Freedom's Answer is a non-partisan, youth-led voter turnout drive led by a coalition of youth organizations nationwide. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, young leaders came together in Washington, D.C. with the aid of Doug Bailey, Mike McCurry and Jim Jonas to form a new organization designed to lead the newly dubbed "9/11 generation" towards doing something positive with the new patriotism formed by the attacks. Six teens (Zach Clayton, Puneet Ghambir, Dane Anderson, Lindsay Ullman, Bernard Holloway, and Tori Zoellner) wrote a book called Freedom's Answer to detail their experiences following 9/11 and chronicle the early history of the organization.
Contents
Organization structure
The organization is a coalition of prominent youth organizations including National Association of Student Councils, Junior State of America, National Honor Society, Youth in Government, FFA, Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, YMCA, Boys State, Girls State, and a variety of other organizations who embraced the concept. Its goal was to establish state teams in all 50 states to recruit high schoolers into registering their schools as official schools and to begin voter registration drives and voter promise drives within the individual schools.
Goals
For the 2004 election, this organization had a goal of recruiting 10,000 schools nationwide; among them they planned to recruit 250,000 students in the program and using them bring 2.5 million new voters to the polls. The organization fell short of their goals but still credits themselves with contributing to the national increase in voter turnout in the election. The Florida state team was credited with the largest voter increase and thus won the MegaPrize, a collection of donated prizes for the state that generated the largest increase.