One of the simplest ways of helping your government make better and wiser decisions is to let your state leaders know how you feel about an issue that is important to you or about proposed legislation. Contacting your state leaders has gotten even easier with Connecticut Network's Legislative Communications Center (LCC). The LCC provides various search utilities offering the choice of locating your state representative or senator by town, committee, chamber, party affiliation or name.

Once the LCC has helped you to determine who your state representative or senator is, we offer a host of choices for communicating and interacting with them. You can visit their website, click on their e-mail address, jot down their telephone number or let CT-N help you format an e-mail by clicking "Compose Message". With all these tools at your disposal, it's now up to you to exercise your right as a citizen of Connecticut and let your voice be heard.

Teachers
This is a great writing exercise and the Legislative Communications Center helps you get organized. You can print out the names of the representatives and senator from your district along with their address and distribute it to the class or have your students look them up.
Next, ask your students to choose an issue to write about. They should write their letter either supporting or opposing the issue and explain why citing examples of how the issue may impact their lives.
Review their letters and send them out. Use the school's return address so that you can monitor the responses and see their faces when you hand them a response letter. Have the students share it with the class.

Tools
Your class can choose an issue from a short list that you create or make it a homework assignment and let them research an issue that is important to them. There are several places to look for ideas and subject matter.

1. Inside CT-N's Legislative Communications Center, you can click on the "Legislation" link which will list all of the current proposed bills that legislator is working on.

2. You can visit our Media Links page for a listing of on-line newspapers and find a local issue.

3. You can also click here for the most recent "Major Issues" report from the Office of Legislative Research highlighting the significant issues to come before the legislature.

Also, here are some helpful guides for your students:

• Salutations page which shows examples of how to address the envelope and write the greeting

• Sample legislative letter using proper business format (pdf)

• Do's & don'ts of legislative letter writing (pdf)