 I'm here with Ryan Brown, the new state director for the League of Young Voters. Thanks for joining us, Ryan. Thank you for having me. We want to find out all about you and how you got started with the League of Young Voters, but before we get started with that, for people who might not know what the League is, could you describe it a little bit? Absolutely. So we are an organization that really empowers young people, provides education and tools to teach young people to become more engaged in the political process. We help them find their voice and find opportunities for them to really stand up and play a part in how their community is run. What's the age range that people usually get involved with the League? Yeah, so I would say a majority of our members are probably in their mid to late 20s, but we do serve folks who are in high school all the way up to the age of 35. So those people that decide to join the League and get involved politically, how do you assess where their political stance is? How do you begin to represent them? Yeah, absolutely. For a majority of folks that want to have a larger role in the League, it always starts out with a one-on-one conversation. I think for folks who want to get involved in political work, it's always important to understand what that motivation is. It's important to understand why that's important to that person and be able to identify an appropriate place for them. Maybe somebody is interested in a particular issue, and that's what drives them in finding an opportunity to get involved, to advance that cause, or maybe it's really just to gain a better understanding of how my local government works. How does the platform overall that it represents the whole membership of the League, how has that arrived at? Yeah, well I mean we're a progressive organization, but we are absolutely community-driven. All of the endorsements that we make, all of the issues that we decide to work on, the legislation that we decide to support, that's really all decided by our membership, so holding community meetings, getting input from folks that are interested in making the decisions based on that input. So basically a democratic process. Absolutely, absolutely. So how did you arrive to be the State Director here? Yeah, well I'm so excited to be getting involved with the League. I moved to Maine during the summer of 2010 to get involved in the marriage equality fight, to win marriage for gay and lesbian couples here. It was a great victory a couple months ago. And prior to that I was living in Boston, managing field operations for a gay rights organization there, and in that role really focused a majority of my time on advancing marriage equality campaigns throughout all of New England. So I was always based in Boston, but I had the privilege of being able to go work with, you know, handfuls of other organizations carrying out that work and help them advance that cause. But at the same time also working to strengthen protections for the LGBT community at large in Massachusetts, primarily the transgender community. But having moved to Maine and having been here for two and a half years, I fell in love with the state and wanted to stay and wanted to, you know, to really broaden my horizons and get involved in politics in a broader way. And what I'm so excited about working at the League here, you know, in all of that political experience, what's been the most rewarding for me has really been identifying and developing that next front of political activists, you know, teaching people how to find their voice and teaching them the tools that they need to create positive change in the community at large. It just made me think of the question about what kind of skills that you apply. I mean, obviously the kinds of issues that you've been involved with are, you know, in a lot of places, an uphill battle. What kind of things have you done that you bring to this job that really help you advocate politically? Yeah, well, I mean, I always approach my work in a numbers driven way. You know, I believe that there are strength in numbers and it's really about it's about building power by getting as many people in the community excited or agitated about a particular issue and getting them involved. So, you know, it's a lot about understanding what motivates, you know, what motivates people who want to get involved in the work and finding the right place for them in the fight. Great. Well, what are the fights coming up for the League? Yeah. So, you know, we're entering the second year of a three year strategic plan and we've got a couple of goals that we've outlined that we want to accomplish by the end of next year, the first of which I think a lot of folks are familiar with our voter guide that we disseminate every single every single election cycle and outlines the candidates that will appear on the ballot, you know, different ballot questions that will appear and includes our endorsements and why those endorsements were made. We'd like to increase distribution to twenty five thousand here in Portland and then eight thousand in Lewiston and Auburn. And we'd also like to increase the portion of our membership that's eligible to vote on those endorsements to three hundred this year, which would be really exciting. We'd also like to build our base of supporters, increase our base of supporters up to ten thousand and provide some additional civic engagement tools to really help the community, help those those new members that are involved get involved in their community. One of the things that we'll be doing to achieve that is launching a new series of resources in the form of a civic guide that will cover various topics from, you know, who's who in your city hall to how to run for a local office, you know, looking at this previous election cycle, there's so many successful young candidates that are now, you know, elected officials. And I think it's important that we ride on that momentum. Well, it sounds like you've got a lot going on and it sounds like you probably need a lot of people to get involved and be part of it. We absolutely do. What would people need to do to get more? How could they get more information? Yeah, the best place to the best place to go to learn more about this work or to get involved would be to go to our website, which is main dot the league dot com. Great. Well, thank you very much for joining us. I'm hoping a lot of success with the league is a great organization. Thank you so much for having me.