Morgan Lesko

From SSDPedia

Morgan Lesko is SSDP's webmaster and the founder and an alum of University of Maryland SSDP. Working in collaboration with SSDP's field director, Micah Daigle, Morgan built SSDP's new website and integrated the wiki. The software Morgan wrote has been running the UMD SSDP Web Site, maintained by Anastacia Cosner since the beginning and has continue to grow and now runs our new SSDP 2.0 web site.

Once the new national web site has settled, he will be adopting more SSDP Chapter web sites to run the software and receive beautiful, often long overdue face-lifts in similar styles to the new national web site. The next step will be integrating entire areas of the chapter web sites to automatically pull fresh information from the national site. This mirroring of information to the grassroots fingers of our organization to quickly help our dispersed organization work more often as one and increase the consistency of reliable information across the continent.

Morgan is the son of Matthew Lesko, who is popular for the commercials in which he runs around Washington, DC in a question mark suit, telling people how they can get free money from the government. Morgan's mother Wendy Lesko is a life long activist at every level and has an organization, Youth Activism Project, with recent focus with School Girls Unite sending girls to school in Africa. Morgan's parents were both extremely supportive after his arrest in 2001 for less than a gram of marijuana, and as with most people who begin learning about the drug war have become more and more supportive of the cause.

Morgan currently lives in Washington, DC, happily working for Rescue Social Change Group primarily on a web-based dynamic software system called Helix, which manages comprehensive activist volunteering and campaigns. Tied in are various reports, tools and increasing social networking features which they integrate with highly researched and targeted social branding campaigns. Morgan expects these worlds to one day overlap, hoping to extend social branding techniques in a post Drug War world to improve the methods used in promoting harm reduction and reducing drug abuse.

[edit] Founding of University of Maryland SSDP

Just after midnight, October 1st, 2001, Morgan Lesko and a friend were arrested for a joint behind the Campus Recreation Center. Not able to find a NORML chapter on our campus, he decided to start one up (again). According to his early mentor, Chris Evans, there was some form of drug policy reform organization a few years earlier, which had dissipated. The first meeting called was under the name 'TORML', Terrapins for the Reform of Maryland Laws, but an attendee at the first meeting convinced us not to limit ourselves to fighting marijuana laws, since our policies towards the harder drugs are also failing and creating far more harm than good.

After two years dedicated to the campus chapter, Morgan began interning and volunteering for David Borden with the Drug Reform Coordination Network (www.stopthedrugwar.org) working primarily on the Coalition for Higher Education Act Reform under Jon Rosen. DRCNet shares an office suite with the SSDP National Staff and Flex Your Rights (www.flexyourrights.org). During the summer of 2004, SSDP's executive director, Scarlett Swerdlow (also a middle school friend of Morgan), asked if the University of Maryland chapter would be willing to host of annual national conference on the campus. Despite a nearly extinct chapter with only about five members, they decided to host the conference, turning it around forever.

[edit] Awards

• Outstanding Volunteer - 2006