A Voicemail For Our Veterans

 This unit in my Policy class we learned about legislation. Keeping the guiding question "How do we agree on the common good?" in mind, we studied and learned about various instances in our country's history in which policies created have either worked for the common good or against it. We dug into the federalist papers and read "The Empire & the People" a chapter from Howard Zinn's book, A Peoples History of the United States. Along with the readings we learned about how legislation works and how bills become laws with a classic Schoolhouse Rock video.We also learned about policies created during the World Wars and during the U.S intervention in Cuba. We analyzed these policies asking ourselves if they truly were "good" policies or not. This unit we also had Troy LaRaviere come in as guest speaker and talk to us about how policy can affect our everyday lives as students and as residents of Chicago. Finally as our final project for this unit we were asked to pick a bill which we truly believed was of importance or a bill that we oppose believing it would cause more harm than good. We were then asked to write to contact our representative or senator depending on which branch our bill was in and write a script of a voicemail that we would send in order to convince our targeted politician to help pass or reject the bill. We decided a voicemail would have a greater impact than writing a letter because our guest speaker Troy LaRaviere told us from first hand experience there was something more genuine and effective about talking to another human and communicate with them rather than writing them a letter that could easily be ignored, often times a piece of paper is easier to ignore than a person directly addressing you. With this task at hand we all started to search for a bill which felt important to speak on and so for this project I chose House Bill 0035. Below is my script and voice recording addressing Representative Aaron M. Ortiz regarding this bill and my support for it. Thank you for reading!

 


Cited Sources
  • “Housing Assistance Council Supporting IL Veterans.” Housing Assistance Council, The Home Depot Foundation, https://veteransdata.info/states/2170000/ILLINOIS.pdf.
  • “HB 0035.” Illinois General Assembly - Legislation, https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/default.asp.

  • “2021 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report Shows Decrease in Veteran Suicides.” VAntage Point, 8 Sept. 2021, https://blogs.va.gov/VAntage/94358/2021-national-veteran-suicide-prevention-annual-report-shows-decrease-in-veteran-suicides/.


Illinois department of Veteran Affairs, 2022 



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