"It was awesome!"

That was the reaction of one of the Tennessee activists at the end of the two-day DFA Training Academy held in Knoxville last weekend.

Many of those who filled Karns Middle School had not worked on a campaign before or were not familiar with the sophisticated techniques outlined by DFA trainers. During breaks they peppered instructors with more questions and began making plans about how they would use the information in future efforts.

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The DFA Training Academy is one of the most respected and renowned campaign training programs in the country. And THIS WEEKEND, April 28 & 29, Training Academy comes to Knoxville!

DFA Training Academy is an intensive, two-day series of workshops geared toward your particular political landscape. The primary focus will be on campaign management, field organizing, communications, grassroots advocacy, and precinct organization. You'll get personalized, one-on-one instruction from some of the most experienced political campaign experts in the country and we make sure that you can use your training as soon as you get home.

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If you want to see what happened at last year's training in Memphis, click here.

On April 28 & 29, the DFA Training Academy comes to Knoxville and you're invited!

A whole weekend of intensive training and hands-on workshops, the DFA Training Academy will give you all the tools a candidate or activist needs to win campaigns. Skills like message development, building a campaign's base, precinct organization, field operations, and media management are just a few of the topics that will be covered.

For complete information about the Knoxville program and to rsvp, click HERE.

Posted by Amy Broyles, former candidate for the Knox County Commission.

Dear Friends,

Great news! The Tennessee Supreme Court handed down a decision that will have a huge impact on Knox County's government. Eight of our nineteen commissioners, along with the Sheriff, Trustee, County Clerk, and Register of Deeds, have been declared term limited and unable to serve out their current terms. It looks like the County Commission will be making appointments for temporary replacements in the near future, with an election for more permanent replacements to follow.

Commissioner Billy Tindell of District 2 was among those affected by this ruling. If you recall, I ran against Commissioner Tindell in the Primary and General elections last year, both times as a write-in candidate. In the Primary I came within 94 votes of beating him, and in the General I received almost 30 percent of the vote, quite an accomplishment for a write-in candidate! I ran a vigorous, positive, exciting campaign, and was endorsed by The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Frank Cagle of Metro Pulse, Colvin Idol of The Knoxville Journal, Sandra Clark of The Halls Shopper, Democracy for Tennessee, and the Women Under Forty Political Action Committee.

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Six months of hard work paid off last night when Mark Harmon defeated incumbent David Collins for County Commission in Knox County Tennessee.

The main themes of Mark's campaign were:
1) Improving the Commission's relationship with the School Board and therefore improving the schools in the district.
2) Sensible restrictions on sprawl in the more rural parts of Knox County.
3) Watchdogging our dishonest Sheriff and his spending.

A few weeks later, another theme appeared:

4) Term-limits

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Democracy for Knoxville scheduled a house party showing of the movie Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary, intending to be in concert with the rest of the DFA Film Club project for June. The invitation went out and we had a great response, finally entertaining approximately 28 people from across Knox County.

However, our local source for the DVD ended up not receiving it in time, and a backup plan to have 2 copies mailed from California also fell victim to the phrase "the best laid plans of mice and men...etc." Luckily, we had all our bases covered and were able to spend a goodly portion of the evening hearing from several of the local candidates for county offices.

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Four of this year’s Knox County candidates for the August 3 election joined us in the May 9 meeting at Charlie Pepper’s on Cumberland Ave.

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Our largest crowd yet filled the Knoxville Center Mall's community room to capacity as over 60 activists, volunteers, and candidates turned out for Democracy for Tennessee's "Root Camp" grassroots campaign training seminar.

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Democracy for Knoxville co-hosted a screening of Robert Greenwald's new movie "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" on Sunday, November 13.

The turnout was pretty amazing!

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The Oct. 4 Meetup at Charlie Pepper's near UT featured presentations by Lizajean Holt on the progress of promoting the well-received Fair Employment legislative initiative, Tori Griffin on WalMart's unsavory business practices and the harm they do to America's entrepreneurs and degraded labor force, and Bill Keimig's report on the political tactics manual, "Politics the Wellstone Way," an initiative undertaken by the surviving family members of the late, great Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone.

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