Raleigh is known for many things. The "City of Oaks," the capital of North Carolina, the city where President Andrew Johnson was born, a fast-growing area of relocated yankees, and a place where the economic opportunity just keeps on growing.

Some people, however, may be surprised to hear that it is a city where liberty is blooming.

Hi, I'm Eric Ward, currently the President of Young Americans for Liberty @ Wake Tech.

I'm going to discuss with you what's happening with YAL in Raleigh. More specifically, in South Raleigh at Wake Technical Community College.

Before 2015, there was no YAL group on campus, but that changed when I reached out and brought the libertarian argument to campus.

Wake Tech's overall student community however, is not known to have a high interest in politics. This is unfortunate, but we see a window of opportunity to explain why being informed is important.

Even though most students work, pay taxes, pay insurance, and buy gas for their daily commutes, politics seems to take a back seat. Many just don't see it as that important in their everyday life.

Despite the challenge, I accepted it.

Our very first goal was to get recognized by the school. We are still waiting for their official approval. Our thinking was, if the school puts us on the map, new membership will flourish. That is something we are hoping for in fall of 2015.

To get there, we needed 10 signatures from students, and 2-3 advisers.

Our advisers include two professors from the economics department who are libertarian and capitalist by philosophy. One of them was my professor for Microeconomics. We also have a third adviser who currently works part time in the library and was a former library director at Wake Tech. He's old enough to have cast a vote for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and to have voted for the very early Libertarian Party nominees for President in the 1970's.

We are very grateful to have these three on board with us as they clearly believe what we believe.

Finding advisers wasn't terribly hard, but finding student signatures took some effort.

In March, on a rainy friday, I along with another YAL officer from NC State held a tabling event indoors with the classic political test YAL provides. We noticed there were many moderates at Wake Tech. There may be truth to the rumor that North Carolina has become a purple state in federal and state elections. Indoor activism can be good, but it's not as effective as outdoor activism in my opinion. While we did get a few signatures, there was still more work to be done.

Toward the end of the semester, I tabled outdoors to get more signatures and to discuss Incarceration Nation with students. Our position on the War on Drugs was a big winner on getting people's attention. It's simply outrageous how someone involved in non-violent marijuana sales should be imprisoned for 55 years.

This event helped us reach our goal. I also passed out a lot of literature and gave people my card if they were interested in staying in contact. Of everyone I talked to, there was no negative feedback about my message. This was our most successful event.

I think these single issue pitches can be great because it can get certain groups excited to know more about us.

Recently in Cary, I had a meeting with 2 other members who are now officers. We are looking ahead to the fall and want to end that semester with a YAL chapter much stronger than it is now.

We are proud of the work we've done so far, but there's so much more to do in order to spread the liberty message across campus. We are also looking to possibly work with other groups on campus on issues where we agree, as well as hold new and exciting events to get more people interested in what we are doing.

With Wake Tech entering the YAL mix, supporters of smaller government can feel good about Raleigh being more and more a part of the solution in spreading liberty.

Our chapter did a lot of promotion for our activism event, spending hours outside handing out flyers, putting posters up all over school, and even requesting that the school send out an announcement for the event through their system.

A couple days before the event we ran into a weather related problem, it decided to storm the entire week with thunder and lightning. We decided to make the best of it, and set up in the student union in a major thoroughfare.

Decked in our finest Reno 911 and prisoner costumes, we asked students passing by whether they thought they were criminals, and found that most students initially said they were not.

After going over specific questions that mainly regarded alcohol and marijuana, most students later admitted that under federal laws, they were in fact criminals.

After talking with each of them and inviting them to our speaker panel that night, we asked them to take their picture with our makeshift jail to show their support for criminal justice reform.

We teamed up with Generation Opportunity for a speaker panel event featuring Alex Johnson (NC State Director for Generation Opportunity), Daniel Rufty (12th District Chair, NCGOP), William Gechtman (ACLU), and Vince Coakley (radio host/formal congressional candidate.)

We started off by watching a documentary on the story of Weldon Angelos, a man who was sent to prison for selling marijuana to a police informant. Thanks to federal mandatory minimums, Weldon was given 55 years in a federal prison. We talked about many of the injustices in the systems, and what we as everyday citizens can do to help bring about change.

After we discussed the issues for a while, we opened the floor up to Q&A, and some of the audience members were able to ask questions.

We had over 50 attendees, and gained many signatures in support of criminal justice reform. It was a fantastic event, and we believe we made an impact in the hearts and minds of students on campus.

Hello ladies, gentlemen, and NSA Agents illegally monitoring all of our communications!

My name is Aaron Hass, I'm the YAL President for SUNY Oneonta. This past semester, as many other chapters around the country, we put on an event called "Incarceration Nation" to teach our campus about our great nation's not so great justice system.

The goal of incarceration nation was to bring information to the public about our criminal justice system. YAL national cut us a check and gave us a basic outline of how to get it done. Their basic plan: Build a small little fake jail that people can hold up to take pictures protesting the over-criminalization of America. We'd walk up to people and ask if they were a criminal, get them to admit they were a criminal, snap a picture behind the jail, then give them some info. The idea was to try to get them to come to a movie YAL had sent us later that day.

We talked to our awesome regional director, Cliff, who told us to not worry too much about what the official paperwork said and to make it as awesome as we wanted. Fortunately Needless to say, we decided to, in the words of Henry Kissinger, go for broke.

Our Vice President, Dustin Tropp, convinced our school (through what he calls charm but I assume to be luck) to match the money YAL had given us for the cell. We now had twice as much money to spend on the event.

We immediately decided that the little YAL design was now to be called "Plan B" and decided we were going to build a full blown 3'x4'x7' cell. Unfortunately, this plan fell apart the minute we realized we didn't have a compressor for the nail gun we borrowed. (Actually we did have a compressor, but letting my friends play with a nail gun is just insane).

We also decided that the movie wasn't quite what we wanted. Dustin was able to book a room and get a group of lawyers to come in to teach the students their basic rights and how to handle the police in a way that protected the individual rights. Working with our PR Wizard, Fallon, they called this the "Know Your Rights Seminar."

So we started working and hanging out and not working and hanging out and what not and somehow we made some bars, shoved them in the car, and went to campus.

YAL's original plan called for going up to people and saying "Are you a criminal?" but we realized people can just say no. Instead, after some trial and error, we went with "You're under arrest."

This would be followed up by someone indignantly asking why. If two dudes walk up to you and try to arrest you, you'd do the same. We then asked if they ever drank underage or smoked weed or stolen something or downloaded music illegally. If they said yes, we'd take them to jail. Below are a bunch of our friends in jail, and one particular girl making a pretty miserable face. We're with you, jail seems rough. You go, Glen CoCo.

The Seminar also went well. Over a hundred students showed up.

Beginning mid-semester, YAL at University of Wyoming became an officially recognized student organization. We started out by putting up posters advertising the group and testing out tabling. I wrote about this event here:

http://www.yaliberty.org/posts/first-tabling-event-at-university-of-wyoming

Shortly after, Abe Alassaf from the Leadership Institute came to help us table and he was awesome! We got over 30 sign-ups in a short time.

We were able to have our first official meeting, which thankfully tuned out well. After a presentation about YAL, we had an extensive conversation about liberty in Wyoming and bounced around ideas of what we could do as a chapter. This event was very encouraging because we finally had a good group of people willing to promote liberty.

Incarceration Nation was our first major activism project. We built our jail, but since we live in Wyoming, we had to push our project off a few weeks due to a few feet of April snow. Once the weather was nice again, we setup outside and had a great event. 

The jail definitely attracted attention and people were really surprised to learn about the incarceration rate in the US. This is important in Wyoming especially because people here don't pay much attention to politics. They think of everything as Democrat and Republican, and since Republicans win pretty much everything in Wyoming, people don't bother to care. Events like this that display the issues are very thought provoking for people in these situations.  

Our full album of photos is available on our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/YALWyo

We had a great semester! 

Thanks Young Americans for Liberty!