Rep. Luján Receives New Leadership Council's '40 Under 40' Award

The New Leadership Council has announced its '40 Under 40' award winners for 2009 and our own Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D, NM-03) is one of them. According to the New Leaders Council, the awards were created to help recognize the hard work of a diverse group of young leaders including elected officials, inspiring community organizers and non-profit and policy leaders who exemplify the spirit of progressive political entrepreneurship.

The nominees for the awards are produced by the progressive community. This year, NLC received more than 300 nominations. The 40 winners were chosen for displaying extraordinary ability to create progressive change in an innovative and thoughtful manner across a wide variety of sectors, as well as their representation of the young progressive network. NLC sought leaders from the labor, women’s rights, renewable energy, education, environmental protection, LGBT, health care, immigration, and working families movements to be honored by the 40 Under 40 Awards.

As you can see from the list of winners, Rep. Lujan is in excellent company as an award recipient. He and Rep. Tom Perriello from the Fifth District of Virginia are the only two members of Congress to win the award this year.

You may recognize a few netroots winners including Nate Silver, the founder of Fivethirtyeight.com; Mary Rickles, Director of Communications and Media for Netroots Nation and Democracy for America; Paul Rieckhoff, founder and Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America; Andrew Golis, Deputy Publisher of Talking Points Memo; and Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com, author and women’s rights activist. There are many more from a diversity of stations and walks of life.

These awards are designed to credit the distinguished individuals for the exemplary work they do, as well as bind the national progressive community together by celebrating these leaders with NLC events in five cities across the nation.

To see our previous posts on Rep. Ben Ray Luján, visit our archive.