We want to hear from You!

Greetings Liberty Lovers,

With 2011 right around the corner, your newly elected Board of Directors wants you to get involved! We have established new committees and are working on our agenda for the coming year. If you are interested in helping us form our meet-up events, agenda and direction this coming year, please fill out our survey. We want your input on what kind of events you are interested in attending and/or organizing and what types of things you would like to be involved in.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY ----> https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHp2OE1oUndUNkkzTGRlNzFNS0Ywb2c6MQ

In the coming months, LPNOVA will be establishing additional committees to tackle other important business. If you have specific areas that interest you, or would like to be considered for committee assignments in general, please let us know.

And if you have not met your New Board...

Chairman - Matt Cholko
Vice Chair - Kristin Pavelski
Secretary - John Fast
Treasurer - Rodney Severson
At-Large - Matt Helm

Thank you so much! We all look forward to a great and active New Year!

Sincerely,

Kristin Pavelski

LP's Monday Message

Dear Friend of Liberty,

I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. Even with the elections recently over, we've had a busy couple of weeks.

Our Libertarian National Committee had a productive meeting in New Orleans on November 20-21. It was a shock to us to learn shortly after the meeting that Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan had passed away that weekend.

Lots of people have expressed condolences, and many news outlets wrote respectful pieces about his work creating and leading the party. Some of those articles are here.

I don't have a lot more detail to provide you about specific funeral arrangements, but we have posted a statement from our Chair, Mark Hinkle.

In the meantime, we will continue fighting for the cause of Liberty, as we expect David Nolan would want us to.

Many organizations including the Libertarian Party have come out strongly against the TSA and their "strip or grope" policy for airline passengers. Here's a press release we sent. Some of the biggest newsmakers on this issue are current or former Libertarian Party members. Here's one example.

You may have seen news about the recent releases from WikiLeaks. Whether or not you approve of their methods, I think you might agree with me that much of the information they are releasing is not surprising. Libertarians have a long history of distrusting the motives and public statements of politicians and government officials with their hidden agendas. Nevertheless, I won't be surprised if the federal government uses these leaks as an excuse to seek more power to shut down websites.

As we've said for years, and hopefully won't have to keep saying for many more years, it's time to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Sincerely,

Wes Benedict
Executive Director
Libertarian National Committee

Get Ready For a New LPNOVA in 2011

Libertarians,

As you may be aware, the Libertarian Party of Northern Virginia held its annual convention last Saturday. Attendance was pretty good, and the convention was productive. We made some minor changes to the bylaws, and elected new party officers. After the business session ended, we held a short, informal board meeting to discuss a few things that we need to work on going forward (a discussion we'll continue at our December board meeting). This was followed by a few hours of eating, drinking, and just hanging out with fellow libertarians. A special thank you goes out to Chris Brookover, for hosting this year's convention.

I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce the new LPNOVA governing board. I'm Matt Cholko, and you're all probably pretty well aware of who I am. I am now the Chairman. Kristin Pavelski is the new Vice-Chairman. Kristin served as Campaign Manager for Bill Redpath's 2010 Congressional campaign, and is involved with a several other organizations that promote smaller government, such as the Northern Virginia Tea Party, and Campaign For Liberty. Long-time libertarian activist Rodney Severson was re-elected, and will serve his third term as LPNOVA Treasurer. Another long-time activist, John Fast, is now our Secretary. John is a recent transplant from Florida, where he was active with the LP. He's attending graduate school at George Mason University. Former Chairman Matt Helm remains on the board, but this time in the At-Large position. Matt has been on the LPNOVA board in 3 different positions now, and we're glad he's still here.

I'd like to encourage you to come out and meet all of us, and get involved in our discussions about LPNOVA's 2011 plans. Our next meeting is scheduled for Saturday, December 4th at 2:00pm at the Kings Park Library in Burke. Here are a few tentative agenda items:


Discuss Meetup/Event Organizing and ideas on how to increase turnout
Discuss generating more website content
Identify possible candidates for elected offices in 2011
Discuss management principles/effective use of volunteers
Consider ways to better serve all LPNOVA territory
Discuss fundraising ideas for the next year
Communicating with the membership more consistently
Hear reports from each board member

Whether or not you've attended an LPNOVA board meeting before, this would be a good time to come out. We need to hear your thoughts on what we should be doing going forward. If you've seen some problems with things we've done in the past, or know of things that we've done particularly well, please come out and let us know. We're trying to strengthen our party, and we need your help to identify areas in need of improvement. We'll also be looking for volunteers for many things over the next few months, so please let us know if you're interested in helping out in general, or have some specific skills that you think may be helpful to our cause.

Also, since we'll be discussing it at the board meeting, I'd like to encourage anyone who thinks they may be interested in running for office next year to come out to the meeting and/or send me an e-mail at Chairman@lpnova.org and let me know. There are many seats up next year, and we need to give our neighbors a Libertarian choice for as many of those seats as possible. As a former cnadidate, I can assure you that the experience is a rewarding one.

As always, I thank you for your support of the Libertarian Party. I hope that you will join us as work work to build a stronger, more effective organization in 2011 and beyond.

Sincerely,

Matt Cholko
Chairman, LPNOVA