The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

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...

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 tha...

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 p...

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 ho...

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 U...

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...

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 p...

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 a...

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 Ecologi...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, Madeline, and Vanessa talked about the complexities involved in reflecting on and celebrating Thanksgiving (and many holidays), building on last year’s #RedefineThanksgiving episode. We engaged with a panoply of important questions: Is it OK to celebrate Thanksgiving? Should we be changing how we celebrate based on what we understand about the historical...

At the week's Round Table, Kenisha, Inica, Jack, and Madeline spoke to Sam Laskin, a sophomore at Dartmouth College who is the Head of Growth and Outreach for the Left-Middle-Right , a student-run multi-media publication aiming to elevate the civil discourse in a time of division and extreme political polarization. Every week, LMR publishes three political perspectives on a single issue to expose...

At this week's Round Table, Erina, Kenisha, Jack, and Madeline spoke with Sandra Sirota , Assistant Professor in Residence in Human Rights and experiential global learning with the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut. As teens, even though we have a passion for justice, we typically don't know or understand our basic fundamental human rights and how they can be violated, which...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Kenisha, Jack, and Madeline spoke with ​​ Alexander Cooley , the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Director of the Harriman Institute for the Study of Russia, Eurasia and Eastern Europe at Columbia University, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year! Professor Cooley helped us understand international politics and histor...

How can you make meaningful change in politics if you don’t have the resources and networks to do so? Well that won’t be a problem if Nick Guthman, the founder of Blue Future , achieves his vision. At this week’s Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline sat down with Nick to talk about how to empower and equip youth change makers in their own communities. Blue Future is a youth progressive...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, and Madeline discussed the TV show that’s taken the world—and our podcast—by storm: Squid Game. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or, perhaps, in North Korea…) you’ve undoubtedly heard about Netflix’ most successful series ever. We were reeled in just like the rest of the world and were eager to discuss with each other--and our listeners--what does it...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline sat down with leaders of the National History Academy . President and co-founder Willam (Bill) Sellers noted that there are many STEM programs, business programs, and law programs over the summer, but not history programs. That’s what inspired him to start the National History Academy: to give a voice to history and create academic opp...

At this week's Round Table, Erina, Inica, Jack, Madeline, and Kenisha decided to not have any guests In order to discuss our perspectives on how it’s been adjusting to the environment of in-person school. We discussed both our pressing concerns about the role the pandemic has played on the school system alongside the utter pleasure of meeting classmates after a year in remote learning. Through thi...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with Carolyn Sufrin , MD/PhD and an assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Director of the Advocacy and Research on Reproductive Wellness in Incarcerated People program; and who serves on the board of the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. Dr Sufrin worke...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Jack, Kenisha, and Madeline spoke with David McCullough of the American Exchange Project (AEP) AEP is a first-of-its-kind, free exchange program in which you stay in your own country. That’s right, you don’t need a passport to experience different cultures given the diversity of America and how deeply​​ the political landscape varies in different regions. Based o...

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. Gi...

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...

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...

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 mon...

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 , whic...

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...