The Utah Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is excited to announce this year’s Legislative Day will be on Thursday, February 14th at 7:15 AM at the Utah State Capitol Complex!   We are excited to have State Senator Steve Urquhart from St. George as our guest speaker.

Sen. Steve Urquhart has served in the Utah Legislature for 13 years (House 2001-08; Senate 2009-current). He is a lawyer in St. George, Utah, having graduated from Williams College and BYU Law School (Honors, law review). Steve and his wife Sara have 4 wonderful kids. He has been blogging longer than any elected official in America (SteveU.com). His Twitter handle is @SenatorSteveU. He has enormous experience working to improve the state of Utah and you can learn even more about him through his website: http://www.utahsenate.org/aspx/senmember.aspx?dist=29 and a recent article about him that can be found here: http://www.thespectrum.com/article/20130116/NEWS/301140033/Urquhart-never-one-duck-issues.  Please come and help us to initiate a relationship with Senator Urquhart and to better understand UAND’s strategy regarding policy.

This year, we are transitioning to a new model for Legislative Day and so here is our objective for 2013:

We want to blitz our legislators with phone calls and/or emails in an effort to help them understand who we are as Registered Dietitians and what we can do to support the health of Utah.  The Utah Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics challenges you to:

1.    1) Discover who your legislators are (You can use this website: http://www.le.utah.gov/GIS/findDistrict.jsp)

2.    2) Contact them via phone or email to communicate that Registered Dietitians are the nutrition experts and that UAND is their resource whenever nutrition related legislation arises.  They need to know that you are a constituent that cares about nutrition related policy (I have attached files via email the UAND email about the event that you can copy, paste, and insert your information).

If you can’t come to our event, you can still do this!

What you can expect for future Legislative Days is that we will actually be setting up appointments with our legislators to discuss issues and communicate our concerns and ideas for nutrition policy in Utah.  As Registered Dietitians (and students!) we really need to create awareness and build relationships this year with these individuals as both constituents and nutrition experts.

More information and directions can be found in the UAND email about this event!

Thanks,

Emily Vaterlaus, State Policy Representative

Rickelle Richards, Public Policy Coordinator

Utah Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics