Cortney Piper
Cortney Piper, a board member of a new statewide organization training Democratic women to run for office, will be guest speaker at the Monday, January 23, meeting of the Anderson County Democratic Women’s Club. The club will have a dinner meeting at 6 p.m. at Swifty’s Atomic Bar and Grill at 119 South Illinois Avenue in Oak Ridge.
Piper, president of Piper Communications in Knoxville, is a board member of Emerge Tennessee, founded in 2016 as the premier campaign training program for Democratic women in the state. The program is designed to inspire women to run for office and to hone their skills to win, aiming to increase the number of Democratic women in all levels of public office, a press release said. Emerge Tennessee is an affiliate of Emerge America, a national organization operating in 17 states.
Since 2002, the Emerge America network has trained more than 2,000 women to run for office at all levels of government, the press release said. More than 50 percent of those women have run or been appointed, and 70 percent of those have won their races.
In the 220 years since statehood, Tennessee has sent only two Democratic women to the U.S. House of Representatives, and a woman has never served as governor or as a U.S. Senator, according to the Emerge Tennessee web site, http://www.emergeamerica.org/content/emerge-tennessee. Only two Democratic women serve in the state’s 33-member Senate, and only seven as representatives in the 99-member House.
Piper founded her company in 2008, offering strategic communications specializing in energy and technology. She ran for Knox County Commission in 2008, and that experience resulted in her spot as a political pundit on WATE-TV’s “Tennessee This Week,” the press release said. A graduate of Leadership Oak Ridge in 2009 and Leadership Knoxville in 2013, she was the 2014 recipient of the Postma Young Professional Medal.
No reservations are necessary for the meeting. Those attending may order dinner from the menu. For more information, please email Ann Mostoller at amostoller@msw-law.com or call Mary Matheny at (865) 483-8937.
This press release was submitted by Kay Brookshire.
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