The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week's Round Table, Erina, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline, and Skyla spoke with Maine State Senator Chloe Maxmin , the youngest woman elected to the Maine House and Senate, and a relentless voice in the fight for progressive politics+climate change. She waged back-to-back successful campaigns in 2018+2020, winning a House district that had a 16 point Republican advantage, then going on to unseat the highest-ranking Republican in the Maine Senate. Maxmin decided NOT to seek another term in order to devote her focus to grassroots organizing outside of Maine via her organization, Dirt Road Organizing, building on more than thirteen years of community organizing with a focus on climate change, including co-founding Divest Harvard, a campaign calling on her alma mater Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels that ultimately drew 70,000 supporters.  Chloe’s goal is to activate and support lots of young progressive candidates in rural communities across the country, and share her successful blueprint for how the Democratic Party can rebuild bridges with these rural voters, long abandoned by the Dem Party. She believes she can make a bigger impact by getting lots of folks elected instead of just getting herself elected. As you can imagine, all this made for a very interesting conversation on many levels! We talked about what motivated Chloe to get involved in work like this at such an early age, challenges she faced, and how she’s overcome them in her campaigns and in office.  We talked about what it’s like to amplify a movement of progressive politics in rural Maine, what it was like to be the first Democrat ever elected in her district, and how to build a broader base of support in the service of working towards what’s best for EVERYONE, in a bipartisan way, within a very partisan political environment . We talked about urban vs rural divides, and how to move beyond generalizations of rural life outside the city, politically, socially, and intellectually. We talked about the primacy of building power together and aligning around values; as Chloe notes, she never met a Republican who wanted fewer good jobs or more expensive health care–where things devolve are around politics and party. And we talked about the power of local politics and recognizing that the vast majority of decisions that affect people’s everyday lives happen in state legislatures. A signature lesson Chloe learned in state office is that the best policy doesn’t happen WITHOUT grassroots organizing—and that movement building is vital for getting good people elected and keeping them in office. Here’s to it. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline and Skyla spoke with…each other.  Don’t get us wrong: we LOVE our guests but we also love our No Guest episodes when we dig in and speak in depth with one another about issues on our mind. And this week, political language and performative activism were very much on our minds. Tipped off by a paper Madeline recently wrote about the phrase “My Body My Choice” and how the meaning of that phrase has changed over the years, we talked about the language we use to describe our political ideologies, the importance of “sexy slogans” and power of social media to both provide and erode credibility in social movements, and how marketing and catchy slogans can skew narratives and chill discourse rather than enable people to evolve in their thinking. We talked in depth about the spectrum of activism, and whether and under what conditions performative activism can be a gateway to deeper, more authentic activism. Nobody decides to do activism because it’s easy; we agreed that the key to activism is the willingness and resilience that enables us to pick ourselves up and get back at it when we fail or fall short. We also agreed that the way to change is through “slow conversation” that illuminates the human experience, including that of people in the groups we may feel activated against. Hope you enjoy hearing our thoughts as much as we enjoyed hearing one another’s. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack and Kenisha spoke with Cornell Woolridge, Program Manager of the Civic Saturday Fellowship at Citizen University (CU). Cornell got involved in politics at an early age– a campaign in 3rd grade—and has been around the political space since then. What brought him to civic work and keeps him in civic work is bringing people together and helping them discover and use the power they have together. Born in Oklahoma, and growing up in Texas, Cornell was “a double PK”—Preacher’s Kid–since both his father AND his mother were preachers. Growing up in a strong faith tradition, today his energies are organized around civic faith, which binds spiritual faith with civic engagement and blends it with belief in the power of community and the intangible connection and energy to create together. Through his work at CU, Cornell is committed to assuming good intent, focusing on finding the chords of connection between people, and helping them understand one another’s experiential realities and why those might lead them to see things differently. This is why he loves coaching people in facilitating Civic Saturdays, to which you invite people who you don’t generally speak with and ideally who may be on opposite sides of an issue and create a powerful and unifying experience through the structure and rituals that bring people together through layers of communication and connection. Cornell noted that “no one leaves a Civic Saturday worse than they came in.”  Participants walk out more energized and inspired and if you leave feeling better than when you walked in, you’re more motivated and likely to take action that leads to different outcomes.  In the end, it comes down to trust. For any system of government or community to succeed, you have to have trust—in yourself, in your community, and in being able to get something done together that you couldn’t otherwise do. Sign us up! Thank you for listening.

At this week's Round Table, Ava, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Kaz Brecher,  founder of Curious Catalyst and Innovation Strategist for Made By Us. As the daughter of two rocket scientists, Kaz loves the process of inquiry and thrives in ambiguous contexts, drawing from her background in psychology, behavioral science, innovation, emerging technology and media. She believes that empowering others is the best way to have impact and spends half her time creating directly and half her time teaching others, striving to help people see what they uniquely bring to groups. She is committed to respecting everyone’s uniqueness and helping people be confident and centered in order to be empowered to do work. She believes that courage is contagious, as are all behaviors. In tackling issues and challenges, she asks, what’s the problem and how do we connect to people who have them? She firmly believes that the more opinions you have, the better the solutions you can come up with BUT there can also be a lot more friction as a result of different perspectives. She encourages us to think about what we can do together that we couldn’t do individually and emphasizes that changing systems—and society—is never easy. Being a translator is critical because different touch points resonate and we must always come back to the basics of what connects us: listening, respect, curiosity. Thank you for joining us for our first podcast of 2023!

At this week's  Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Skyla engaged with some of our favorite guests—alumni podcast hosts Inica Kotasthane, now finishing her first semester at Barnard College, and Riya Mehta, midday through her junior year at Tufts University. We think you’ll enjoy catching up with these formerly-familiar voices as much as we did. In the spirit of year-end episodes, we started by rating HOW our respective years have been and why and then talked a great deal about the year in pop culture and its intersection with politics. We discussed how it’s becoming increasingly hard to separate art from politics;  whether you can–and should–separate the artist from the art; the importance of artistic freedom; and where, when, and how lines should be drawn and artists should be “canceled”--as well as WHO should make such calls, platforms like Spotify, companies like Adidas, or consumers. We also talked about the challenges of free speech and how Twitter is emblematic of our time, with “free” speech being bought by the richest man in the world, leading to use of the N word instantly increasing by 4 times along with geometric increases of other hate speech, huge layoffs, increases in misinformation and lack of civility, and places getting increasingly less safe, in person and online.

This is a really exciting time on a personal level as well as a cultural one. . Many of us have oriented our whole lives around getting into college and, now that three of us podcast hosts have gotten into the colleges we applied early to–yay!--we have to figure out what’s next. We’ve got some exciting ideas, and resolutions, and book recommendations we think will resonate with you and would love to hear yours too. Thank you for listening in 2022 and we look forward to sharing more podcast adventures in 2023!

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha, Madeline, and Ava spoke with Lisa Kay Solomon, writer, Associate Professor and Designer in Residence at Stanford Institute of Design, and Co-founder of All Vote, No Play, exploring sports, civics, social change, and the interconnections between them. Lisa teaches an incredibly popular class on futures thinking at Stanford and is also a passionate public educator, spreading the civic gospel well beyond the classroom and onto the courts and playing fields of America. While Lisa is a trained futurist,  she emphasizes that thinking about the future is a skill set we all can learn—and it doesn’t require having a crystal ball! It entails thinking about what is the range of possible futures that might unfold–recognizing that nothing is fixed or assured– and how we can learn to bring our preferred future to life. All that’s required is bold imagination and comfort with ambiguity along with socializing and sensitizing ourselves to different perspectives and world views in order to try to understand the fullest range of possible—and then to try to shape it! At root, futures thinking is about shaping systems and looking for levers of change that are high value and go unnoticed. You know, like student athletes, who have been wildly overlooked in the civic space yet if you think about who has influence on campuses, you can’t NOT think of this. On the heels of the murder of George Floyd and the public outcry for social justice reform, this led Lisa to partner with long-time basketball coach Eric “Rev” Reveno ("Rev") on a shared mission to help players register to vote and to flex their civic power more broadly. They asked themselves, “what if we empowered all student athletes to act like citizens, and to model the kinds of behaviors that create the types of societies we want to live in?” Athletes actually have a lot to offer with regard to some of the thorny civic challenges of our time, like bridging differences, which they do every single day in playing on teams and against others. Getting them to transfer those skills to the civic skills is powerful.The pilot Lisa and Rev cooked up together was so successful it led to the participating student athletes proposing legislation to the NCAA to take this an annual event for over 500k students and to form the powerful All Vote and No Play initiative–and they are just getting started! Lisa reminds us that democracy doesn’t just happen: it requires individuals putting themselves in positions—including sometimes at risk of harm or threat— in order to protect the kind of democracy we want to be part of. We are incredibly inspired by the vision of All Vote No Play and think you will be too. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha, Madeline, Maya, and Skyla spoke with Alison Gash and Daniel Tichenor, Political Science Professors at University of Oregon and co-authors of Democracy's Child: Young People and the Politics of Control, Leverage, and Agency. Democracy’s Child is a sweeping and innovative study that places young people at the heart of pivotal conflicts, decisions, and transformations in American politics–and our conversation was similarly sweeping. We talked at length about the power and possibility of GenZ, esp coming off of the 2022 midterms and how young people can flex our collective muscles to be increasingly at the center of politics and impact issues. So many political decisions are made FOR young people without our direct input. That cannot stand. Our generation wants to pave the way for change in our democracy. To do so, we want to better understand the history of youth activism–both its successes and shortcomings–and how we can both build upon AND differentiate selves from prior movements. We talked about how much voice teens really DO have, how to keep a focus on youth BEYOND the time of elections when our votes are needed, and how to get beyond the limiting belief that young people don’t have the capacity developmentally to engage fully in politics and public affairs. We talked about how to make politicians understand that they HAVE to care about what we care about and how we need to create politics BY young people, not just FOR young people. What young people learn at pivotal ages stays with us. It doesn’t just influence us in the moment; it transforms us. THIS is why education is so hotly contested, because the values that youth adopt can be threatening to the status quo. Let’s threaten it together. Thanks for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Collin, Erina, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Dr. Steven Becton, Chief Officer of Equity, Inclusion and Belonging at Facing History and Ourselves. Dr Becton has spent his career working deeply in and with schools to create whole school culture and transformational educational experiences that equip educators, while also empowering students, to overcome the systemic issues that have placed them at risk. We talked about the structures that uphold racism; the impact of structural racism on communities and schools; the importance of disrupting narratives, and confirmation biases, about what people can and can’t do, whether Black, new immigrants, non cis gendered, or anything outside dominant identities; and the power to teaching difficult history to students along with teaching them to be critical thinkers and giving them space to come to their own conclusions–which is far afield from the purported “indoctrination” that worries people in relation to race. We talked about how America was born in a paradox (not a contradiction), with two competing ideas sitting as truths for people–that is, that all men are created equal at the same time that the founders were enslaving people–and how we still live with paradoxes and the consequences of them. We talked about how as activists, we too often fail to connect change to policy, yet most of what happens in our country is influenced by policy as much as by culture and changing hearts and minds. Dr Becton underscored that the anti-racism movement doesn’t need allies; it needs co-conspirators. He reminded us of the danger of thinking it’s THOSE people who have the problem when we often have to think about OURSELVES–what price are WE willing to pay for equity? History has taught us that it costs upstanders something. Are we willing to give up power? Positionality? Income? Good schools? We encourage you to join us in this self-interrogation–and in taking action based upon it.  Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha, Madeline, and Maya spoke with Paul Gabbey, a fantastic teacher of AP Government & Politics/MacroEconomics at Penfield High School in Rochester, NY for the last 28 years–a school that he himself graduated from. Mr Gabbey is the kind of teacher you wish everyone could have–creative, kind, and inspiring, registering thousands of students to vote; supporting many former students in getting involved in local, state, and federal politics; and hosting the biggest political party in Monroe County every four years to make Election Night memorable. We talked about how to teach politics in a productive way at the nexus of history and current events; the challenges of teaching in a time of hyper polarization AND of preparing students for the AP test WHILE making content relevant and relatable; and the power of an interdisciplinary approach in doing so. Mr Gabbey’s key emphasis is on involvement- you can't sit on the sidelines and expect things to get done.  He wants to help students to see that politics and government–and teaching!-- can be a noble profession and that making a difference is key. It’s very evident how much of a difference Mr Gabbey has made on the lives of his students–and now on you. Thank you for listening!

At this week's podcast, Kenisha and Madeline celebrated Thanksgiving by speaking with Eunice Lin Nichols, CEO of Co-Generate and one of Co-Generate’s newest Innovation Fellows, Natilee McGruder, co-chair of Alabama Leads.  CoGenerate is working to bridge generational divides to co-create the future–a mission near and dear to our hearts.  We talked about the power of intergenerational conversations and relationships–and also the tensions, judgments, and misperceptions that can arise. All of this can come to a head at Thanksgiving, especially for those of us who many not have engaged with extended family over for a few years due to the pandemic and may now be feeling a bit tentative about having conversations across generational lines. We shared stories about formative cross-generational experiences in our own lives and talked about opportunities for bonding, Modern Elders and Old Souls, the challenges of growing up in a pandemic and the generational implications, and the power of digging into shared problems (you know, like climate change…) together. We also talked about the importance of youth entering spaces with a sense of “I’ve arrived and have something to offer” ALONGSIDE respect; young people speaking their truth does and should arouse elders since the most powerful movements have ALWAYS had youth at the forefront. We emerged with heightened respect for just how powerful co-generating can be. Thank you for listening!