College Dems Convention Day One

**This blog was written on Saturday August 23, 2008

So we started our morning out bright and early today beginning with the Women’s Caucus. The CDA Women’s Caucus has been doing amazing work around HPV education, awareness and advocacy. They launched the ABC’s of HPV campaign in 2005 and it has been going strong since. Check it out http://www.whatishpv.net/

Donna Dolton, a UIS MA student in Public Administration won the election for Development Director of the Women’s Caucus.



Next I attended a seminar about a new canvassing tool called the Neighborhood Volunteer Program. http://www.democrats.org/a/2008/05/neighborhood_vo.php

The Neighborhood Volunteer Program is a door-to-door strategy for activists to get out in their neighborhoods or communities that they are otherwise connected to and talk about the major issues of this election.



Later in the evening things got a little more exciting. As I was walking with the rest of the Illinois student delegation to the Light Rail Station, the streetcar system in Denver, several blocks were barricaded off by the SWAT team. We thought that it was a motorcade for somebody eating downtown so we waited for about fifteen minutes for the block to clear. There were probably around 250 people waiting to get through. The longer we waited the more SWAT team members and arrived. Suddenly the SWAT team yelled at the crowd to step back to the other side of the intersection. The crowd slowly moved so the SWAT team began to move toward the crowd to push it back. We decided that we did not want to wait any longer to get through the block so we started to walk the other direction. About three minutes later we heard an explosion. It turns out that there was a bomb threat and the SWAT team had to destroy the object they thought was a threat.