by Marley Zeno · August 25, 2014 10:17 AM

Earlier this month, NPR broadcast an interview—“Chicago Students To News Media: ‘You Don’t Know Us’”—with fifth-graders from Chicago’s Bradwell School of Excellence, who recently published an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune. Their piece, titled “You Don’t Really Know Us,” addresses the Tribune’s coverage of crime, and only crime, in the South Shore neighborhood they call home.

It questions reporters’ and news cameras’ practice of showing up to their neighborhood “with fancy suits” when there is a crime but rarely publicizing the many positive aspects of their community. Damiontaye Rogers, one of the authors, read from the op-ed: “We want you to know us. We aren’t afraid. […] If you listen, you will hear the laughter and chattering from a group of girls on the corner, who are best friends and really care about each other. Do you see the smile on the cashier’s face when the kids walk in? Why – because the neighborhood is filled with love. This isn’t Chi-raq. This is home. This is us.”

As an ESL (English as a second language) teacher, I was struck by how attuned students as young as ten or eleven were to the media’s portrayal of their community. These students identified the flaws in the media’s narrative and responded by literally re-writing it. Their op-ed, which highlights the joy, love, and mutual support in their community, was published in a major newspaper and syndicated nationally by NPR and Huffington Post. (I, in Brooklyn, received it from a friend living in Boston.) These young students, tired of the negative publicity their community receives, organized and reclaimed their story on a national level.

The ability to narrate one’s own experience is so powerful but so often taken from young people in low-income and disenfranchised communities. This is one of many reasons I am an ESL teacher in a low-income community and why I am on the board of LaunchProgress Action Fund. Launch Progress Action Fund enables young people to speak for their own communities. LaunchProgress Action Fund identifies and supports young leaders who represent a changing America and empowers them to run for office, creating a base of future leaders. As electoral politics becomes increasingly overrun by corporate interests—compounded by decreased regulation—the voices of average citizens are muffled. The rising generation is the most diverse our country has seen and the voices being drowned out are more and more the voices of lower-income people, people of color, people with dis/abilities, queer people, and trans* people. It is more important than ever to empower young people and amplify their voices.

Our narratives about lower-income communities are often myopic and negative. These narratives isolate and pathologize communities like South Shore. A group of fifth graders rejected these tropes and called out selective storytelling. They shared an inclusive, nuanced, and humanizing view of their neighborhood, a view that corresponded with their experiences. As early as fifth grade, these students identified a problem, stood up, and engaged. They didn’t just roll their eyes at the reporters—they came together as a group and took ownership of their narrative. What would be possible if more young people did the same?

LaunchProgress believes that progressive change happens when young people engage in politics. My drive to be an educator and my work with LaunchProgress Action Fund both stem from the same belief in youth empowerment. Do you support young people engaging and speaking out? If so, I encourage you to support LaunchProgress Action Fund.

Marley Zeno is a public school teacher in New York City. She serves on the LaunchProgress Action Fund Board of Directors.

by Stevaughn Bush · August 25, 2014 10:08 AM

Welcome to our ongoing interview series highlighting young elected officials and young candidates.This month we spoke with 30-year-old Michael Blake, who is running for State Assemblyman in New York’s 79th assembly district, the district in which he was born and raised.

Michael is a seasoned political operative who has enjoyed tremendous success at the national level. He worked for Barack Obama from 2007 to 2013, first on his campaign, and then as an official in his administration. Serving as Deputy Political Director of the Iowa Caucus and National Deputy Director of Obama’s “Operation Vote,” Michael was instrumental in registering veterans, women, and communities of color to vote and turning them out to the polls. At the White House, he was Director of Minority Outreach at the Office of Public Engagement, implementing several initiatives all over the country, including the Urban Entrepreneurship Summit Series which helps promote urban start-ups and small businesses with a focus on inner-city entrepreneurship.

“But,” Michael says, “in the midst of all that, I kept coming home.”

With the high-stock he’s accumulated in national politics, we asked Michael why he would choose to run for State Assemblyman, a local office. “Why would I not be running for State Assembly?” he shot back, “This is a community that has impacted my family for three generations. I’ve had an opportunity to serve my country, and now there’s an opportunity to serve my community as well.”

Michael, whose district is situated in the heart of the Bronx, is seeking to become a representative of one of the most impoverished urban counties in the nation. When we asked him what were some of the most pressing issues in his district, he named many issues that plague inner cities across our nation. “Continual gun violence, continual joblessness, continual sense of hopelessness, continual lack of engagement in voting.”

It was then that Michael spoke to us about his effort to run a transformational campaign. “I am running for office because I want to bring positive change to the Bronx, and for people of the Bronx to see themselves in such a light where they expect and deserve great things,” he said.

“We need to increase community outreach, address the gun violence that is ravaging our community, focus on job training and on getting kids from the cradle to a career,” Michael said, “because if you help someone pick up a check and pick up a book, they don’t pick up a gun.”

We asked Michael to share his thoughts on the importance of millennial leadership in today’s political arena. “Millennial leadership isn’t just good. It’s necessary. We are the ones that provide energy, the impetus for change, and a different thought process,” he said.

Michael then told us about the effect millennial leadership could possibly have on kids from underprivileged backgrounds. “If we want young people to see what could be possible for them, we have to show them faces that they can relate to, and that will only occur through increased millennial leadership. They would see that they don’t have to be a gangbanger or a rapper,” he continued, “They would see they could be a doctor, or a lawyer. They could be President of a Fortune 500 company. They could be President of the United States.”

Finally, when we asked Michael if he had any words of wisdom to impart to others under 35 who were considering running for office, he left us with the words then-Senator Obama gave him in 2007, back when his ascent to the presidency seemed unlikely. The first thing Obama told Michael was, “Dream big dreams.”

by Clara Potter · August 11, 2014 6:00 AM

Attempts by the media to define the millennial generation abound. Sensationalist pieces on our social habits, buying tendencies, mannerisms, self-view, world-view, and perhaps most frequently, political leanings, crop up daily. The eagerness to pin down our generation’s preferences is unsurprising, given we will soon hold political and economic power, inheriting a slew of deep-seeded problems in almost every arena.

So what’s the story? The “experts” can’t seem to agree, even with themselves.

David Leonhardt of The New York Times wrote a piece explaining “Why Teenagers Today May Grow Up Conservative.” Events occurring as a generation gains political consciousness forms its political identity, he argued. For teens, largely too young to remember Bush, this means problems under the Obama administration could negatively affect their view of the Democratic Party well into the future. While acknowledging that millennials are overwhelmingly liberal on social issues like same-sex marriage, he noted there could be some residual backlash against Democrats for current government dysfunction.

However, just a week later he wrote, “Politically, 18-Year-Olds Look a Lot Like People in Their 20s,” noting that, while Democrats may be in trouble on some issues or among certain populations, they still have a 14-15 point advantage with young people over Republicans. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait agreed with this “emerging democratic majority” theory. Because the electorate is increasingly diverse and individuals of minority backgrounds tend to be overwhelmingly liberal, he wrote, millennials will consistently skew to the left.

Ana Marie Cox of the Guardian dubbed the average millennial a “Somewhat Concerned Multicultural Moderate” — that is, an individual who supports socially liberal policies and is less concerned with fiscal issues. Citing data from a Reason survey, she noted that millennials are far less likely than their elders to identify with a particular political party, but are definitely averse to the outrage style of socially conservative discourse set forth by Republicans.

Anand Giridharadas offered a variant of this argument in The New York Times by painting a portrait of millennials that favors a “live and let live” philosophy. Millennials are individualists who have little faith in the power of government to solve collective problems, he wrote. And considering the failed war on drugs, two unsuccessful conflicts in the Middle East, the Great Recession, the end of NASA’s space shuttle program, and Washington gridlock, Giridharadas conceded, “this is a generation of American young people who may be rightly suspicious of grand collective enterprises.”

While pundits struggle to find a theory that sticks — pouring over data to find a millennial portrait that coheres to our current political framework — it seems many are missing the point. The data doesn’t indicate millennials’ views are “incoherent,” or we have given up on the power of collective action in the political sphere. But it does show we are dissatisfied with the current system. Our political leadership is older and less diverse than the electorate. It is unsurprising that young people’s views do not subscribe to the categories set forth by those currently in power.

Furthermore, our current political leadership has systematically created many of the crises facing the millennial generation through their political games, staking the future of the country on partisan gain. From a rapidly deteriorating environment to untenable economic inequality, there are a plenitude of problems that demand innovative solutions. Yet it is clear that real innovation is unwelcome by established leadership. Regardless of our political leanings, young people care. Millennials want to feel like the sky isn’t falling all the time, like progress can be made on these issues, and the world can support a more just, sustainable future.

This is where the work of LaunchProgress comes in. By assisting young, progressive candidates with forward-thinking policy views, we can begin to elect a new generation of leaders who will change the political debate, starting at the local level and expanding upward. This generation has the power to invigorate government. LaunchProgress candidates believe in the ability of the political process to bring people together toward socially just goals, navigating the country out of infuriating gridlock.

We would welcome fewer articles about millennials’ views on the status quo, and more about millennial leaders looking to change it.

Clara Potter is Communications Coordinator at LaunchProgress.

by Pichaya Winichakul · August 08, 2014 4:58 PM

As featured on Literally, Darling on August 5, 2014.

There have been a lot of articles lately about idle young people not caring and about single women not voting. I’m a 25-year-old unmarried woman and I started a nonprofit and a political action committee to encourage and support young people running for office. I definitely care. I definitely vote.

But I wasn’t always this way. Growing up, I was as apolitical as they come. I refused to watch the news. I tuned out protests. Until senior year of high school, I picked up a newspaper only to reuse as gift-wrap. My family is from Thailand, and while I’ve lived in America nearly all of my life, American politics often felt irrelevant to me—politicians didn’t look like me, they didn’t talk like me, they didn’t seem to live like me. Nor did I feel connected to what was happening in Thailand. I was living in between nationalities, in between two experiences. It was complicated, and, like a good teenager, I chose to tune it all out.

That changed when I went to college. In September 2008, I was at a liberal arts school in Ohio, located in one of the country’s most impoverished counties. At the time, one in four homes was foreclosed.

I walked past those empty homes every day on the way to my economics class where we were learning theory and discussing America’s financial future. As part of a research project that year, I delved into housing and loans, but also talked to homeowners in the community who were given a bad deal—often the now-infamous racially targeted, subprime loans—and were about to lose their homes because they couldn’t get out of a mortgage that was impossible to pay off in the first place. It didn’t seem right that in a country founded on the right to pursue opportunities—the country my family immigrated to in pursuit of opportunities—that some should have them and some should not.

Yet here I was, standing on a mound of knowledge with access to the resources of an elite institution and living in a community where residents were drowning in indecipherable legal documents with nowhere to turn for help.

I again was in between two worlds.

But this time I didn’t ignore being in the middle. I used it. That year, I started a small organization, a coalition of community leaders to connect homeowners to the resources they needed to stay in their homes. We filled the gap.

It’s been a long time since that experience, but I now run a nonprofit and a political action committee with that same mentality. LaunchProgress encourages and supports young people running for state and local office, focusing on uplifting voices from underrepresented backgrounds. We are filling the gaps in our political system with people who usually fall through the cracks—LGBTQ people, women, people of color.

We believe people who fall in between worlds are powerful because our experiences cover a multitude of overlapping aspects of life. At LaunchProgress, we think those perspectives need to be heard. And we encourage those voices to lead.

We especially focus on young people because they fill a unique void. The millennial generation is solution-oriented, innovative, and empowered by unprecedented technological advances. Our country desperately seeks change and we are equipped to lead that change.

I’m lucky to work with amazing young people who are leading that change every day. Our candidates and supporters are black, white, Asian, LGBTQ, women. They are in urban areas, in rural areas, in suburbs. They come from public school educations and from low-income backgrounds. But they all have powerful stories about how they came to public service and how their experiences have led them to run for office. They are full of energy, passion, and ideas to move their communities forward.

When the media began highlighting millennials and unmarried single women as the biggest question marks in voter turnout this year, I felt a certain call to arms. Young women—we are powerful. Our experiences holding multiple roles—as sisters, daughters, listeners, thinkers, mitigators, leaders, multitaskers—are valuable. Our opinions make the difference. We should feel empowered to make that difference by speaking, by voting, by running for office and leading.

Whether you follow politics, work for politics, or don’t care for it—we need you to vote. We need you to run. We need you to lead. We need your perspective and your voice to be heard to move the country forward. You make all the difference.

Poy Winichakul is the co-founder and co-director of LaunchProgress, a nonprofit and a political action committee working to encourage and support young progressives running for state and local office.