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For six years now you have watched Ken Steele's Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project grow from a small, day treatment program reaching out to people in his local area to an organization of over one hundred volunteers helping to register and educate some 30,000 voters in the New York City area alone. The program has continued to grow throughout the state and, in the past year, the National Mental Health Association has been proud to help take Ken Steele's initiative nationwide.

For too many years, people with mental illness have been afraid to vote or have thought that they do not have the right to vote. Remember: voting will not strip you of your housing or of your disability benefits. Quite the opposite, the more you assert yourself as a citizen by exercising your right to vote, and the more your voice is heard, the more elected officials will take notice of you.

When Ken Steele first started his voter empowerment project six years ago, he had trouble getting candidates to attend his candidate's forums. Today, with 30,000 voters enrolled in his project, candidates come to him and ask to be invited to those same forums. People with mental illness, just like any other citizens in this country, have the right to vote. Only a very small percentage of individuals—those who have been adjudicated incompetent by a judge—may not vote.

Our approach has been to teach consumer supporter organizations and other mental health advocates throughout the country how to launch their own voter empowerment campaigns. With Ken's assistance, and with the assistance of Joseph Glazer of the Mental Health Association in New York State and Christine Simiriglia of the Mental Health Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania, we have offered daylong trainings on how to launch a voter empowerment campaign.

To date, we have organized trainings in Long Beach, Calif., Atlanta, Ga., Orlando, Fla., and Washington, D.C. One hundred twenty-one representatives of consumer supporter organizations from 29 different states have attended these seminars to learn all of the nuts and bolts of launching a voter empowerment project. The skills addressed include how to establish a voter empowerment advisory board, how to set up a database, where to find and register consumers and how to educate people with mental illness about voting and the issues.

We are excited to announce a new section on our web site, at www.ncstac.org, devoted to helping organizations set up their own voter empowerment projects. You can visit this site to learn about the six basic steps to launching a campaign and to find addresses of and links to many other helpful civil rights organizations, like the League of Women Voters or Rock the Vote (a site that allows you to register to vote on-line). You can also take advantage of our discussion board to communicate on-line with other voter empowerment campaign organizers.

Registering voters must be a yearlong process, but with registration deadlines fast approaching for the year 2000 national elections, the time has come to focus on educating the mental health community about the issues. Education must, of course, be non-partisan, and the National Mental Health Association is excited to announce that this September we will release a candidate's survey polling presidential and senatorial candidates on issues of key concern to mental health consumers.

We encourage those of you running voter empowerment campaigns to copy the structure and the language used in this survey to poll your congressional candidates as well as the candidates for local and state offices in your area. A publication with additional information on "How to Conduct a Candidate Survey" is also available at our web site or can be ordered from us by calling 1-800-969-NMHA (ask for Gwen Dixon).

Altogether, people with mental illness could constitute a major voting block of some 40 million adults. It is our responsibility as citizens to take part in the election process and to see that policies are enacted to make life better for us and for those of our brothers and sisters who cannot yet speak for themselves. With your participation, the National Mental Health Voter Empowerment Project can continue to amass those 40 million voices.

See you at the polls!