What a month!

It has been one month since the re-launch of the new YPAC (April 18, 2006). How we doing? The numbers speak for themselves.

In YPAC's first year (April 05-April 06): 2078 of you took action, sending a total of 4382 messages to your elected officals and media.

Since our launch, in just one month, 1270 of you have already taken action, and sent 2949 messages!

You are well on track to do more in two months than you did all of last year! Tell your friends how they can get involved as well (including your friends on MySpace, Essembly, Yahoo360, and Friendster).

Which brings up the question: what should be our goal? How do you, as a member of the YPAC community, want us to judge our collective success? Should we set an annual goal? 10,000 messages? 100,000 messages? 1,000,000,000 messages?

Look what you did!

Yesterday you collectively sent more than 350 messages responding to an alert posted by Mobilizing America's Youth, "Congress wants you off MySpace (and Facebook, and Friendster...)" Great work! This is the second highest daily total in the history of the YPAC (the highest daily total to date being more than 500 messages sent on June 23, 2005 in response to the alert "Say No to Federal Funds for Drug Testing.") We will keep close tabs on this social networking bill, and you can too -- we have added it as the featured bill on Billtracker.

You gave the media the REAL scoop!

Who says you can't make a difference? In the first week after the re-launch of the Youth Policy Action Center, more that 5,200 of you viewed more than 23,000 pages on the Web site, and sent nearly 500 messages to elected officials and media. That's right, media -- a number of you have figured out that the Youth Policy Action Center can be a powerful way to get your voice in print. The Campaign for Youth posted an alert about a graduation rate story in USA Today, and you responded, submitting more than 160 letters to the editor to papers across the country! Students for Sensible Drug Policy posted an alert about how many college applicants in each state have been denied financial aid due to drug convictions. You sent more than 160 letters to the editor, and look, here is one of them, which was printed as the lead letter in Sunday’s Providence Journal! Education Week took notice as well, reporting on the important work you all are doing through the Youth Policy Action Center.