty way but doesn't go back to jail there is no rhyme or reason there so we are incarcerating people which has nothing to do with committing a new crime so that's a very important place that I think we've talked a lot about looking at and wanting to get some and on transitional housing that's something else we want to take a look at in November we'll be doing an online forum on what approvable housing means talking about the people that are being housed right now for lack of residence so that'll be in November so we are definitely looking at all these areas that everyone has brought up we have a big map and we're going to touch upon all of them I think one way or another hand it off to Duff thank you Nicole and Ashley I get one more hand for them and for the presentation and all the work that is going on and I know there were some more questions so please take the opportunity to ask those of Nico, Ashley, myself other staff and you can do that now during the break it is hard to come back from a break but we have a really exciting and engaging and informative second half of our meeting and I can't wait to get started so let's do it would you all please join me in welcoming Julie Kalish, ACLU Vermont board president who is going to deliver the president's report right now look it's at my is that okay? I have a feeling that I am not going to be the engaging, exciting part of this second half but I might be the informative part of the second half of the program I also have reached the point where I can no longer see and have to do this sorry now I can't see you maybe that's good so first of all thank you so much for coming today and it's always every year when I come here it's so nice to see all the familiar faces and people who come out and make the long trip every single year I have hair that caught my glasses and there are also I see a lot of new faces which is so exciting it's really great and I want to welcome all of the new people to this is your first annual meeting I hope that you find in this community the kind of meaning and sense of community that I know that I have found in my years of affiliation with the organization in fact we have a couple of brand new brand new like three months old and there was a there was a very young sweet black lives matter activist who I saw over here who's doing excellent work already I can tell so that's really exciting too and it's so exciting to see all of the young students who are here who are being honored and I can't tell you how excited I am about that so this is my first time standing up here I have to talk to you before those of you who have been here in the past but never before doing the president's report and I really as I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about I really wish I had something more hopeful and inspiring to say but for as excited as I am by the growth that we've seen in this affiliate and it's amazing staff and really I am awed by the work and just the sheer talent of the people that we have right now working with us at the ACLU of Vermont it's we are poised to enter like such we already have such an exciting period of work and growth here at the organization and that's amazing but we are also at this moment poised to enter a period of legal change a period of legal change the likes of which I never really thought possible in my lifetime obviously I'm referring here to the possibility of Brett Kavanaugh taking Justice Kennedy's open seat on the Supreme Court and I have to tell you it's been one hell of a week to try to write this I have revised this and rewritten this I think twice a day for the past week and I probably could have done it again this morning it just I gave up so whether it's Brett Kavanaugh or whether it is another jurist chosen from Trump's list of 25 that let's be honest was generated everybody knows was generated by the Heritage Foundation and the Federal Society to achieve a certain set of purposes whether it's him or whether it's another person from that list it's really hard to understate the implications of Justice Kennedy's retirement on what the future of civil rights and civil liberties is going to look like and the extent to which we will come to understand those rights as being protected by the Constitution is really hard to understate clearly the right that everybody has been talking about obviously is abortion and ever since the finding of the abortion right in Roe v. Wade there's been a concerted effort to overturn that decision by groups of very highly dedicated people and that was a long path but there was an unmistakable process going on what is your stance on Roe v. Wade to name a very clear political litmus test for anybody who was trying to get near the Senate or near the Oval Office and whether the expected answer was supposed to be pro or whether it was supposed to be con the whole point of that question was what are you going to do when it comes time to appoint the next Supreme Court Justice and indeed over time changes to the bench in the years since 1973 have in fact unmistakably altered and restricted the abortion right. Justice Kennedy himself actually authored one of those decisions it was Gonzalez v. Carrhart and it allowed the government to ban what had come to be known as partial birth abortion I don't know how many of you were paying attention to that but since his appointment despite that Justice Kennedy has also been the last remaining Republican appointee to hold fast what Planned Parenthood v. Casey Court called the Central Holding of Roe which is basically that the Constitution does in fact protect a woman's fundamental right to make the decision whether or not to end a pregnancy but now obviously with Justice Kennedy gone all of that is poised to change whether it's going to happen through an outright overruling of Roe or whether it happens through a functional equivalent by gutting the undue burden test if Kavanaugh or another person from the list fills Justice Kennedy's seat each state is going to be deciding for itself with essentially no floor whether to protect, whether to inhibit whether even possibly to completely ban women's access to abortion and it's going to be basically sort of the situation we had before the Roe v. Wade decision with each state being able to make its choice there are other changes other changes we should also expect to see with Justice Kennedy's retirement we should also anticipate an end to race conscious affirmative action and race conscious programs and processes of many different types those who have been paying attention to this know that there's been an onslaught of challenges to state legislation that attempts to address racial disparities in education many of those challenges have actually reached the Supreme Court over the past decade and those who have been following those cases they also know that in each one of the cases that has upheld the use of race as a consideration Justice Kennedy was the swing vote so as with abortion opponents of race conscious affirmative action have been preparing for this precise moment in fact Edward Blum I know those of you who follow his work Edward Blum he's the legal activist who was behind Shelby County versus Holder he was behind Fisher Ristas University of Texas he has been working to ensure that there are cases in the pipeline that are coming up and ready for Supreme Court review the most prominent of which I don't know how many have been reading about this but the challenge to Harvard's admissions policies in fact you probably read in the paper that the sessions Justice Department just recently weighed in on that case and not surprisingly did so against Harvard given these opportunities I have to say that I think we should expect that within the next four to five years it's very likely that the court will have officially adopted Justice Thomas's position that what equal protection under the 14th amendment means is absolute color blindness and there's going to be little unlike in the abortion context there's going to be little that Congress or the states can do on their own when it comes to that change we will I told you this is going to be a downer we'll probably see other erosions in rights that affect racial minorities it's likely that disparate impact claims under civil rights laws laws such as the fair housing act are no longer going to be the viable kinds of claims that they used to be because precisely because disparate impact claims require government to be aware of race when they're making their decisions which is going to offend that approach of equal protection meaning color blindness without these sorts of tools we'll see a substantial weakening of civil rights era legislation and sort of just as I refer Shelby County versus Holder just as Shelby County took away section 4b of the Voting Rights Act when you take away a key sort of enforcement tool it winds up weakening the the piece of legislation we're likely to see incredible levels of deference to states to law enforcement to the end to the federal government when it comes respectively to restrictions on voting rights to protections for criminal defendants when it comes to immigration and national security all of these are areas that have clear racial implications advancement of rights for the LGBTQ community will likely stall personally I think marriage the marriage decision itself is safe despite his passionate dissent I don't think Justice Roberts will have a taste for overruling Obergefell so quickly I think he's very concerned about court legitimacy and I just don't think he would have a taste for that but there are a number of questions that are already in the pipeline that directly affected the rights and the dignity of LGBTQ individuals these include questions about the extent of sex discrimination protections under Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act questions about First Amendment religious liberty rights to refuse service that was an issue of a piece of cake shop issue but the court very prominently left that question undecided so it's still hovering out there there are lots of others I don't think we can expect that the arc of the moral universe is going to be bending towards justice on these questions anytime soon at least not at the federal level so what do we do so what do we do and this I think I feel like this is where I'm going to kind of jump on the bandwagon with Nico and Ashley and what they were saying and talking about first we vote we vote not only this November but at every single election every single election matters every elected position matters we heard about the work that smart justice is doing with the state's attorney's offices and all the public education that they're doing there are so many offices roles that I don't think people understand the extent of their impact and we need to make sure that people do because it matters so we can also we're all sitting here in this room we can double down on our support of the ACLU of Vermont by some swag these folks Andrea, Ashley Barbara, Chloe Jay, Kate Leah, Nico Stephanie they are all they're working so hard every day all across the state our reach is so huge now it's so exciting to make sure that the rights of the state can survive and can flourish and Duff Duff Duff I truly can't say enough about you and his leadership his vision the energy and passion that he has brought to his role as the executive director it's just it's just amazing the transformations that have taken place over these past two years thank you Donald Trump for that too we have to give credit where credit is due we would not have been able to hire all the wonderful staff without that little Trump bump support the Vermont ACLU I think we had people doing the Trump bump back oh big bump I thought it was like a move okay really the kinds of changes that we've seen taking place I never would have thought possible both for the good and for the bad and for the in between but as far as this organization goes definitely for the good so however you're able to and however you choose to please help support the work that these folks are doing and that can be through bank swag, through donations, through community involvement, participation in events, responses to our can alerts or just talking up our issues and talking us up with friends and neighbors your support really helps it really does similarly support our coalition partners you saw them we have so many exciting new coalition partners across the state we have the black lives matter the Vermont women's march there's so many people and groups doing important work and they're doing that kind of work at every single level at the community level at the state level at the national level and it's more important than ever for all of us to play a role it's more important than ever for us to all actually in doing so our own ability to make change that our individual actions matter because and sort of Niko was alluding to this earlier like let's be clear there's never been any kind of change neither political nor legal that hasn't first had its path cleared and groomed by individuals by people banding together and demanding change so powerfully and with such a unified voice that it becomes morally unacceptable to act otherwise no one actually I'm so excited to be here in the room with them no one actually illustrates this better than the students who are sitting in this room with us you students the demanding change in your schools the students if we look more nationally the students of Parkland, Florida demanding change from nation's lawmakers when it comes to guns you know you are aware of the strength of your voice you know that well that's just the way it is or you're just kids that these aren't actually reasons these aren't reasons to accept the status quo you know that actually because it's the right thing to do is actually the best reason there is for doing anything through your acts you've actually shown us the path forward it's your questioning your insistence on calling out injustice when you see it that actually holds the seeds of change you're our conscience and you can actually be for all of us you can be our moral compass if we let you and that's actually I teach and it's because of you it's because of my students that I actually there have been some dark moments over the past couple of years and it's you who are the ones who make me get up every day feeling hopeful still so one of this is one of my very favorite quotes it's a Bobby Kennedy quote and I'm sure there are people who already know what it is Bobby Kennedy said few will have the greatness to bend history itself but each of us can work to change a small portion of events and it's from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped each time a person he said man but I'm adjusting each time a person stands up for an ideal or acts to improve a lot of others or strikes out against injustice they send forth a tiny ripple of hope and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance it's one of my favorite quotes because oftentimes we feel like we're acting alone and that what we do really has no impact but none of us ever really knows how far the ripples will extend from any one of our acts but we need somehow to believe that they will so thank you thank you for everything that you do that you do to send out a ripple of hope thank you thank you Julie okay so as happens every year I've left myself very little time to talk every year I say I'm not gonna do that and every year I do so I'm gonna talk quickly um and I'm gonna pick up on some of the themes that Julie sounded because here we are about a month and a half out from an election with pretty enormous implications for not just Vermont but obviously for the whole country we have a supreme court Trump is about to get his supreme court pick he's he has been filling the lower courts with extremists for some time and will continue to do that the same the same has been happening at the state and local level over many years um doing possibly as much or more damage to American civil rights and civil liberties than the Trump administration has even managed to do over the past 19 months and two days not that I'm accounting um I mean we have obviously I don't have to tell you we've witnessed in unprecedented and relentless assault on our laws on our values on the rule of law to the point that doesn't seem to be an exaggeration to say that the fate of our democracy is very much in doubt um and so you know again sounding on the gloomy themes of Julie's portion the gloomy portions of Julie's report and so I mean as she said what do we do about that um you know one answer has always been the ACLU's answer is we fight like hell right about these things we have to fight like hell and that's what we do that's exactly what the ACLU, our supporters our friends our allies across the country have been doing um you know the ACLU as you know has been backed by a growing membership the support of our members nationwide has allowed us to add new staff launch ambitious campaigns and initiate upwards of 200 legal actions to counter the Trump administration's agenda um you know just on immigrant rights alone uh ACLU lawsuits have stopped the monstrous policy of separating young families at the border we've sued over Jeff Sessions' blanket denial of asylum to victims of domestic violence and gang violence and we've filed multiple challenges to the administration's ever expanding immigration detention system and that's just a small sample of what we have done and with more to come from both sides in that fight um in Vermont over the past year we have also fought hard for an alternative vision to what we're seeing at the federal level uh as the ACLU has done nationally we've continued to stand with Vermont's immigrant communities including the migrant justice activists who've been targeted for politically motivated retaliatory arrests and detention we filed multiple FOIA lawsuits related to ICE and border patrol activities statewide that we still don't know the extent of or the details of but we're going to find out um and we're going to keep pushing local and state policy makers to do more to ensure that immigrant rights are respected and that immigrant communities are safe as we have been doing we have continued to fight for racial justice in Vermont where people of color are still disproportionately disciplined in our schools stopped and searched by police and incarcerated in our prisons we're working with community partners to pass legislation establishing ethnic study standards for all of our public schools so that all students voices histories and experiences are respected and are included we will be insisting that Vermont's new uh racial equity panel uh newly formed takes action to dismantle institutionalized racism in this state of our two racial profiling lawsuits now pending against Vermont law enforcement one is at the Vermont supreme court awaiting decision the other is now moving forward despite the efforts of the city of Bennington um to to have it thrown out both times unsuccessfully uh we have continued to stand with Vermont's homeless community to oppose the further criminalization of poverty in this state again working with community partners we have helped to feed efforts to criminalize low level public order uh offenses in Burlington and we pushed for an end to local ordinances that criminalized panhandling in multiple Vermont cities and towns including right here in Montpelier we settled a lawsuit with Burlington for its role in evicting so-called nuisance tenants and we immediately filed another lawsuit against Burlington this time challenging the city's eviction of homeless encampments and its practice of confiscating without due process in some cases the only earthly possessions of some of our most destitute practices that blatantly violate our our laws and offend our values so we are fighting like hell and for the ACLU in Vermont and elsewhere that is traditionally meant filing a lot of lawsuits and we are going to keep doing that but clearly lawsuits alone are not enough okay um if there was any doubt of that just look to the supreme court's willingness this past term to abrogate its responsibility for safeguarding fundamental fundamental principles and premises of our democracy in upholding the Trump administration's Muslim banner and the fact is while the courts remain critical to the defense of civil rights we cannot rely on them alone and furthermore we must recognize that the election of Donald Trump is but a symptom of a much larger problem in our democracy that if not fundamentally correct it is going to resurface again and again and again yes it can get worse and the courts aren't going to do that work by themselves they can't do that work by themselves um and so recognizing that fact the ACLU has for several years now been working to develop and incorporate new strategies more strategies to safeguard our rights and advance justice and equality at the local state and federal levels much of the work I just described in Vermont over the past year alone involved not just litigation but also policy advocacy, community organizing strategic communications and public education and with the new staff that we've been able to bring on we are leveraging these new strategies to involve more ACLU members, supporters, students and voters in the political process to get political okay you may have heard that the ACLU is moving towards a more political becoming a more political organization and that changes under way here in Vermont as well you've just heard about our first initial foray into this stage our first steps into becoming more politically active although we remain non-partisan and will continue to refrain from endorsing or opposing candidates for office but our first step forward in this direction is obviously the smart justice campaign this year for the first time in our history the ACLU Vermont is employing political and electoral strategies to raise awareness, increase engagement and mobilize Vermonters to hold public officials more accountable to the vision of Vermont that we all want to see realized as Nico mentioned previously we conducted statewide polling we found that two-thirds of Vermonters want smart justice reforms and we're using those findings to show the candidates and to show all public officials that the public is behind them if they enact reform and the public has moved past the tough on crime era armed with the polling data we conducted candidate surveys and published a voter guide again providing Vermont voters for the first time with information about the most powerful elected officials they've never heard of, their local state's attorneys we sponsored candidate forums, ran paid ads, hosted webinars, gave presentations, all the things that Nico mentioned and much much more all things that we have never done before and even though this specific campaign is only 20 months old we've already succeeded in making mass incarceration a campaign issue and establishing a strong reform frame in the public discourse and the political discourse forcing even old school candidates to acknowledge that yeah Vermont does need to reduce its prison population that is a world away from where we were 20 years ago when the candidates would be falling all over themselves to proclaim who was tougher on crime than than the rest that framing and that framework and that orientation is going to be is the groundwork that is going to be absolutely critical to the ultimate success of this long-term campaign and we're not going to stop with smart justice the campaign is only just beginning it's going to continue but we're going to build from the experience as we head into the next legislative session and beyond last year the legislature, our legislature concluded the first biennium of the Trump era and while there are many examples of great leadership that the ACLU worked to support including legislation to restore net neutrality to address systemic racism in the state to end sexual assault in the workplace and to reduce our prison population and the fact is we and our elected officials must do far more to meet the challenges that we face in this historical moment. Here in Vermont we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to articulate a better broader vision and agenda and to counter the profound injustices that we're seeing at the national level and to do that it's going to be imperative that we engage more people in the political process again more students more activists more voters to demand and win changes here in Vermont that can reverberate outside the state. Vermont has already shown that it can rise to the occasion and lead on these issues but we need to be doing much more of that right now the lessons we are learning through smart justice will allow us to build on the experience to hold our elected leaders accountable and spur them to take those bolder actions and so to conclude I'm just going to repeat again that the ACLU must and will continue to fight in the courts we're not going to stop doing that ACLU litigation can be so powerful and we saw that most recently in the lawsuit to stop the separation of immigrant families at the border that's just one example of the power of our legal programs nationwide but the point is if we're going to be effective and win the many battles we still have to fight the battles that Julie alluded to and so many more we're going to need to engage, educate organize and mobilize people like never before to do the difficult work of building power from the ground up and to support our grassroots partners who have been doing that work for a long time and we're going to need your help so we call on you our members and supporters to stand with the ACLU in this difficult but crucial task of building and sustaining movements for social change in the state and across the country and we are confident that working together we can advance an alternative inclusive and positive agenda we can hold our government accountable and we can win thank you we're going to move right on into our awards presentation and this year it is my great privilege and great honor I'm very excited to be here to present the ACLU Vermont's David W. Curtis Civil Liberties Award to the student organizations and their members who earlier this year succeeded in making their schools among the very first in the nation to raise the Black Lives Matter flag so I don't think I have to tell you why these actions were so powerful and so significant institutionalized racism and white supremacy remain woven into the fabric of our society and our state as they have been since before the founding of this country but in recent years we have seen an onslaught of racist rhetoric and actions at the highest levels of government and you know what I'm talking about continuing police violence against people of color and the continuation of new Jim Crow policies not just in our criminal justice system but at every level of our society from schools to health care to housing and more all of that applies in full to Vermont same as everywhere else and so it is in that context and in the face of no doubt many doubts from the doubters and attacks from the haters from far too many white people in this state who still remain indifferent or far too indifferent in the face of massive inequality and injustice it is in that context that these students took action it did something bold and beautiful and powerful and so we salute them and we stand with them in the groups that they represent and with people of color across this state and across this country and we say it again that yes black lives matter we have with us here today representatives from several of these amazing groups to receive the award on their behalf not all the groups were able to make it it's a busy time of year but we're going to make sure that they do receive them but I would like to ask the students who are here to come up the ACLU and its members are proud to present this award to the members of the Montpelier High School racial justice alliance the Burlington high school social justice union U-32 high school's BLAM black, latinos, asians and many more school aware, Brattleboro union high school aware the Essex high school diversity club and youth for change also of Brattleboro so again those that are really going to help me present them first Montpelier high school racial justice alliance you can just identify yourselves so that you can present the award to you and I'm going to read the award once they've been presented I'm the Burlington high school social justice union just kidding we do have however U-32's BLAM yes, that I'm missing out I think that's everybody, is the middle school representative? I'm sorry so Brattleboro area middle school aware that we've just presented to these groups they would be able to read this follows the second civil degrees union in Vermont presents its 34th annual David W. Curtis civil degrees award to these students and the organizations that they represent for courageously and with great integrity leading the movement to fly the black lives matter flag over their schools for lifting up the experiences of students of color in Vermont affirming their importance and their truth for advancing racial justice and equality promoting dialogue and expiring change in our communities for confronting systemic racism and racist violence in all its forms in Vermont and nationwide for raising their voices to demand a better of ourselves our state and our country with this award we recognize their historic accomplishment and their continuing dedication to making our schools and our state places where all are safe and welcome and where every rematcher can thrive awarded this 22nd day of September 2018 in Montpelier Vermont please give a big hand it's not a pop quiz we did not sign all of them in our educational institution in Montpelier High School was because we wanted to demand direct change basically every single injustice ingrained into the system and we also wanted to call other institutions specifically educational ones with youth who wanted to make a change thank you and also outside support that's not just administration being the people in this room is the biggest thing that is helping us out with promoting justice in society so thank you from the start or did you have any kind of opposition did you have so that's when we get to the administration and faculty not all administration faculty was on board to even like get the pass from the school board to raise the flag so it really took the community supporters who are willing to say yes this needs to happen right now to get the faculty and administration to change their ideas thank you all so much go over to please welcome to state first come on you guys so we're actually ahead of schedule we also didn't tell them we were going to take questions from the audience so the last couple orders of business are upon us first to announce the election results we have two long time board members who are stepping off the board, Tracy Griffith and Denise Bailey and of course we want to thank them for their commitment to this organization thank them for their service so please to announce our two new board members who are elected this year Caterina Campbell and Gabrielle Lucas as here Gabrielle could be here because of a prior commitment but just very quickly I'll just introduce them Caterina has worked in the movement for intersectional love and liberation as a diversity educator representative for legislative councils community organizer anti-violence program director and now as the coordinator of programs in leadership at UVM's women's center dedicated to centering the lives of those most impacted by injustice and violence Caterina aspires for cultural and systemic change that emerges from loving communities that celebrate and connect across difference Gabrielle has served in the state legislature representing Windsor County Gabrielle's professional life reflects her commitment to education for nearly 30 years she has served colleges and universities in many roles including administrator faculty member health educator and counselor she currently serves on the board of directors for second growth in the Hartford-Dismissed House both Caterina and Gabrielle to the board lastly I really want to thank all of you again for coming and for your support thank you for voting thank you for retiring new and current board members for your service and yeah thanks everybody for attending our 51st annual membership meeting yes I want to interrupt which is going to watch as people who know me I'm Ewan Barr, I served four years on the board and when you talk about voting the fact is when you have a non-contested election our votes don't mean anything there's no point in voting because the candidates have been selected for the number of seats that are available and I think that the ACLU should stand for the proposition that democracy begins at home and it's not democracy you don't get a real choice very nice thank you it's a lot of process, a lot of other people sure, I understand I would just point out that our membership bylaws allow for either contested or uncontested elections over the 51 years they sit there have been any contested and non-contested elections some years they're contested some years they're not and there are a number of reasons for that the board has debated and discussed this policy recently and so last year we voted on changes to the bottle as where the votes absolutely mattered I think the year before that there was a contested election just to be clear there's no policy against contested elections just practice as I say the bylaws allow for both and sometimes it's one sometimes it's the other sort of where things stand but my whole taken so before I close again I do want to thank you all for your support please consider making a donation with Barbara and Steph at the back table to ensure that people of all ages across Vermont experience the promise of justice and equality for all in some ways we are just getting started and there is still a lot of work to be done in this state as you all know so please continue supporting me please stay engaged, please stay in touch thanks again for coming onwards