The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

It's a GREAT time to catch up on some of our podcasters' favorite episodes, like Restorative Justice Is a Creative Act Revolutionizing the Learning Space Is My Love Language We Need to Learn To Live in the Gray Transformative Presidencies: Never Let a Good National Crisis Go To Waste The Sum of Our Parts This Is How We Get Out of Never Power Of, By, and For the People The Opposite of Hopelessness...

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha, Madeline and Skyla spoke with Rich Tafel, Managing Director of Raffa Social Capital Advisors and Director of the American Project, a new effort to bring together leading thinkers to imagine new solutions to America’s broken political system. Tafel is also pastor of Church of the Holy City in Washington DC, where he is launching a spiritual entrepreneur hub. Pri...

At this week's Round Table, Kenisha and Madeline--and new podcasters Ava and Skyla-- spoke with Dr Zackory Kirk , an educational leader, thought-fanatic, and determined voice in innovative media. Dr Kirk knew he wanted to be an educator since he was a child, heeding what he refers to as “a special call to be a resource for the generation that comes after us.” His educational approach is grounded i...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica and Madeline spoke with Jade Zaroff , founder of Entertainment for Change . Jade was raised as a performer and from an early age recognized that being an artist is being an observer of life. She’s long asked herself questions like “why don’t we care about the planet? Why do we treat people differently? How can we use art intentionally to tell stories using the 17...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica and Madeline spoke with inspiring rising high school freshman Lyla Petroske about her work in electoral college reform. Lyla recently founded The Electoral College Reform Movement (ECRM) as part of her mission to fundamentally reform the Electoral College in a way that will destroy its faithfulness to the majority and give a voice to the United States' minorities....

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, andMadeline spoke with the energizing Ave Mateo , Executive Director of 18byVote . Ava believes deeply in the power of youth and works to spread opportunity for meaningful engagement among teens and young adults. In addition to her work leading 18by, Ava recently completed a Sociology and Education Masters degree at Columbia University, Teachers College,...

At this week’s Round Table, Erina, Jack, and Madeline spoke with Geanne Belton , Director of Baruch College’s High School Journalism Program which hosts the annual Newsies for high school journalists from across New York City and helps prepare teacher advisors to start new school newspapers. As all of us podcasters are involved in journalism, we were particularly eager to learn from Geanne’s persp...

At this week’s Round Table, Jack, Jedd, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Eli Dvorkin , Editorial & Policy Director of the Center for an Urban Future (CUF). CUF is an independent nonprofit research and policy organization focused on building a stronger and more equitable economy in New York City. It’s pretty unique in being deeply place based and focused on driving IMPACT with research by givin...

At this week’s Round Table, Erina, Inica, Jack, and Kenisha spoke with Mika Rao, Communication Partner at Transcend Education and a proud South Asian American, professional, and woman about the role her identity has played in her life and work over the past 25 years. Mika shared how, growing up in a majority white neighborhood in the 1980s, she was curiously “unraced” and didn’t really come to con...

At this week’s Round Table, Jack, Jedd, and Madeline spoke with Jennifer Brande l, Co-founder & CEO of Hearken , a company that helps organizations around the world develop and operationalize participatory processes. Jennifer was "an intensely curious kid," and that curiosity has been her guiding principle all her life and what brought her into journalism. Jennifer envisions a shift from a mod...

At this week’s Round Table, Kenisha, Jedd, and Neil spoke with Dr Frederick (Rick) Hess , senior fellow and the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute , founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network , editor of Education Week’s Straight Up column, and a prolific author, educator, and political scientist. Rick has been studying education refo...

At this week’s Round Table, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Dr. Adeyemi Stembridge , author of “ Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy” and a gifted educational consultant and thought partner specializing in equity-focused school improvement. We talked about Yemi’s lifelong love affair with teaching– and with equity– sparked by his own experiences in hi...

at this week’s Round Table, Inica, Madeline and Jack spoke with Raj Vinnakota , President of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars . Raj has dedicated his career to educating, empowering, and supporting America’s youth, particularly those from disadvantaged communities. Did you know that the United States spends on average just 5 cents per student on civics vs an average of $50 per student in ST...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack & Kenisha spoke with Lina Sergie Attar , Founder and CEO of the Karam Foundation , about the refugee crisis, which is on many of our minds given what’s happening in Ukraine. Karam means generosity in Syrian and the Karam Foundation, founded in 2017, invests in young Syrian refugees to help shape a new generation of kind, courageous future leaders. Lina’s...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with youth civic scholars from the Center for Constitutional Studies at Utah Valley University and the Quill Project , which works to research the history and enhance understanding of some of the world's foundational legal texts. A core goal of the Quill Project, founded in 2016, is making the discussions that led to the creation...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Michael Mauser and Helen Hankin, two authentic intergenerational allies. Michael is the Co-Chair for the Braver Angels Nevada Statewide Alliance , and both Michael and Helen have both been active in both the Toastmasters International and the Rotary Youth exchange for decades, hosting 11 students from other countries over the...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica and Kenisha spoke with John McNally, a Graduate Student at Teachers College who is studying the evolution and implementation of the Seal of Civic Readiness initiative in New York State as a lever for fostering high quality civic learning in schools. John is very passionate about civics, having served in the U.S. Army for 8 years before going to West Point, teachin...

At this week’s Round Table, Jack, Jedd, and Kenisha spoke with Sara Wolk and Ruben Montejano of the Equal Vote Coalition – driving forces behind the exciting STAR Voting system from Oregon that is now starting to spread nationwide. Given our interest in systems of voting that help voices be heard to the greatest extent possible, ensuring elected officials represent us most effectively, and how WE...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Jedd and Kenisha spoke with Chaitra Nagaraja , associate professor of strategy and statistics at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University. Chaitra loves statistics and how they can be applied to a variety of social issues to illuminate who we are and how we live in democracy together. She quoted James Madison’s point that if we don’t know about...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Jedd, and Kenisha discussed an issue on many of our minds: the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  As we were doing so, we were keenly aware of how each day brings new developments, some hopeful and many devastating.  As high school students born well after the Cold War, we study the historical catastrophes of World War I and II, and had hoped that we w...

At this week's Round Table, Erina, Inica, Jack, and Kenisha spoke with Allison Lichter Joseph , Assistant Professor and Chair of Journalism + Design at The New School. She is the co-author of the Matriarchy Report , a newsletter that investigates solutions for families and care workers from an intersectional feminist perspective. All of us podcasters have a real passion for the intersection of pol...

At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha and Madeline spoke with Ross Dakin of the New Jersey Office of Innovation. Ross is a technologist whose background spans Silicon Valley startups, corporate enterprise, federal/state/local government, national non-profits, and academia. This made him a perfect match to work for New Jersey’s first Chief Innovation Officer, a role created as part of Go...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha and Vanessa spoke with Halley Potter , Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation, where she researches public policy solutions for addressing educational inequality with special focus on school integration. We talked about issues our education system is facing and what we can do with them, what equality in education would look like, and how we can rec...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, and Kenisha spoke with Ian Rowe who, with apologies to Dos Equis, may be the most interesting man in the world. Ian is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute , where he focuses on education and upward mobility, family formation, and adoption. Family, Ian underscores, is the first Institution every child is exposed to and the stability or insta...

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 strateg...