| An active Girl Scout until she was 18, Aftyn grew up in Knoxville and started her advocacy career early. She attended high school in Knoxville where she was nominated to represent her high school in the Knoxville Mayor's Youth Council in addition to achieving her Girl Scout Gold Award. Following graduation, Aftyn attended the University of Texas at Austin where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the Liberal Arts Honors and the Psychology Honors programs. In 2014, she enrolled in UT Austin's Steve Hicks School of Social Work specializing in disability studies and public policy.
In 2016, Aftyn watched the election night returns abroad where she had been working for the United Nations advocating for LGBTQIA refugees and forcibly displaced persons. Unlike many of her peers, Aftyn decided to return to Tennessee because she wanted to advocate for people at home. When she returned, the first person she met with was Rep. Gloria Johnson who helped Aftyn, like so many others, get involved with politics.
In 2017, Aftyn was hired by the Tennessee Justice Center as their healthcare community organizer and she was thrown into the chaos of preserving the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. She traveled across the state raising awareness about the Trump administration's attacks on healthcare and putting pressure on Tennessee's elected officials to pass policies for the uninsured and families with kids with disabilities. She organized with many state legislative representatives during this time including Senator Charlane Oliver, Rep. Gloria Johnson, Rep. Justin Jones, Rep. John Ray Clemmons and Rep. Craig Fitzhugh.
In 2018, Aftyn was hired by a national organization called Indivisible, where she campaigned for Democrats up and down the Tennessee ballot and held Tennessee's federal and state representatives accountable for their policy votes. This was also the year she helped launch the Enough Is Enough TN campaign, supported by Dr. Michelle's Dauber national PAC Enough is Enough, to raise awareness of former Rep. David Byrd, a rural legislator who had sexually assaulted underage girls when he was their basketball coach. Aftyn, along some of the women featured in the photo spent nights - yes, literally spent the night - in the Capitol demanding the resignation of Rep. David Byrd. Rep. Gloria Johnson and Rep. Mike Stewart bought pizza and snacks while keeping them company as they slept in sleeping bags on the Capitol marble floor.
Since 2021, Aftyn has worked as the Campaign Director for a national political group called RuralOrganizing.org, where she oversaw the organization's electoral strategy and execution and shaped the political and policy landscape impacting small towns and rural communities. In 2023, RuralOrganizing.org helped pass a major piece of federal legislation called RECOMPETE, which provides block grants to distressed rural communities. Staunch Republican Joni Ernst from Iowa was a cosponsor. In the Spring of 2022, the White House invited Aftyn to attend President Biden's announcement on affordable high-speed internet due to her tireless efforts advocating for reliable broadband nationally and in rural Tennessee.
Aftyn currently serves on the steering committee for the Southern Connected Communities Project, a non-profit dedicated to bringing internet connectivity to underserved or unserved areas, with an emphasis on community input and ownership, and Healthy and Free TN, an organization working to grow a reproductive justice movement across race, class, and gender in Tennessee.
When Aftyn isn't at the Legislature or out in her community, she's at home snuggling with her animals Franky (the pug), Lilly (the chonky cat), and Nug (the chaos agent), or watching RuPaul's Drag Race at home with her partner Chris and his kids. If you want to follow Aftyn's animals on the campaign trail, be sure to check out the animals' Instagram account called "ChonkyTonk."
Once a month, she makes the trek back to Knoxville to see her parents Bruce and Julianne, who have put up with her for 33 years and are her biggest fans. She also loves bugging her little brother Landyn, who, despite living in Dallas, is always ready to receive a political tweet with the comment "lol thought of you." |