The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack,  Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Sasha Simon, leader of the BIPOC Mental Health Coalition, established in May 2020 and funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The Coalition is an emerging and diverse group of 30 youth-serving organizations across the nation and is dedicated to helping the mental health of BIPOC youth and advancing racial justice. Given the impact of Covid 19 over the past 18 months, social isolation, anxiety, depression, intergenerational trauma, and other issues have increased and the language, desires, & experiences faced by BIPOC youth have evolved. Sasha actively listens to youth for their input & learns more about the ways that intergenerational politics have stunted the mental health resources available to BIPOC youth. She reminds us, “As BIPOC folks, we have probably experienced our trauma for generations and there’s a lot that needs to be unpacked. We need to speak, normalize, and seek out support.” Sasha encourages us, as youth, to have a liberating and revolutionary approach to mental health advocacy: she challenged us to start a petition, find resources for your community, to make mental health matter. We’re posing that question to you too: how can YOU make a positive change around mental health in your community? Thank you for listening!

We came to this week's Round Table on our own--no guest-- so that we could speak in depth with one another and so you could get to know our newest podcasters, Jack and Kenisha, as well as veterans Inica and Madeline, a bit better than you might in an ordinary episode. We talked about the issue on most teens’ minds--what will it be like to head back to school? Many of us are a year and a half older than when we were last in an actual school building. Are we a year and a half wiser? We talked about various tensions at hand--whether or not we think vaccines and masks should be mandatory; how do we socially distance in a school of 5000 at 150% capacity; how do we handle school lunch, which can’t be done with a mask; how to we address the detrimental mental health impact of the pandemic; how can we empathize with those who have very different perspectives on all of this than we do? One thing is for sure--the year isn’t going to be boring… Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Inica and Madeline spoke with Jennifer Wilson, Dean of Eugene Lang College and Associate Professor of Mathematics at Eugene Lang College. Dean Wilson loves math and she loves social change so she has found ways to entwine the two in her work. She studies the ways in which we make decisions and the fairness properties embedded in that, for good and for bad. Voting is a quintessential way citizens make decisions and thus is of particular interest to her. Dean Wilson is deeply invested in plurality vs majority systems, and is closely analyzing the recent primaries in New York City, which used ranked choice voting (RCV) for the first time. Of course SOME aspects of RCV can be approached mathematically (like the spoiler effect) and others can’t (like does it impact how candidates approach the campaign) but analyzing it mathematically can help us step back, gain objectivity, and think LESS about campaigning as a sport and MORE about the structures we use to make decisions--and then to critique and improve them. A mathematical lens (specifically collective game theory) can also be helpful in analyzing the bandwagon effect--that is, what are the reasons for candidates to support one another as they’re gaining momentum—and gerrymandering to produce more or less competitive races. Needless to say, Jennifer Wilson’s work and this episode will help you think differently and more deeply about electoral math. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Madeline and Kenisha did something a bit different for the podcast, along with Elijah from the Department of Youth & Community Development and Caroline from NYCVotes We Power NYC: interviewed Danny Frost, Senior Advisor and Director of Communications for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for an episode of We Got Issues on Facebook Live. We Got Issues is a monthly partnership of YVote/Next Generation Politics, DYCD, and NYCVotes that illuminates what different elected officials do, seeking to build voter and citizen knowledge AND to humanize the office and officials. In this episode, we talked about the role of the District Attorney  (spoiler alert: it’s NOT to nail em and jail em), Danny’s responsibilities as the chief spokesperson and Public Information Officer of such a high stakes office, what’s different working as an attorney for government vs a private firm, and how the DA’s office works to engage youth and leverage Community Partnerships. We also talked about pressing current events, like how the District Attorney’s office dealt with arrests of protesters during the Black Lives Matter Protest in 2020 and how Danny has seen criminal justice in New York change over the course of his tenure. The role of the DA isn’t to win, it’s to seek justice--which aligns with our ethos at Next Generation Politics as well--so it was an exciting episode for us. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Shaylyn Romney Garrett-- writer, speaker, and thinker-- who is trying to change America and the world for the better through connection and community in order to heal and renew our societies. Shaylyn is the coauthor with Robert Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together A Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, which provides critical insights for weaving a stronger, more united future for our country. Today, it seems the only thing we can all agree on is that America is in a bad place and on the wrong track. So Shaylyn and Professor Putnam engaged in vast, data driven work to examine the last 125 years of history through four lenses-- economic, cultural, political, and social-- to better understand ‘how we got here’. They made a breathtaking finding: all four lenses map the same trajectory, a trajectory that looks like an inverted bell curve. At the turn of the 20th century, we were extremely polarized and narcissistic across economic, cultural, political, and social matters, after which things started moving in a better direction for the ensuing 70 years until about the mid 60s, when everything started sliding back to the way it looked at the beginning of the 20th century. You could characterize that 100 year period as an I-We-I-century: polarized and narcissistic at the beginning and end, but unified and communal in the middle. Today, our country looks very similar to the America from the turn of the century- Gilded Age America. The lesson, however, is surprisingly optimistic. Instead of disparaging, The Upswing teaches us to learn from and act upon what actually happened after the Gilded Age: an age of unprecedented peace and shared prosperity. We’ve been here before and we can get out of our current toxic culture if we learn from and build on historical precedents. One thing we learned during the last upswing is that progress didn’t come overnight. It took 60+ years, and even with all that was accomplished, not everything changed and progress around things like race and gender were insufficient. We have to do better in creating OUR upswing, and Shaylyn was the perfect guest to guide us in doing so. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, guest podcaster Sophia, Madeline, and Kenisha spoke with Anooj Bhandari, Network Coordinator for Restorative Justice Initiative and an overall warrior for all things restorative. Anooj is a Community Organizer with passions for the relationship between community education and the transformation of harm. He focuses on exploring alternatives to, diversions from, and the elimination of, the carceral state. He is first and foremost an artist, creative storyteller, and a visionary who believes deeply in art as a process to ask quiet questions publicly. Anooj asks, what does it mean to dream of a world that can address harm AND healing--and how do we bring it into existence? He asks, in a landscape in which people are getting further and further from one another, how do we humanize one another and do so in anti racist ways? He asks, how might we shift resources in society differently if we recognize that harm is often about needs not being met? He asks, what if we meet people who have committed crimes with belonging rather than isolation and help them know they don’t need to do this alone? Anooj helped us understand that storytelling can help people burst through the binary of bad and good within criminal justice to believe in something else--and to get beyond ‘who did what’ to instead ask ‘what do you need?’ He helped us understand that being an artist is a way you move through the world and infuse curiosity and wonder into everything you do. It comes with responsibility to bring that more into the world. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, guest podcaster Vanessa, Inica, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with renaissance woman Charli Kemp, founder of Change The Tune and doctoral candidate in education leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Charlie has tapped into EVERY kind of schooling over the course of her own education and professional career, which enables her to state with confidence that our systems are perfectly designed for the outcomes they create—and they’re designed to fail. Students spend 80% of their lives OUTSIDE of school. By the time they reach 6th grade, this results in affluent kids having 6000 extra hours—or four extra years--of learning. It’s not about creating better schools--even utopian schools can’t touch that opportunity gap and, resultantly, the wealth gap. Change the Tune aims to, well, change that tune by leveraging universal connectors--things like music, food, and sports--through programming like “Just Us” Time, Holistically Dope, and Possibility Panels--to reimagine the extended learning experience for youth in a way that creates mastery and memories, which is where true learning happens. For her, education isn’t about equality or equity--it’s about liberation. Charli believes music is “the universal language of the soul,” a way to say “I see you,” and a panacea for societal problems--and she did a pretty great job convincing us of this throughout the episode. Thank you for listening!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Jeanette Castellanos, Vice President of the Social Impact Collective at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). Jeanette’s career has been at the intersection of social justice, education, and innovation. We talked about what social justice means today; what it looks like in a professional context, formally and informally; and how it does and doesn’t play out in education today. Jeanette underscored that as long as there’s not equity in education, there’s unlikely to be equity elsewhere. Having access to high quality education for everyone, regardless of your zip code or economic status, is a linchpin for everything else. We talked about how social justice should be more fully woven into the K-12 curriculum, especially at the middle school level, which is a critical crossroads for civic identity. We talked about the need to disrupt the traditional notion of school THEN employment to instead explore how learning and earning can be more integrated. We all agreed that we have to broaden our conception of education to extend well beyond the classroom--and to include things like this podcast. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Eric Torres, a doctoral student at Harvard School of Education, about political identity and the history and future of polarization, which he studies and, come this fall, will teach a course at Harvard on.  Eric developed his fascination with these issues through his undergraduate studies in philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics. As he saw the country shifting and dividing, he found himself pondering what makes for productive dialogue and arguments, and wanting to be involved in helping foster and facilitate them. Eric feels that it’s not that politics are getting further apart, it’s that our political identities have become wrapped up in sectarian conflicts since the 1960s and that we now make judgments about people’s character and morality based upon their political views. He feels this stems from a swirl of factors including elite political behavior, social media, demographic shifts, income inequality, and the decline of religiosity, all of which drive us to act in more tribal ways. Today, too often political identity is grounded in anger and socio-emotional needs rather than civic responsibilities and participation, but it doesn’t have to be so. Eric helped us think about how we can forge individual and collective political philosophies that “rebel” against the toxic political environment. We hope you’ll join us in this rebellion. Thanks for listening!