Four minutes, start to sent
Write to the person who decides
A compact passes when legislators hear from constituents who do the job it affects, which for this one means RDs. There aren't many of you, so one letter from an RD carries more weight than it would on almost any other bill.
Use your own email
Everything below opens a draft in your mail app, from your address. Mail from a real constituent address gets weighed. Mail from a campaign platform gets counted.
State, not federal
The compact is enacted state by state. Your member of Congress has no vote on it. You want your state senator and state representative, and the lookup below leaves Congress out on purpose.
Replace the bracket
The letter has one placeholder for your own story. Offices sort mail into "form letter" and "actual constituent," and that paragraph is the entire difference.
Find your state legislators
The compact is state legislation, so this finds your state senator and state representative, and leaves out your member of Congress. Enter the address where you are registered to vote.
Your address is sent once to look up your district and is never stored, logged, or shared.
Confirm your state
Pick your state so you get the correct letter for it.
Make it yours
A form letter counts as one message. A form letter with three sentences of your own counts as a constituent with a story, and staff route those differently. The story field is the one that matters.
Send it
Choose your state above to generate your letter.
After you send it
- Ask for a reply, and note the date. If nothing comes back in two weeks, send one short follow-up. Offices read persistence as seriousness.
- Tell your state Academy affiliate. They track who has been contacted and who has responded warmly, and your letter is worth more as part of that record than on its own.
- Offer to testify. Committees hear from lobbyists constantly and from practitioners almost never. If a bill gets a hearing, a working RD in the room changes the tone.
- Bring one colleague. Five letters from five RDs in one district read as a constituency, and one reads as a person. Both are worth sending, but five count for much more than five times one.
Start from your own state
What you're asking for depends on where your state stands. Each state's page tells you what to ask for, which bill to mention if there is one, and who your Academy affiliate is.