Todd Eugene Vachon

CONNECTICUT NATIVE
Todd Vachon is a Salem native who currently resides in Colchester, CT. He was born in New London in 1976, attended Salem Elementary School and graduated from East Lyme High School in 1994. The son of working-class parents he grew up experiencing economic hard times until his father joined the CT Carpenter's Union. Todd, a member now himself, has a great deal of respect for the power and necessity of organized labor. Thanks in part to the union wage and benefits, he was able to become the first family member to attend college- graduating from Marist College in 1998 with a BA in Communications. After spending some time working in media for MTV and Nielsen Media Research he was accepted to the New York City Teaching Fellows program. From 2001-2004 he taught 4th and 5th graders in an extremely underserved part of Brooklyn, NY while earning an MS in Education from The City University of New York.

POLITICAL CHARACTER
Having met his lovely wife, Genea, in New York the two then spent an extended honeymoon in Europe, residing mainly in Portugal. Here Todd experienced socialized healthcare, abundant and efficient mass transit, numerous political parties and the widespread use of renewable energy. This marked the beginning of Todd's active involvement in politics when returning home to CT in 2004.

Seeing the corporatization of the media as an anti-democratic force he co-founded C.R.E.A.M. (Citizens for Reform of Entertainment and Media), attended the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis and began working on local activist campaigns sponsored by Free Press to stop further media ownership consolidation.

Furthermore, discovering the root of many of the world's current problems to be the capitalist economic system itself he co-founded and chartered The Socialist Party of CT (an affiliate of The Socialist Party, USA). The party has played an active role in the local anti-war movement and worked to educate people about the terrible side effects of production for profit, including: pollution, wasteful overproduction, mispricing, low wages, unemployment, wars to control resources, inflated military budgets, deflated domestic social budgets and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to name just a few.

2010
Todd is currently the secretary of the Colchester Housing Authority and the statewide chairperson of The Socialist Party of CT. He is a stay-at-home father of 3 very young children by day and an independent music producer by night (known throughout the Northeast as "Mista Mayday").