Six years ago, I sat down at my kitchen table with a plan to write to 1,000 Alabama voters encouraging them to vote in the 2017 special election. I couldn't have imagined how that experiment would grow into what Vote Forward is today. Two midterms, a presidential election, dozens of experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of our collective work, and more than 30 million letters later, I'm immensely grateful for this community of letter writers and so proud of what we've accomplished together.
And now it's time for a change! I've always known I would pass the torch of day-to-day leadership at some point, and this moment, as we prepare for enormously consequential elections in 2024, feels like the right one. I have the highest confidence in the Vote Forward team's ability to continue empowering our community of volunteers to encourage fellow citizens in underrepresented communities to vote, and believe the fresh perspective of a new leader will only strengthen this community's efforts.
While my day-to-day involvement with the team will wind down over the coming weeks, I'll still be very much involved as a member of Vote Forward's board and, of course, as a letter writer.
I'm also thrilled to announce that Yasmin Radjy, who some of you may know as the executive director of our affiliate organization, Swing Left, will assume that mantle for Vote Forward as well. Yasmin has more than a decade of experience encouraging potential voters to make their voices heard and working to strengthen our democracy, with previous roles as an organizer, a leader at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and as a senior advisor at the Treasury Department working on the implementation of the American Rescue Plan. After working alongside Yasmin for the last year, I can confidently say she has a unique and powerful ability to support Vote Forward's efforts, and is the ideal leader to further Vote Forward's legacy of groundbreaking research and experimentation to increase civic participation.
In practice, this means not much will change: under Yasmin's leadership, Vote Forward's overall nonpartisan mission to promote active participation in our democracy will continue to flourish as we develop new letter writing campaigns, launch new Labs experiments, and continue the work to engage potential voters from historically underrepresented communities across the country.
You'll hear a bit less from me, but you'll get to hear a lot more from the rest of our small but mighty team—including research and experimentation updates from Emily and Phong on our data team, and more about events, training, and new ways to get involved from Nia on our mobilization team.
Growing and leading this organization from its first days at my kitchen table to a community of 250,000+ volunteers has been a tremendous privilege, and I truly cannot thank each and every one of you enough for your extraordinary efforts in service of Vote Forward's mission to help strengthen American democracy, one heartfelt letter at a time.
I look forward to writing millions more letters together in the years to come.
