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Green Bay Local Solutions Network

Report on Activities September through April

The LSN-GB was organized in September 2005 for the purpose of finding more women candidates to run for Green Bay City Council and Brown County Board of Supervisors. At that time only two women were County Supervisors and no women were on the City Council. Dotty Juengst agreed to facilitate the network activities through meetings, e-mail and telephone contacts. From September through December the activities focused on educating women on how to run for office. In January, there were five women running for the city council (12 seats) and eight women on the ballot for the county board (26 seats), including one woman running for both city and county office. Of the two women facing a primary, one woman won and one lost. In the general election, at the county level, three women won their races and at the city level one woman won. The Brown County Board now has four women supervisors (one woman, an incumbent, had no opposition). The women on the county board are Kathy Johnson, Pat LaViolette, Mary Scray, and Patty Hoeft. Kathy and Mary were incumbents and Pat and Patty were running in races that didn’t have an incumbent running. The new woman Green Bay City Council member is Celestine Jeffreys. She also was running in a race without an incumbent. The other women who lost all were facing an incumbent in their races.

Some observations are:
-There needs to be a strong network of people working for candidates.
-It is very difficult to win if there is an incumbent running. (Only one county board race was won by a non-incumbent).
-Women still need more encouragement and training to run for office.
-The number of women winning was noticed by the Press Gazette.

We had a good group of volunteers helping candidates and working to accomplish our goal of increasing the number of women elected to city and county government. Thanks to all who ran for office and to those who helped them.

Dotty Juengst
Facilitator LSN-GB

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