 Thank you, Ms. Flurry. And now for the Denouement, as they say in the theater. We have with us this afternoon Cat Kerwin. She is a Rhode Island native. She ran the in the fall for the City Council for Ward 12. She's the youngest person serving on the Providence City Council. Cat was featured in Teen Bogue's story, 18, 18 Bogue's story. Cat began working at Providence in the Providence City Hall as early as 13 years old. She moved out of state and attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she made local and national news, running her organizations, her university's outreach and civic engagement activity. Currently, she's the director of communications at the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, a non-profit advocacy group with the mission of passing gun violence prevention legislation in Rhode Island. She's led many campaigns. For example, she facilitated a city-wide youth engagement campaign around gun violence prevention. The campaign trained over 100 administrations, 100 students, I'm out of my notes, pardon me, in an effort to de-escalate gun violence and to add to peace strategies and over 50 states of the union. Ladies and gentlemen, Katherine Carlin. So hi everyone. This is my going key for me pretty well. Okay, so thank you so much, Lee for asking me to come to speak for Roger Williams. I'm excited to see so many high school students in the room, and I'm excited to be here. Who here is coming from out of state today? Oh, well welcome, welcome to Providence. My name's Kat Kerwin. I am a city councilwoman here in Providence. I ran for office for the first time at 20 years old. So I'm really excited. I took office in January and I'm serving as the youngest person ever elected to the city council in Providence. And I think why I got involved and why I'm excited to see so many high school students in the room is in the past few years, there's been a really incredible inspiring uptick in youth organizing. And I think in youth engagement, we saw a lot of organizers doing national work like Emma Gonzalez when she called BS on the NRA. And a lot of those youth organizers then kind of got what organizing was and they realized that they needed to start taking their work across the country and incorporating youth of color, incorporating youth who were most at risk of being impacted by violence and making sure that the youth that really were being impacted by the work that they were talking about were at the forefront. And so that's why they were so successful in this amazing effort to register youth to vote and to get youth engaged. And so I'm going to talk a little about the youth work that's happening here in Rhode Island today. And I'm going to talk about the Coalition Against Gun Violence here in Rhode Island today. And I'm really coming at this from a local perspective. I think that when we talk about public administration, we talk about leadership. You know, Janice was totally right. It's stuff that is happening at the local level. It's running for office. It's running local issue advocacy campaigns. And it's really doing the work on the ground level in the community that you're in and the community that you love that will make the biggest difference. So, yeah. So my background, I am a student currently. I know a lot of people can empathize with that. I'm going to be graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in next week. That's crazy. So I went away to school in Madison after I graduated from high school here in Providence in fall of 2015. And I did a lot of work in Madison around organizing and combating a lot of the political things that were happening at the state level in Wisconsin. There was a very conservative legislature and a very conservative governor and Scott Walker. And there was a lot of attacks at the university. They kind of saw the political science department of the university and they saw the campus as too progressive. And so they were defunding the political science department and they were criminalizing student protests. And I started to realize after the presidential election in 2016 that a lot of the work that was happening in Wisconsin was an uphill battle. And by then, you know, we didn't have a Democratic governor in Wisconsin. They hadn't even, no one was talking about Tony Evers or the state going blue. And the state legislature was on the brink of passing a bill called campus carry. And campus carry is a bill that would have allowed anyone on campus to carry on their person a firearm wherever, whenever, all the time. And for me, that was scary. It was scary because we had a football stadium that held 250,000 students. And there was drinking at that football stadium and there was drug use in that football stadium. And when you mix in firearms, that's often a dangerous concept. And so we decided in Madison to start organizing and we held a successful protest that really got me connected to my work here in Rhode Island. And it's a little edgy. It's called the Coxknot blocks protest. And so folks from Texas in the room may remember this, UT Austin piloted this. And what they did was something that is a really strong organizing tactic. And for the older people in the room, I'm sorry in advance. They gave away 500 free dildos, sex toys, and they had them, all the students slapped them on their backpack as a way to protest absurdity of sex toys being illegal on campus. But guns were about to be. And what we saw was it took off just as it had in UT Austin. People thought it was hilarious. People thought it was an effective organizing strategy and people that wouldn't have been talking about gun violence prevention, gun policy. We're talking about gun policy. And so as an organizer, I think that sometimes the best ways to build power and the best ways to start conversations about issues and make people excited and make people feel engaged is to do things that drive headlines, is to do things that get people talking and get people excited about different issues. And so that's something that I've been really excited to do here in Rhode Island. So after I led that campaign in Madison, I ended up getting a job offer here in Rhode Island at the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence. I did a kind of crazy thing. I was a junior in college. I saw that my dream job was up in Rhode Island. And I was like, you know what? I need to be in a community where I was born and raised. The president was president. And I was like, I need to be somewhere where real change is happening. Here in Providence at the time, the Providence City Council had just passed the community safety act. And then it was up. It was the most progressive community control of the police bill in the country. It basically eliminated our game database and provided a lot of really powerful tools, mostly for people of color in the city to use when they were facing discrimination by law enforcement. And that was happening in the Rhode Island Legislature passed the Protect Rhode Island Family Act, which was one of the most progressive gun safety bills in the country, disarmed domestic abusers. And I was seeing all this work happening in my home state. And I was working on all these uphill battles in Madison. And I was like, I need to go home. I was like, I need to be somewhere where even in the face of a very combative national political scene, I needed to be somewhere where real change was happening. And I recognized that that was happening on the municipal level and the state level here. So I made a decision. I came back and accepted my job. I moved home to Providence where I was born and raised. And they do the thing that people of Rhode Island do. I was raised right behind the Gregg's Restaurant on North Maine. I love death by chocolate cakes. I eat it all the time. It's still my favorite. But when I got back to Providence, I was learning a lot about a city council person that represented me. And he had done an office. It's a year I was born. And it had never been challenged. And there was a reputation about him. And I'm hearing a lot of people talk about what this organization does and how ethics is really important. And ethics is important to me too. And I was remembering when y'all were bringing up ethics as one of the kind of cornerstones of public administration. I was remembering how the men that I had got running against in this city council race. The reputation about him was whoever got handed the bar before the city council meeting, that's how he voted. And there was this old school Providence politics that was associated with him. And I realized that I wasn't okay with that. You know, it was the same thing. Real change was happening here at the local level. We still were having these lingering feelings of corruption that we had been sick and tired of. And I have been sick and tired of hearing about since I was growing up here, since the buddy Nancy era. So I had time for office. It was exciting. It was invigorating. It was hard. And I think more young people need to do it. I think a lot of times once we realize we're preventing us, we realize that they don't look like us. They don't vote the way that their constituents want them to vote. And they are doing their job with integrity. And when that's the case, I think it's time to make sure people go on the record and have to start working harder. And for me, I knew that there was a chance I wouldn't win. And if I didn't win, I knew that I would be pushing him to the left. I would be pushing him to be a better politician. So I'm going to talk less about running for office and about being in office in this presentation. So I'm going to focus on the work of the coalition against gun violence. But during the Q&A portion, if you do have questions for me, please raise your hand. And we'll talk about that as well. But yeah, so this is a funny thing. When I was running for office, there was a bunch of national media around someone so young running. And they would often not talk about the policies that I wanted to do. They often would talk about how I was standing up for myself, or how I was standing up against the older, whiter male folks that I was communicating with or working with. And I just thought it was funny. You know, I was talking about policies like affordable housing. I was talking about climate change. And this was kind of what the conversation always centered around. And so I think that speaks a lot to running for office as a young woman. That kind of was the major focus of my campaign, unfortunately. But so the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence is an organization that does a lot of incredible grassroots work in Rhode Island. And I think when you're talking about public administration and getting involved more at the level, often issue advocacy campaigns are a really good way to start because you can really see all the way through a piece of legislation and real change in your community. So the Coalition Against Gun Violence was founded in 2013. It was a response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook. And what we found is that even here in Rhode Island, where a lot of people think of us as a very progressive, a very blue state, is we didn't have the greatest gun laws. And after Sandy Hook tragedy, a group of Rhode Islanders kind of stood up and said, you don't have an assault weapons regulation. We don't have a ban on guns in schools. And we don't have a regulation of high capacity magazines. So since the organization was founded, we've seen a lot of headway. We passed the Rhode Island family back. And this is one of the strongest gun safety bills in the country. And it basically just disarms domestic abusers, right? So really common sense stuff. If you're going to beat your wife, you're not going to own a gun. If you're going to beat your kids, you're not going to own a gun. Very, very common sense. Make sure that people that should not have weapons do not have weapons. And then another thing that the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence says is we do youth organizing work. And I think that this is more important now than ever. A lot of times, and in a lot of spaces, the work around gun violence prevention organizing has really been dominated around trying to prevent mass shootings and school shootings. And that's important. We do have a mass shooting problem in this country. But the reality of it is a lot of the gun violence in our country is in our urban core. It's gang related. It's suicide related. And it's not discussed by gun violence prevention organizers, which is really disappointing. Because when we don't talk about the illegal gun use and we don't talk about youth violence and how to really get to the root causes of gun violence, we're not thinking about the issue holistically. So working with youth organizations in the city of Providence has really helped us as an organization grow. What we found is that you can't address gun violence without talking about joblessness, poverty, without talking about the education system here in the city. And I think that that's true of a lot of progressive organizations. When you're dominated by leaders that don't necessarily represent the communities that they share, you don't think about these issues like root causes. And so I think it's been important for us to interact with youth and interact with populations in the city to talk about how we can combat these issues in a real way. So one of the bills that we work on is the Safe Schools Act. And in Rhode Island, something a lot of people don't know is that you can conceal carry in schools. So we're one of only just five states that allows this to happen. Anyone can walk into a school that's teachers, administrators, parents, any visitor can walk into a K-12 school here in Rhode Island and they don't have to notify anyone, but they can be carried in. And so there's really no structure in place for us to know when these people in our schools are carrying. And a lot of people say that it's very likely for a good person, a good concealed carry holder to stop an active shooter's scenario. But the reality is in a lot of situations more guns and more violence and also, you know, concealed carry permit holders can lead to accidental violations. And so we feel that people that are trained and that are tested annually are the people that are most likely to stop an active shooter's scenario. We're also working on assault weapon regulation. This is military style assault weapons. Weapons like the AR-15 are kind of the go-to weapon of choice for mass shooters. So we were talking about the shooting at Sandy Hook. We were talking about the shooting just last week in Missouri, California. We're talking about weapons that aren't really used for hun. They're used for locality. And so really what we're trying to do is get these off the streets, you know, simple supply and demand. If it's harder to get something, if it's harder to have access to something and buy something, there's going to be less of them out there. So that's something that we work really hard on. And it's important to know that this bill, as well as the State Schools Act, is something that the Coalition Against Gun Violence has introduced every year in Rhode Island since 2013. So as I said, you know, Rhode Island as a state, we think of ourselves as being progressive, as passing a lot of good bills. But the reality is, because of state leadership, we often don't get votes on really important bills that would save lives. And not just bills like these. We're talking about reproductive health care. We're talking about bills raising the minimum wage. Although the rank and file numbers of the legislature may support initiatives like this. State House leadership is really where the power is. And they're the people that decide if a bill is going to go before and get a vote. And in most cases, these bills have never gone before for a vote. So how about we come to Long River Island? Pretty basic stuff. I always like to go through this. Representative or Senator introduces it. The recording secretary numbers the bill. The Speaker and the Senate President refer the bill to committee. And the committee makes a decision on the bill and fits past. It goes through the same procedure. And then the Governor gets to sign it. So health for further study in Rhode Island. So this is what I was talking about. In Rhode Island, we really have a culture of holding for further study, which is why a lot of our bills don't go anywhere. What happens is they're referred to the proper committee. In many cases, House Judiciary Committee in Rhode Island is the committee that holds the power. And once they go there, they're held for further study and they're left in committee. And this is happening year after year after year for many bills. And I think it's important because a lot of people think, you know, I have a Democratic representative, we're fine. My representative supports common sense issues like reproductive justice and, you know, gun safety and environmental justice. But the reality is a lot of these bills will never go to the floor for a vote. They stay held in committee. And when we're talking about this and we're talking about the culture of politics in Rhode Island, I think a lot of this is waiting out, waiting for the leadership to kind of turn over because as I said, there is the rape and file on both the House and the Senate side of Rhode Island really support these initiatives. But it's also really vigilant, you know, staying committed and keeping up this organizing work and trying to remind constituents of elected officials that the reality is the majority of Rhode Islanders do want to see a lot of these initiatives that we work on go through. And so I'm going to talk a little about power building and tactics for organizing. And hopefully, you know, as I'm talking about this, you'll be thinking about who your representative is or who represents you and what you can do to make sure that they're on the right side of these issues. So who are your targets? These are our Senate president and our speaker. These are real pictures. And your targets can be city, municipal, state legislators, state level politicians like the governor, secretary of state, federal delegation. And your targets are not always the people that represent you. But that doesn't always matter. I think, you know, some people will say, well, I don't want to call the speaker of the House because he's from Cranston and I live in Johnson. And I think in a lot of cases it's important for people in leadership like the House Speaker and the Senate President here in Rhode Island to hear from the collective of what the whole state wants because it is their job not just to represent their districts but to represent the state. We look up who represents you really easily here. It's like www.ri.gov. I usually just Google secretary of state who represents me. And the best way to influence these people in a lot of cases is to log in them. Anyone can do it. Anyone can email, make a call. As Janice was saying, sometimes it's as easy as going on Facebook, going on Twitter, research your legislator, know what their voting record is and then prepare a message. Why do these policies impact you? Why does it matter that you want something? When I'm talking about gun violence prevention, I often will talk about the students that I work with. They tell me how they're afraid in school. They'll tell me about how they feel when they have to go through things like active shooter scenarios in school. And I think when you have a perspective like that, legislators want to listen. So this is an image of the Brown-Iron Coalition against gun violence at the State House last year. It really speaks to the math of volunteers that we have and the math of people that we have engaged and want to do this work in Rhode Island. And then with youth organizing, we've been really lucky to work with a few organizations. One, Gun Gone, Providence Student Union, Young Voices. And I think that when you're doing organizing work, it's really impactful to include youth organizers. I think now more than ever, this is the case. You know, we have organizations that work with us, like Providence Student Union, that really led entire student-led campaigns. And so what this means is the Providence Student Union youth right now are working on a counselor's knock-offs initiative. And this is an initiative that they've been researching fully, that they've been driving. And it would basically just call for the city council to divest and arm school resource officers, so police officers that are in schools and invest in turn in social and emotional support. And what happened during this campaign was we were talking to youth about the issues that the Coalition Against Gun Violence was working on. We were talking about the span on guns in schools. We were talking about this all weapon man. And a lot of the youth that worked with us said things that we hear a lot from the community. They said that school shootings aren't always an issue to us that we're thinking about all the time, but we do think about every day and every moment is how we feel when there's a police officer in our school and how we feel about the school-to-prison pipeline and how when police officers are used instead of teachers to be the disciplinary voice, they feel like they're being criminalized. And so I think for reasons like that, you can't know what it's like to be in a space like an urban school unless you're there. So I think it's important to listen to the youth organizer. And a lot of times take the policy ideas from them because they're living it. So putting youth at, especially youth at most at risk of being impacted by violence at the forefront. And as I said earlier, I think that a lot of the youth organizing that has come out of Rhode Island the last year or so has been thanks to the work of national youth organizers like Emma Gonzalez. These youth did a really good job at taking a bus across the country all last summer and basically recruiting other youths from different cities from Milwaukee, from St. Louis from across the country to jump on the bus with them and tell their stories so that the conversation was not just about mass shootings and school shootings, but it was also about the urban violence. So last year, I'm going to show you a picture. We had a protest at the state house called the student on the target protest. This was one of the most successful actions that we've planned in the last few years. And I think when you're talking about building power and you're talking about ways to get people engaged and lead a campaign forward a lot of times events. And like I said earlier, driving headlines are a really great way to do that. Last May, what we did is we had a group of youth who were really engaged with us and have been wanting to work on this issue plan a protest that they wanted to see. And you know, at first the youth had talked a lot about doing some sort of a sit in or something a little bit more radical. And a lot of youth were scared about what the impacts might be in terms of getting arrested or something like that. And they decided that it might be more powerful if they did a silent protest. And so what they did, you can't see but below is the state legislature and it's the House floor. And they had a silent protest after the legislature was in session and they had targets on the back of their t-shirts. And so from the House floor what you could just see is targets and they were just students silently up there and then afterwards there was a speech by a student who was asking for a vote of a fan on guns in schools. So this was an initiative that got a lot of people talking. It was powerful because it was silent. You know, the adults in the room were kind of taken aback. This was the youth speaking and it had been a youth-led event. And I think that a lot of times when you're doing events like this it's powerful to let the youth leave because they know what they want to see. They know what the impact is going to be and they're creative, you know. And so this was a really exciting moment and what we didn't see is a vote unfortunately. So it's kind of, again, this culture in Rhode Island of the leadership having all the power and although we do have the majority of both representatives and senators in the Rhode Island legislature who have supported our bills and have noted that they would support our bills we still haven't seen a vote. So this was more pictures of the protests. And then again, what makes an action powerful? Just because you don't get what you want we didn't get what we wanted last year after that protest doesn't mean it's not a successful action. Successful organizing is defined by our media. It's defined by the press taking notice in your organization getting gaining collective power from news stories and from the power bill and from volunteers who are reading these news stories and then click on your website and you get their email. It's defined by potential candidates becoming part of the action and then deciding to run for office against someone that didn't call for a vote. I think that that's really kind of at the heart of a lot of organizing and trying to go towards the power and just because you don't see something get done as successful as you had to see campaign really can just be about driving the action with the goal of building power. So now what? No one who represents you gets involved with an issue that makes you excited. You know, right now there are so many amazing groups in Rhode Island doing so much work around climate change, around social justice issues, around supporting the undocumented community, around violence prevention and there's really, you can build your own adventure with so many issues and you know, Rhode Island has a lot of non-profit so if you want to do something and it's not already out there I'm sure someone would be happy to make sure you can start somewhere, something new. And then just show up. I think the best way I've learned how to do a lot of the things that I've been working on is by doing them. Being a politician running a grassroots campaign is a form of education and you get to learn things that you wouldn't learn otherwise but you have to show up, you have to go to the meetings and learn who's doing the work and become a part of the conversations. Okay, so this is my email and my phone number if you want to reach me. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Irwin, that was really a nice tie in with everything we've done today, particularly the MPA student panel. I must say however that I've been involved with the Oklahoma Texas game since 1972 and it's usually played on the Saturday before Columbus Day and there are probably or 92,000 people in the stadium and another 200,000 or so thousand outside going on the rides and drinking beer some of them come armed. I remember actually seeing it but you can carry a gun into the into the stadium. Fortunately the only assaults I've had were beer, Pepsi and get out of my state. During all those years I never saw them put that other item on them anywhere. The one that Ms. Curwin referred to on the backpack. I've never seen that in this, no. I think I'm kind of happy about that but are there questions for Ms. Curwin? Did you face the issue of age bias since you're so young in terms of like creating policy and then how did you overcome that bias if you didn't face it? I faced it less or I do face it less in the creating policy spaces than I did in the campaign spaces. I think that a lot of times you're legitimized when you win and people are kind of forced to listen to you. But there definitely is an age bias. You know, I feel it almost every day in a lot of cases. You know, I think that there's kind of there's power in not showing all of your cards. So a lot of times people just like assume that I won't know something or won't know what something means or how to do something. And I think there is power in kind of keeping yourself what you know and then when you do good work people are surprised and because of your age you can get more credit for it which is funny, but it's good to keep your cards close. And I also think it's good to have especially win campaigning and I hope you do run for office to have people around you that are really established, yes but also to have fellow young people around you I think that a lot of times young people running for office will compensate because they feel insecure about running at a younger age by trying to put a lot of older established people around you, which in some cases is good but I think it's also really powerful to have an organization that's built with people that you trust and people that don't do things the way that they've always been done. You know, the way that my campaign was built was really non-traditional because it was me and 10 kids from the neighborhood that were either students at Providence College or friends of mine that had grown up in our community and so I think that's a really powerful way to campaign and build power because people see the kind of collective chance for change with that and I think if you're running as a change candidate it's powerful to have those voices around you. Thank you. My question is given the fact defeated an entrenched incumbent who as you say yourself was first elected when you learned the work that you're doing in the General Assembly trying to get those passed and trying to work with again entrenched incumbents who were the leadership who've been there for years and all that what are your thoughts on term limits? So something that the city council does have term limits and they go into effect four years from now so people will be term limited after three terms of four years and you know what I think about term limits is that there is a really steep learning curve to being an elected official I think specifically when we're talking about say the mayor of Providence who is a two term limit I think that it's not totally effective because I think that I think that it takes at least eight years to build a staff that has the power to do a lot of the work that our city needs to do things like fix the school budget to do things like pass really impactful municipal policy so I think that there is a balance what we see in the state house is that there aren't term limits but things are still run similarly so I'm not confident that that term limits are always successful but what I think I prefer to term limits is really strong organizing tactics and making sure that we have a culture of government where people aren't afraid to challenge incumbents and where politicians see challenges to themselves as healthy to the democratic process yeah that's a good question I think not just gun violence but a lot of the other issues that people are really passionate about advocating for right now like passing the reproductive health care act and codifying where we wait and you know climate change a lot of these issues or you either are for it or you're against it and there's really no middle ground so I think politics like that is dangerous it's dangerous to not be able to hear the other side and what they have to say but at the same time we've kind of got into a culture where some of the people that disagree with you have really harmful and sometimes dangerous beliefs you know like when you're talking about someone that believes in the Muslim ban that people should be deported and not be in our country just because the color of our skin it's really tough to have a conversation have a dialogue with people like that and I think the best way to prevent that sort of isolation and prevent that sort of further polarization is to try to have conversations and try to build community but also be honest about what shouldn't be tolerated you know like from the coalition against gun violence standpoint the issue of the second amendment for example you know like I think a lot of us can agree with second amendment supporters they don't want to see children die they don't want to see our youth die they don't want to see people being murdered and it's just a disagreement on what the second amendment represents and so having a conversation and getting to the root of like humanity right like people should not be innocent people should not be dying and I think there is problems when there is kind of a fundamental difference but trying to get to the humanity of a lot of these issues is the best way to have a productive dialogue I think you so rarely see professional this comes up or not but I don't know as you had to recuse yourself from legislative discussion on legislation because of your professional work and how you navigate those issues where they are obviously very important to you but you may have to sit on the sideline as a legislator how you navigated that yeah so on the city council I recused myself from from any votes on resolutions that relate specifically to gun violence prevention I should say there are a lot of preemption laws in Rhode Island so in most cases the city council doesn't have power to really have any say in things like concealed carry holding or guns in schools just because the state is in charge of all of those sorts of policies so it doesn't happen super often but I do think that you're right like it's not super common to see people like organizers that are in these spaces and I think it's really important for organizers to be running for office I think that you know when people are doing ground work with these organizers when people are trying to run campaigns that are built on power they kind of know more about the policy and why it's important you know like legislators always go to Planned Parenthood for statistics about reproductive health care climate action for statistics about climate change and like the people that know about these issues the most in a lot of cases I think it's powerful for them to be empowered thank you Ms. Carbone thank you we're not we're not on profit but we're not on great thank you we never let our destiny without what we're doing thank you thanks to all of you for coming it's 2pm and it's wrap up time before we go I didn't recognize Joe Lager Joe has been videoing us since almost the last century we've got archive footage that I know he's put together so he's really good at his craft and our own Mr. Pierce has been offering his own version of our photos too so thank you Christopher thanks to our friends from National ESPA we wish you safe travels in your returns and as Mr. Shields pointed out there are lots of chapters that have lots of things going on to which they're all invited they've made time for us and I think that's worthwhile thank you very much gentlemen so I hope we have an 11th annual public service and leadership conference and that's all we'll see you next year