Tyler Sommers' Blog

Good Morning everyone!

It's been quite some time since my last entry and since you've heard much about the CYA I'm sure. The reason for this is that I've been incredibly busy with a variety of things. I became the new Coordinator for Democracy Watch about a year ago and in September of last year I started at Carleton's new Political Management program. Needless to say that this has kept me busy. I'm also helping with a paper that will be published in the summer - I'll be sure to let you know when that is (we're looking at motivations for voting, volunteering, and generally community engagement among youth).

As I have been the main pusher of people at the CYA my lack of involvement meant that things sort of stagnated a bit (if you're interested in taking a key role like mine in the CYA, email me! sommerst[at]cya-ajc.ca (replace centre with '@').

That said, in the past little while there's been movement here at the CYA. I've been able to meet a lot of fantastic people through the Master program and we've secured some firm commitments for speakers when we make this happen. This includes a former politicians, political insiders, community enthusiasts, academics, and more.

I also had the pleasure of meeting James Baxter of iPolitics last night - I'll be sending him an email soon and hopefully getting together for coffee. They're planning some fantastic things and I'm looking forward to meeting him and figuring out how we can work together.

What I'm going to be doing is blogging about the people I meet and the experiences I have through my involvement with the CYA and perhaps some other things I think you'll find interesting. No political commentary, rest assured - we do seek to be neutral in our roles at the CYA.

That's it! Now you know what I've been up to, why there's been a bit of a lull and what's happening next.

PS. Our forum is in maintenance mode because it was flooded with spammers. I'll be bringing it back up, but password protecting it or something so everyone can see posts, but not make them until I can figure out how to stop the spam.

Talk to you soon,

Tyler Sommers