The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

At this week's Round Table, new podcasters Emily and Heba joined Jack and Skyla to speak with Brianna Carmen , political director at Emerge . Emerge is the nation's premier organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for office. At Emerge, Brianna not only gets to work through partners at the local state and national level, but also develops strategies for operationalizin...

At this week's Round Table, Erina, Jack, and Kenisha spoke with Elena Waidmann, a rising fifth year graduate student in the lab of Dr. Erich Jarvis at Rockefeller University, who studies the neural and genetic mechanisms underlying mouse vocalizations. From participating in a neuroscience program through the Center for Talented Youth during high school to studying the neurological facial recog...

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Maya spoke with Rachel Roseberry , the Associate Director of Young Adult Program and Services at The New York Public Library (NYPL), about the vital role libraries play in community building and civic education as well as the various opportunities there are to get involved in breaking literacy barriers. The NYPL is a civic space where people can g...

At a recent Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Maya, and Skyla spoke with each other celebrated and reflected on the bittersweet end to their four memorable years of high school. Attending high schools in different locations--and heading off to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Amherst respectively--they discussed what made each of their high school experiences unique AND what made them similar. Something ver...

At this week's Round Table, Jack and Madeline spoke with Salomón Flamenco, a rising 2nd year Masters student at Georgetown University, whose work currently focuses around the experiences of minorities in America. Being Salvadoran American, Salomon experiences the lack of connection with his Spanish roots, which is a common thread amongst children of immigrants. He created his own podcast, Mino...

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Mondiant Dogon, human rights activist, refugee ambassador, and author of Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds. Mondiant is the founder of the international nonprofit organization, Mondiant Initiative, with a mission to transform the lives of refugees in Africa through opportunities.. His plan is to expand this initiative all over t...

At this week's Round Table, Jack & Maya spoke with Daniel Jones, cultural curator at The Cameron Art Museum (CAM), whose work lies in the intersection of art, history, and education. As a curator, Jones collects oral histories and uses artistic expression to continue to push these stories to the forefront of our communities. The CAM is located in Wilmington, North Carolina–one of the last...

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Maya spoke with veteran educator Kent Lenci , author of Learning To Depolarize: Helping Students and Teachers Reach Across Lines of Disagreement . Kent framed for us that political polarization feels acute because of the negative connotation surrounding this concept. However, his goal is to help educators navigate the complexities of polarization...

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, Madeline, Maya spoke with Drashti Brahmbhatt, Participatory Budgeting Project Management Director at the NYC Civic Engagement Commission. We were fortunate to have Drashti discuss The People's Money and its goals for bringing New York City one step closer in having everyone’s voices heard in government on the very day the campaign launched! The Pe...

 At this week's Round Table, Erina, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with AMAZING 16-year old DJ Yearwood who is the founder of Vote16 Missouri , a nonpartisan state-wide initiative to lower the voting age to 16. DJ believes that advocacy and grassroots work are some of the most important steps of the civic and political change process and voiced his concerns surrounding lack of youth representatio...

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha and I spoke with Ivelisse Porroa-Garcia, a Democrat who serves as Senior Vice President at Crossroads Strategies, helping companies and organizations navigate the federal government in Washington, D.C., and Nic Adams, a Republican who is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Although affiliated with two ideologically different political parties tha...

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha and Jack spoke with Dr. Aaron Mckain , executive director of The Institute for Digital Humanity , and students Philip Graham and Richard Leyva about how to navigate new emerging technology like Artificial Intelligence and how to use these technologies for good rather than letting them further polarize and antagonize our political process. The Institute for D...

At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Vanessa spoke with Betsy MacLean , the first Chief Engagement Officer of the City of New York . Betsy previously ran her own non-profit organization called Hester Street that sits at the intersection of communities and the government. From cultivating diverse relationships between staff to drastically increasing the national and international scal...

At this week's Round Table, Jack & Madeline spoke with Michael Whidden and his 16 year old daughter Miranda Whidden, founders of American Tributaries . American Tributaries is dedicated to promoting experiential education travel within the United States for U.S. high schoolers through bridge-building itineraries. Their trips emphasize learning from and about fellow Americans in different r...

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 st...

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 ta...

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, S...

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...

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 importan...

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 di...

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...

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 Ro...

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 a...

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...

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...