The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week's Round Table, Madeline, Maya, and Skyla spoke with Kevin Rogers, a Senior Associate at Government Executive, a media company which owns and operates multiple publications including City and State NY, where he is responsible for executing programs for entities interested in procuring contracts with the Federal Government. Kevin’s passion for public service and state government stems back to his student days, when among other things, he served as Chief of Staff for the SUNY Student Assembly, the overarching student government organization for SUNY’s 64 campuses and 1.2 million students. His interest in electoral politics was initially sparked through an internship in college that placed people in different government agencies and helped them learn about implementation of on-the-ground state policy plus provided him with a feel for how local government collaborates with  state government. Since graduating, he’s worked on a number of local and state campaigns on Long Island and New York City, including as Field Director for the historic campaign of Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright during her independent run for re-election in 2020 and then as her Legislative Director where he helped pass major pieces of legislation such as the NYS Equal Rights Amendment.  Through his work, he’s learned a lot about local, state, and federal law and how it affects everyday New Yorkers, and has gotten very good at synthesizing complex ideas for easy consumption. He also learned how much of this work happens through relationships– a LOT of negotiating goes on after hours, over dinner, karaoke, bocci ball…–and that strong community and relationships are forged by colleagues with a shared mission of making people’s lives better and getting things done. Ultimately, Kevin counseled us that we have to be bridge builders and relationship builders and that if we are, we’ll carry those relationships for life. Thank you for listening! 

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha, Maya, and Skyla spoke with Chris Piedmont of Slide Nine, a communications, public relations, and digital marketing agency that focuses on creating stories that shift perception and move people to action. Chris himself was moved to action in 2019 when he took time off from the PR world to join Pete Buttigieg's history-making presidential campaign. We talked in depth about the high stakes world of campaigns. Having grown up in Charleston, South Carolina with a passion for politics AND communications, he had an existential crisis about which track to pursue: PR or politics. He chose business figuring he could always go back to politics and, after the 2016 election, he realized he HAD to be more involved. He kept a watchful eye on all the candidates in 2018 and, after the CNN town hall where Pete proved how strong a communicator he was and made a progressive splash, Chris realized Pete was his guy, which was confirmed after reading his book. He decided to focus on Pete’s South Carolina campaign, did some good natured stalking and networking, and secured a job as an organizer, helming two districts the size of Rhode Island. Chris was the boots on the ground, and his public relations experience helped a LOT as a big part of organizing is networking,developing trust and credibility right away, looking for the influencers who have impact and can help build scale, and getting the candidate’s messages out there.  Chris described his work on the campaign as some of the most engaging, satisfying, and EXHAUSTING experiences of his life, tinged with a life or death feeling each day. He came to feel that volunteers and women are the lifeblood of democracy in this country.  Having lived in South Carolina pre DOMA being struck down and pre gay marriage, Chris noted that coming back to a conservative community and knocking on people’s doors on behalf of the first openly out presidential candidate was deeply healing. Now several years out and back in the PR world, Chris shared that at the end of the day, there’s nothing like getting someone to pull the lever for Pete. Chris’ energy is infectious and we hope it will inspire YOU to engage in campaign work. Thanks for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Debilyn Molineaux, Founder and CEO of The Bridge Alliance, which is working to create a “game changing” movement that shifts the underlying dynamics of power, politics, and participation in our country in order to strengthen values. The Alliance is based on five very powerful principles: See the best in people, Educate each other, Seek solutions, Acknowledge differences, and Act on commonalities. We agreed that we would LOVE to see these principles more in play in schools and society at large. We talked about the power–and challenge–of striving to revitalize civil society through democratic values and working to instill trust in the system and its values.  What’s critical is that everyday citizens be at the heart of doing so–Debilyn underscored that the first three words of the constitution are “we the people” and that’s what we should be steeped in. We spoke about how fraught bipartisanship is these days, with Debilyn sharing her concerns that some older folks have an overly rosy view of it and some young people want to to give up on it altogether because they’ve never seen it work. Debilyn shared what she refers to as her “embodied sense of optimism,” fueled by belief that the future her generation is leaving young people can be so much better.  We all agreed that we need to become the citizens WORTHY of a thriving, just democracy. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha, Madeline, and Maya spoke with Deo Mwano, a nationally recognized speaker, program designer, and transformational cultural change maker whose work focuses on helping organizations maximize their positive impact.  Deo is a bit of a Renaissance Man, who’s had a stratospheric rise since arriving to the U.S. as a refugee when he was just a boy: having graduated with a degree in International Relations and History with an MBA in Strategic Leadership, he’s worked for the federal government, non-profits, universities and tech startups and now runs his own human-centered design strategy consultancy. One of the 40 Under 40 in New Hampshire,. Deo is a gifted storyteller and performer whose family’s story was featured on Dancing With the Stars, which he and his brothers performed on live. On the side, he loves making hip hop and R & B music, dancing and teaching dance, watching documentaries and reading biographies (he gave us some great recommendations too!), and being a dad to three children. We talked about what it was like to migrate from the Congo to New Hampshire–a state many know only from the primaries–as a refugee after his father was assassinated; how he created a personal brand–and traveled across the United States sharing his story–while he was still in middle school; the healing power of storytelling in overcoming fears and traumas; and what he’s learned from cultivating so many interconnected, intimate relationships over the years and across the country. His formative experiences in storytelling and relationship building very much inform his approach to helping organizations maximize their positive impact in the consulting work he does today, creating spaces where people can tell their stories, face their biases, and be authentic.  Deo reminded us not to compromise on what love and peace are for us, and how they should be predicated in self identity and grounded in the positive aspects of who we are in order to inform how we show up for all we do.  Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Laura Brill, Founder and Executive Director of The Civics Center, founded in the shadow of the 2016 election to push back again the stereotype of teens being apathetic. The Civic Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to improving high school voter registration and civic engagement. This mission is incredibly important, given the 4 million Americans who turn 18 each year, and the 35 states that allow for registration before that birthday. While the vast majority of high school students are eligible to register before they turn 18, just 6% of them are ever asked or encouraged at school to do so. 6%! The impact of the youth vote IF REGISTERED AND ACTIVATED can dwarf electoral margins. The Civics Center has a plan to reach this enormous, unmet potential; the youth leaders they have trained have mobilized tens of thousands of their peers to register and vote—and they aim to train and mobilize thousands more.

Being registered changes the whole political landscape—the reality is you don’t count if you’re not in the voter file and you’re not taken seriously if you’re not registered or pre registered. The other reality is it shouldn’t be this hard to register! We talked about how dispiriting it is that there are so few civics clubs and effective voter registration efforts at schools. The Civic Center is coming out with materials about using high graduation as a crystallizing experience to register voters as a counterpoint to fall student voter registration drives.

We talked frankly and fully about the range of barriers to registration—beyond accessibility and opportunity are the narratives that discourage young people from taking ADVANTAGE of the opportunity to register and vote. We also discussed perceptions of young people, young people’s attitudes towards civics, how they are changing, and how to make progress as a generation despite being handed so many challenges.

The history of our country is that of small groups of people using the tools we have to make enormous changes to expand democracy. We haven’t yet lost the capacity to do that and we are committed to working together—and with you—to advance this vision. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Erina, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Gene Allen, a lifelong resident of Brooklyn who has experienced and thought deeply about the drastic changes in our city over 50+ years due to gentrification. This was super interesting to me because I recently conducted a photojournalism project on gentrification in the Bronx and was eager to learn about similarities and differences beyond the borough. Gentrification has a tangible impact on all of our lives–Kenisha spoke about how dramatically prices have increased in her neighborhood in Queens since she moved to the US, and how the livability metrics she analyzed as part of the NYC Youth Agenda Steering Committee demonstrate this is playing out at the city level and the individual level. Madeline shared that her mother’s stories about growing up in an ungentrified Brooklyn sound like fairytales to her. Meanwhile, our guest Gene powerfully framed gentrification from a Black man’s perspective as another form of Jim Crow, and walked us through the cultural annihilation he feels has been perpetrated upon his community over the decades, starting with the crack epidemic in the 80s. He compared this to the Opium Wars in China, which the English refer to as the worst thing they ever did. Gene talked to us about the decimation of the Black community during the heyday of crack cocaine–and then another kind of diaspora induced more recently through gentrification, when white people crowded into communities where they’d never before even visited. Gene shared his feelings that gentrification can’t be stopped–how can you stop capitalism?--and that NYC is being overdeveloped while simultaneously being drained of its culture, vibrant nightlife, and edge. He also shared his concerns that we’re not having the right talks–we talk about slavery but NOT about repair, because to make reparations we would need to engage with capitalism. Despite all of this, Gene has hope because of OUR generation, which he perceives as the first that’s actually liberated and committed to not being bigots. He thinks we still have the potential to turn things around IF we know and learn from our history. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Michelle Blanchet, co-author of Preventing Polarization: 50 Strategies for teaching kids about empathy, politics, and civic responsibility. Michelle has taught social studies around the world for many years and was shocked, upon returning to the U.S. a few years ago, by the degree to which politics seems like a team sport, fueled by ego driven conversation and ever-increasing divides. She recognized that we can’t prevent polarization–it’s here!--but it’s what we DO with it. Michele is very concerned about the degree to which dialogues about critical political issues don’t make it into the classroom— which is a disservice to students. Too often books about civics are about facts and take the emotions out. But “just teach the curriculum” doesn’t work —you can’t, for example, teach about the Electoral College without eliciting feelings and reactions. She feels that politics is the soul of civic engagement—and policy is how you shape the world you want to be in.

Michelle believes it's more important than ever to support teachers to facilitate difficult dialogues and to equip students with skills like communication and consensus-building so they can use policy to tackle our country’s most pressing challenges. It’s not about teachers imposing their views–it’s about facilitating dialogue and engaging with the complexity of the “wicked problems” of our time. The goal of her book is to reopen lines of communication. There are simply too many important issues in the world to be in discord. Given the futility of keeping politics out of the classroom, we talked about how to integrate politics into the classroom in a healthy and productive way, how to make discourse more productive (and what makes this so challenging), and the importance of giving young people time and space to do applied civics to learn how to engage productively. We share a love of being in the change maker space to help young people see how they can make things happen. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline and Vanessa recorded the podcast together live in the P & T Knitwear podcast studio on the Lower East Side of New York City, which was super fun.  Sparked by the recent controversy around the College Board’s modification of its Advanced Placement African American Studies course, seemingly in response to criticism from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis that it would violate recently- passed Florida laws banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory, we talked about how history is taught, the lenses it’s taught through, and the lenses we’d LIKE to see it taught through, honing in on what we’d like to see history curricula look like going forward (hint: it shouldn’t be lecture based…) We talked through what specifically has been removed from the new AP curriculum and our feelings about things like SHOULD African American Studies be taught separately from regular history or should there be more emphasis on infusing more African American studies into ALL the APs.  We shared concerns about what qualifications teachers will need to teach African American Studies–and what that means in terms of which schools will ACTUALLY teach it? We shared concerns about how to cover the vast swaths of history expected, which leads to teaching to the test rather than to teaching for depth. We also voiced concerns about the removal of contemporary issues from the AP curricula, as well as removing secondary scholars like bell hooks who provide insight about the systemic undergirding of these issues, and our sense of the agenda behind that being to make racism and disparities seem like they are in the past and that we’ve moved beyond these forces as a nation.This plays into our larger concern about the trend of trying to wrap up history with a neat little bow, making us miss the shades of gray and the modern relevance—which is a problem more broadly in school. The point should be to make us think more deeply, not to erase the nuances. More broadly, we grappled with the question of whether politics and history are inextricable, particularly in trying to separate historical injustices from what’s happening today.  We feel that it does a disservice to history to try to separate the two, and that it does a disservice to students to not teach them that there are some problems that we haven’t yet solved. The point of school should be to make us independent, capable thinkers–therefore ingraining facts rather than challenging us to use content to think about important issues misses the mark. We did acknowledge that despite the critical lens we are sharing in response to recent revisions, we celebrate the critical need for an African American Studies AP course and applaud the College Board’s attempts to address this need. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline, and Maya spoke with Max Eden, who heads the Conservative Ed Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank. While we are devoted to cross-partisanship, we don’t get to be in deep dialogue with strong conservatives often enough and we really enjoyed our engagement with Max, talking about various aspects of education reform and, most importantly, the impact of schools on the humans who people grow up to be. Max really helped us understand polarization and the culture wars in education reform specifically, and that the debates of today weren’t the debates we were having 10 years ago or even 5 years ago, when the focus was on fixing schools that serve higher need students through various modalities. All of that fell apart in 2015-6 in response to the Common Core Standards being poorly implemented and politically toxic. Foundations aligned with unions around the notion of institutional racism and that schools don’t need policy change, they need cultural change. Max feels there’s been a slow and steady build around DEI from 2016-20 which got ignited with the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and is now an inferno. He feels we have to view the current AP black studies controversy through this lens, and that a lot has gotten thrown into the curriculum inappropriately, including progressive causes that he feels are forced and wouldn’t allow participants to voice their own opinions. Max feels many teachers today are misconstruing their role, and that they should be agents of government rather than agents of social change trying to change the world through youth. Max also shared his perceptions of how progressivism has impacted early childhood in detrimental ways, from lack of emphasis on phonemic awareness to inappropriate attention to gender identity. We also found it helpful to hear about Max’s personal path, from being quite liberal in high school to becoming a conservative at Yale–a somewhat unusual trajectory catalyzed by his intrigue about counter arguments to common arguments he knew–and his commitment to shatter the notion that good people think one way. We closed with a fascinating conversation about whether or not schools should be values free and whether or not they CAN be. We’d love YOUR thoughts on this front. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline, and Maya spoke with Aissata Diallo, Jolina Jimenez, and Mukilan Muthukumar, members of the NYC Youth Agenda Steering Committee representing CUNY’s Intergenerational Change Initiative and YVote and discussing the 2023 Agenda that will be released at a policy breakfast on Feb 21st. We talked about what exactly the NYC Youth Agenda is, how it came to be, and what it hopes to achieve. We discussed the value of local data gathering; the unique perspective youth bring to policy making, and government more broadly, especially locally; the power of cross-organizational youth coalitions; and the motivation that comes from knowing that we are making a tangible difference. We grappled with the very real struggle to be heard and taken seriously by elected officials, especially as young people–but how it compels us even MORE to do the work we do.  Overall, we are encouraged by our progress so far—and know how much further we can and must go. Thank you for listening!