The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week's Round Table, guest podcasters Kenisha, Mateo, and Sharona spoke with Allie Swatek, Director of Policy and Research for the New York City Campaign Finance Board about the recent municipal election in New York and the advent of Ranked Choice Voting. We’ve had 110 mayors in New York. None of them have been women and only one was non-white. This year, that won’t be the case. While we don’t yet know who the mayor WILL be, it won’t be a white man. More women, and more women of color, ran for office in NYC than ever before. And more than ever seem to have won—it looks like 29 of the 51 City Council Members will be women (up from just 14 currently) and a black man is in first place for mayor with a black woman and a white woman neck and neck for second and third place as things continue to be tabulated. Multiple factors are at play--and many feel that Ranked Choice Voting played a significant role. Cities are laboratories of democracy, so how might Ranked Choice Voting impact cities more broadly now that the biggest one has left plurality voting behind, quadrupling the number of people in the U.S. who are voting through ranked choice voting? Were people prepared? We couldn’t have a better guest to help us understand the issues at play than Allie Swatek, who was part of the 2019 Charter Revision Commission that brought RCV  onto the ballot and who has been working tirelessly to help citizens understand and prepare for it. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Sherene Crawford and James Brodick from the Center for Court Innovation about their visionary criminal justice reform work. They are both very mission driven: Sherene sees criminal justice as the civil rights issue of the 21st century and James is compelled by conviction that we are all one and thus must drive community change together, focusing on those who have been most poorly served by the systems we currently have. They both feel strongly that community based organizations are a critical bridge between communities and courts--and the best way to inspire community problem solving. We talked about their work finding more holistic alternatives to the broken system of incarceration, the challenges of solving problems when there’s a lack of trust across stakeholders, the pendulum swings of responses to crime, the importance of holding government accountable for doing well by all who are impacted by the carceral state, and their hopefulness about the rise in progressive prosecution. They encouraged us to think about reform from within the system as well as outside of it. We honed in on the fact that we ALL want the same outcome: safer communities. The friction is around HOW to do it. We are inspired by the fact that there has been serious progress made in reducing incarceration—AND we still have a long way to go. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with two of our O.G. podcasters, Julianna Davis and Riya Mehta. If you haven’t listened to our first season podcasts from last year, we highly recommend you go back to hear their great work.  We reflected on the very unusual 2020-21 school year through the lens of first year college students, discussing the heated political environment on college campuses; the social cost, and value, of being political in college; and the implications of most “political dialogue” transpiring through Instagram stories. We also talked about the value of “talking with” vs “talking at”--and ensuring that “talking with” includes people with divergent perspectives; pervasive lack of respect for nuance; and the importance of not jumping to conclusions about who someone is based on their views or posts (or lack thereof) and instead thinking about WHY people think the way they do. Together, we pondered the scary rise in hate crimes; whether more and, more importantly, different kinds of dialogue could help resolve some seemingly intractable divides; and how our views about social justice have or haven’t changed over the course of this strange year.  Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, Jack, and Madeline spoke with Micky Ayoub about his experiences as a campaign and community organizer and about his recent article Four Ways To Actually Understand Someone You Disagree With. Micky was honest about just how hard this can be to do in practice--and why it’s important to keep trying. We talked about the value of not defining someone by their political alignment and beliefs; the importance of trying to establish a shared set of facts; and the necessity of figuring out where we DO and SHOULD draw a line and set personal boundaries. We also talked about what distinguishes Gen Z’s approach to things--and why Micky thinks we are going to create powerful generational change. Micky lives by three core values-- community, service, and leadership--all of which came across loud and clear in our conversation. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Madeline and guest podcaster Kenisha spoke with NPR Correspondent Martin Kaste, who has been covering law enforcement and privacy over the past seven years. The big story, as he sees it, is the gap between perception and reality when it comes to understanding the complexities of law enforcement and public safety--and the galvanizing impact of video and social media. Seeing something fundamentally changes the dynamic, and throws lighter fluid on the issue. This has radically changed what the public perceives as acceptable use of force. Video illuminates--and it also distorts. Public perception of the number of people shot by police is FAR higher than the reality. There are about 800,000 police officers in the US, and many millions of criminal contacts per year. The vast majority of officers never shoot their guns. That said, of course ANY unnecessary killings are tragedies to be avoided to the greatest extent possible. So what can we do? What are we as a society willing to accept? With 18,000 independent police departments across the U.S., Martin encouraged us not to think of the police as a monolith but rather to think about systems of policing, so that’s what we strove to do in this conversation. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Isaiah, Madeline, and guest podcaster Jack Flanigan spoke with Eric Torres, a doctoral student at Harvard School of Education, about promoting dialogue across political differences but with a switch--this time our guest asked questions of us instead of the other way around. We talked about the state of civil discourse in and outside of classrooms, what it takes for dialogue to be productive rather than argumentative, and concerns about the absence of facts in too many of these conversations or, as I put it, how “every one is an expert on everything without actually knowing anything.”  We all agreed that productive political dialogue in schools is almost an oxymoron and that building students’--and teachers’--skills around engaging in hot button dialogue would be very, very valuable. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, and Madeline spoke with Willoughby Winograd, on leave from his junior year at Stanford serving as Program Director of Deliberations.US at Equal Citizens. Willoughby's work focuses on getting Americans to discuss the issues we SHOULD be discussing in order to restore the core promise of political equality. This includes conducting Deliberative Polls around the world-- events which bring together people from a range of backgrounds to discuss the political issues facing their communities to foster thoughtful, informed opinions. We talked about his (unexpected) path to this work, perceptions about the rise of polarization in the U.S. (spoiler alert: data shows that there hasn't been much of a change in our country’s political divide since the 1970s), and what fuels--and counteracts--polarization. We also talked about how to set up effective deliberations that help us get beyond echo chambers and orthodoxy--something we are all deeply invested in. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with Andy Danilchick, CoFounder and Director of the Project for Mental Health and Optimal Development (PMHOD) at Penn Graduate School of Education. We spoke about the impact of the last 14 months on students’ mental health and well being--and the conditions that will nurture them on the other side. Andy shared the guiding question he and his Center have operated by during the pandemic: how do we help in this time of intense pressure and change that educators and students are facing? We talked about the toll Covid and other stressors are taking on both students and teachers--and how differently they’re playing out for some than others; the importance of learner-centered approaches; and what else schools can do to support students’ mental health and flourishing. Oh, and we talked about our OWN mental states. Thank you for joining us!

At this week's Round Table, Divya, Inica, Isaiah, and Madeline spoke with three of NYC’s We Power Ambassadors: Caroline Ji, Felicia Trestin, and Nathaniel Valdivieso. They are among 32 Youth Ambassadors chosen from all across New York City to inspire and promote voting and civic engagement on behalf of the New York Campaign Finance Board’s NYC Votes initiative. And inspire they did--we loved hearing them share what motivates them to do this work, what they’ve been learning through it, and how they hope to make an impact. We grappled with some of the traditional questions that come up around youth and politics: DO our voices matter? CAN the issues we care about influence elections? We talked about the challenges of opportunities of doing civic engagement outreach in COVID; the power--and peril--of social media; the dangers of raising a misinformed generation; and the importance of getting involved no matter how young you are. Thank you for joining us!