The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Inica, and Kenisha spoke with Hassan Javed and Zoey Belyea of Citizen University’s Youth Collaboratory, which focuses on equipping the next generation with the skills to build civic power and use it for good—right up our alley. We have to change narratives of power as part of this. Zoey and Hassan underscored that we can’t solve problems with the same old strategy; we NEED to help young people realize and wield our individual and collective power. It’s a key to transformation and empowerment, both societal and personal. Hassan talked about the pain of wanting to call out and address injustices he saw but not having a vehicle to do so. So HOW do we build power? By organizing of course! One person can bring four more people in. By building community and networks, especially of young activists, we can become civically super charged and start to change culture and, ultimately, cultural change is even more important than policy change. Yet it doesn’t happen overnight or even over many nights and we have to hold the vision and be willing to work for it, day after day and night after night, and to pursue multiple avenues to find what works. The more we learn now—and maybe even the more we fail now—the more effective we’ll be in 20-30 years. We loved how Zoey talked about using creative capacity to combine a logic framework with a heart centered approach to enable each of us to show up in ways that are fulfilling, loving, and inspiring and that help the world become the best version of itself. Here’s to that version–and thanks for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, and Kenisha spoke with Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute, where she focuses on child welfare and foster care issues. For decades, Naomi’s work has focused on understanding how to identify and attend to those who are most vulnerable and at risk and how we can better support them. Today, that translates to focusing on the impact of remote schooling and the mental health crisis being experienced by adolescents, especially the most vulnerable, for whom things have gone from bad to worse while they have simultaneously become more invisible. The data is sobering: rates of suicide and suicidal ideation and substance abuse and overdosing have gone dramatically up. We talked about the impact of school closings and how important it is to adjust to Covid as the new normal and not be overly cautious: Naomi shared that a child is as likely to die from Covid as to die from playing Little League. She encouraged us to think of Covid like we think of the flu, for which 20,000 kids are hospitalized every year and we survive. Naomi feels that the billions of dollars the Federal Government has poured into schools hasn’t been well used, and that schools are trying to adhere to too many policies to their–and our– detriment.  Further, she would get rid of quarantining as she thinks it’s impossible to run institutions with it.  We also talked about the foster care system–there are 440,000 kids currently in the system and rampant cases of abuse and neglect—and what it would take to reform it in meaningful ways. It was a super interesting conversation; we hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline, and guest podcaster Jedd spoke with John Pelissero, senior scholar on government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. Ethics are something many of us don’t think or talk about enough yet, as Jack put it, are an underlying bedrock that, if properly addressed, could help solve a lot of our current societal challenges. What ARE government ethics? It’s a broad framework to contextualize the ethical issues and awareness that we seek from public officials in the political system–for example, campaigns, elections, issues that confront voters. The foundation comes from Aristotle and other ancient philosophers and is organized around the notion of the common good and how the public interest can best be served through the powers given to the government. At the founding of our country, people gave up some of their individual power to a collective government with the belief that everyone would benefit–has that value proposition been achieved??? Government ethics don’t make things utopian: Professor Pelissero underscored that there will always be winners and losers in a political system. Morally, that’s not wrong BUT if there’s a pattern and a population is consistently left out, we are demonstrating bias and NOT serving the public good. Being good fiduciary actors and ensuring that we are being fair in how we protect people and allocate the benefits of the government.  We talked about the age old question of delegate vs trustee government–that is, should elected officials be beholden to their constituency or to what THEY think is best? What are the appropriate ways for representatives to check in with people. And, surprise surprise, we spoke about the need for basic education in civics and ethical awareness to undergird all this. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Tedman Getschman, Founder of Common Sense for Uniting America. Ted is a native Nevadan who served as a U.S. Naval officer for 28 years, during which time he was stationed in Japan, Spain, Germany, and the UK. He’s now retired from the military and spends his time spreading the word that there IS a common sense approach to ending political divisions–-so of course we wanted to speak with him! While developing training programs all over the world, from Armenia to Azerbaijan, Ted became excruciatingly aware that there were lots of disjunctions from administration to administration in the U.S., which prevents our country from having and working towards the kind of long range vision that many other countries have (think China)  This, combined with the divisiveness of the last two elections, and the all or nothing feeling from people on both sides of the aisle, led him to feel that our government is a beautiful idea but it doesn’t work in practice. He feels there’s a simple issue with the government with a simple fix that would make political division go away. After all, if you think about all the problems we have in our country/world, shouldn’t we ALL be focusing on answers to these challenges, even if we come to the answers through different pathways in life? One key thing Ted feels needs to change is our two party system and plurality voting, which inevitably makes people feel left out, voiceless, and disempowered. It’s not that we don’t and won’t have differences of opinion. We do and we should. It’s that the current system forces people towards extremes. We think you’ll enjoy learning more about Ted and his thoughts in this episode. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Charles Tocci, Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education at Loyola University Chicago. Professor Tocci’s work explores the connections between American education and democracy in the past and in the present–so as you can imagine, we had a vibrant conversation. We talked about what makes for good civic education–and how often the reality of what’s on offer falls short of that. Civics has many facets and many features. We agreed that a good civics class should focus on power: how do we access, exercise, and share power? What role do each of us play? How do we make decisions that address the common good? How can we have a collective mindset that makes us feel powerful rather than powerless and rudderless? We agreed that highlighting that we all have a relationship to power—through whether or not we vote, through writing to council members, etc–and reflecting upon how we participate in and circulate power, both currently and over the course of our lives, should be central. As young people, we often don’t see ourselves pictured in government—but we should: we are the missing link. Charlie shared that the bar is often lower than we might think: if 13 constituents reach out to a legislator about an issue, that legislator will often investigate. That said, another key civics lesson we discussed is that you’re going to lose. A lot. It’s important to build civic persistence and resilience if we aspire to be lifelong change-makers. We need to play the long game, and collectively imagine new ways to do politics. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table--our last of 2021, Inica, Jack, and Kenisha had the special holiday treat of being in conversation with two of our amazing alumni podcasters: Julianna Davis, from our founding podcast team and now a sophomore at American University—deemed by some as the most “liberal school in America”-- and Divya Ganesan, from last year’s podcast team who is now a freshman at Stanford University. It provided a good opportunity to reflect on core values from NGP that they have carried with them to college: pragmatism, commitment to broadening and deepening our understanding, investment in hearing others’ perspectives and thinking about how people’s backgrounds affect their views, how vilification prevents us from being able to hear others, the value of learning from experts on topics of interest. We had an open and constructive conversation about the challenges of polarization on campus and how those are exacerbated by online exchanges and social media (“anyone can be a keyboard warrior” as Julianna put it.)  We debunked some myths: that the path to and through college is linear (it’s curvy!), that college culture is cutthroat (it’s collaborative!), that there’s a tradeoff between freedom of thought and expression (it’s essential for true learning!), and that members of Gen Z aren’t mature enough to engage in sophisticated political conversations (which just may be operating under a different belief system…) Most importantly, we enjoyed reconnecting with one another and connecting with you, our beloved listeners. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Inica and Madeline spoke with Bhawani Venkataraman, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chair and Departmental Faculty Advisor for Natural Sciences and Mathematics at The New School.  Professor Venkataraman focuses on how chemistry can be made relevant to students and to issues of social justice and equity, and to how to get students thinking deeply and becoming informed voters—pretty cool, right? Connect macro with molecular with social

Making sense of the world today requires integrating multiple disciplines, and so she strives to connect the molecular world with macro social issues. More specifically, Professor Venkataraman’s work tackles challenges around safe drinking water. We all have an intimate relationship w water and know it is essential to keeping us alive but what is it about the properties of good old H2O that makes it so? Water dictates so much about public health, safety, educational opportunities and is a POWERFUL medium for exploring the interconnections of human existence yet we rarely examine its centrality to our way of life, until after a tragedy like Flint, Michigan occurs. Professor Venkataraman works to make the invisible, visible–and visceral! She encourages us not to look at individual issues discreetly but rather to connect dots and look at systems, and to always hold issues of justice and equity at the forefront.

She has a book coming out in February that connects the chemistry of water to the policies and management issues around drinking water, a connection we found fascinating and think you will as well.  Life cycles should be at the forefront of policy making, esp for vulnerable populations. As such, Professor Venkataraman’s work also focuses on how best to communicate basic scientific research on issues such as water quality, air pollution, and climate change to non-scientists–something we non-scientists really appreciated. Thank you for listening!

Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away...At this week's round table, Inica, Jack, & Kenisha spoke with Michael Preston and Rafi Santo from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop about how teens are engaging with public media, and media and social media more broadly today. We all expressed nostalgia for public broadcasting, connecting it to our youth, while not fully connecting it to our present. Which didn’t surprise our guests because it mirrors findings in their By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative, in which they spoke with  tweens and teens across the U.S., asking them for their advice about what media producers should do if they want to engage with people their age, and how their lives have changed during the pandemic, producing the report The Missing Middle: Reimagining a Future for Tweens, Teens, and Public Media. 

We’ve grown up with access to the world at our fingertips, able to access anything, anytime, with the lines between work and play blurring because so much of both happen online. Our lives have been shaped by online interactions, which is a blessing and a curse. Technology evolves as quickly as we do—and what our younger siblings experience through technology may be very different than what we have.  We loved discussing what a good, credible media technology ecosystem could look like--amidst the crisis of misinformation, disinformation, and polarizing media consumption--and the values that should undergird it. 

We loved speaking with our guests about the authentic learning lives of youth, and how to honor the very rich learning and problem solving that happens beyond the classroom, in large part thanks to what technology makes available to us . At root, questions about technology boil down to questions of values--what do we want to spend our time doing and learning, how do we create breathing space in our tech-dominated worlds, and what kinds of possible futures do we want for young people and for our citizenry? Most youth don’t know what public media is, where to find it, and what’s different from commercial media, but public media has an important role to play in a healthy democracy, particularly given how few purely public goods we have in the U.S. that aren’t driven by profit. 

We all agreed that youth should play an active role not just in selecting what media we watch but in producing it: which is of course a core value of this for GenZ, by GenZ podcast. Thank you for joining us!

Decisions, decisions, we make them everyday. Simple and hard decisions are a part of life: Blue or red? Pizza or chips? Within these decisions, there’s debate about what’s right, wrong, & what you believe. The classroom is a huge part of developing skills to make decisions. At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Mariel Halpern, the program coordinator of the Debate and Decision-making Workshop at Columbia University Teachers College, a 4 week long workshop for middle schoolers focused on civic discourse about contemporary issues. Debate is so important during middle school years, especially in a complex world where there are so many shades of gray. Students are placed with a peer with an opposing viewpoint each week to converse for about 25 minutes, after which they write a short position piece on their stance and watch their feedback video to evaluate what skills they’ve gained. Since the pandemic started and the workshop shifted online, Mariel and her colleagues discovered that the anonymity Zoom affords makes participants feel freer to express ideas they may not have otherwise, and that participants have stayed more focused on the issues than the identity of their partner, while noting that the absence of in-person cues has pros and cons.  Interesting, right? 

As Mariel finishes her graduate work, her main question is about how students value the things they learn in the classroom through thinking and discussing critically and, of course, whether this translates BEYOND the classroom into our democracy. Now YOU can practice these skills by making the decision to keep on listening to learn more about the program, its impact, and what’s next for Mariel Halpern. Thank you for listening!

At this week's roundtable, Erina, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Alexios Rosario-Moore, clinical associate professor of educational policy studies in the Urban Higher Education program of the University of Illinois Chicago--the only graduate program that focuses on higher ed specifically in urban context. We dug into findings from his recent study, “Shocks to the System: An Ecological Analysis of the Pandemic’s Disparate Impact on Undergraduate Students at UIC,” which surveyed 1273 undergrads with a 74 item questionnaire asking about academic, economic, social, and other impacts they’ve experienced through COVID. The study explored what factors are most disruptive and--surprise surprise--found a big difference between young people who are in well resourced homes vs those who aren’t, in terms of being more adaptive to adversity. Students who were burdened with family responsibilities have generally fared worse through Covid. Interestingly, Alexios has found that self perception varies and that some students experience more adversity than others but don’t perceive it as such--for ex, a student might perceive having to work out of a room shared with a sibling as more stressful than another student who has lost a family member. The disruption of peer networks likely had a significant negative impact on mental health and academic engagement across the board. What are the implications, now and for the future? Tune in to hear our takes. Thank you for listening!