 Well, thank you guys so much. This is going to be a really fun, exciting panel. It's about civic and political participation. So as you might have guessed, we're going to try to actually get you guys really participating in this panel. It's great that Wendy sort of kicked us off, because a big theme of this panel is that millennials are engaging beyond elections. So what we've tried to do is have different viewpoints to talk about the different pathways and opportunities for civic, social, and political engagement beyond elections. I'm going to do a quick intro of the really, really wonderful panelists and their expertise. They're going to go around, do very brief introductions, and they're going to answer this important question that I hope you all will also think about today, which is what motivates and inspires you to do this work? First, we have Sabir Rahman, who is a four freedom center fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. And in 2015, will be joining the faculty at Brooklyn Law School. We have Tiana Epps Johnson, who is at the New Organizing Institute as their election administration director. We have Russell Cramnell, who is the managing director of Opportunity Nation. And we have Plair Nalal, who currently works as an immigration attorney at Advancing Justice, Asian American Justice Center. Will you welcome me in joining them today? I hope so. We're doing what motivates us. Yeah, so they're just going to briefly introduce themselves and just say, what motivates or inspires them to do this work? So everyone, I'm Sabir, looking forward to our discussion. Just really quickly, I think for me, it's both the idea of necessity that we have to do this work in order to get to the stuff that we've been talking about this whole conference and possibility. I think we're at a really interesting time to reinvent our democracy. Hi, all. My name is Tiana. I think what motivates and inspires me, there's a lot of things. But both true in my personal and professional life, I find a lot of meaning in helping people learn so that they are more confident in navigating the world. And I get to do that both by helping the folks that run elections build skills. And the end result is creating more useful information for the folks that are trying to navigate the civic and political process. Hi, great to be here. I think when I think about the opportunity divided our country, it's especially hitting young people hard. And so I think any way that we can get them engaged to help close that's important. I think people often assume we've got really robust democratic institutions, right? And they'll just be fine. They'll keep operating. We know that's actually not true. They are robust and they function because people work really hard to make that happen. That's been true in the past and that's true today. And we really need everyone, everybody's hands, young adults, especially continuing to fuel that fire. We didn't get an expansion of civil rights. We didn't hold our government accountable for past abuses. That didn't happen because people stepped up. Sometimes at great risk to make important things happen. And so I'm going to see that continue to happen as democracy pushes forward. Hi everyone, I'm Brandon Malau. What inspires me is freedom for all communities that have been terrorized right now by the administration. Freedom from raids, freedom to have worker protections and the freedom to live with our families in this country because so many of us at risk of detention and deportations as we speak. So that inspires me to do what I do. Wonderful, well, I think you've all raised this really important question that I think a lot of us have been struggling with, which is how do we channel and tap into this energy we see with millennials? And then we see sort of the existing institutions. And we're seeing a massive lack of decline and trust in these institutions. But we're also seeing, sort of feels like the best of, it's like the tale of two cities, right? You see millennials engaging in commerce and in their social lives and there's a lot of energy. And yet, as you've said, we're not seeing the big robust reforms of previous generations. And I fear that if we can't sort of tap into that individual energy of millennials, that there are gonna be long-term consequences for our democracy. Any of you can jump in right now. Absolutely, well, I'll comment on that. And then I think political agency and economic agency are often linked, right? And so if you live in a neighborhood that's unsafe and where you feel disconnected or you're working two low-paying jobs just to feed your family, that limits your business, right? That's the less time you have to volunteer or organize in a campaign or push back on some encroachment you think is unfair. And so I think to the extent we can spend an economic opportunity for more people, that's gonna benefit this political engagement conversation. There's a lot of data that's just come out showing the middle class in this country basically makes the same amount of money that it did about 15 years ago. And that's, of course, in the handouts for the event today. Or, of course, we're doing even worse. Unemployed at very high levels. And so I think that's a piece we've also had to tackle. We've got a bit strong pathways for everybody and institutions have to respond to that. I think a lot of people are still locked in their minds that you go to high school, you get a four-year college degree and there'll be a really good job waiting for you. That's a fine path for some sliver of the public but we need lots of other pathways too. You know what else we're pushing for those? They're studying their own businesses. They're earning and learning at the same time. They're being really creative. I think our institutions have to respond to that because with that growing economic capability, then you're able to have better political agency as well. I think that's one piece of the puzzle. A lot of my focus is on sort of process and infrastructure. So a big portion of my work is working directly with the folks that run elections at the local level to help them develop data and technology skills to better administer elections in sort of the digital age. And I think that one thing that is really key to my work that I think helps translate to increased trust in institutions is really focusing on building relationships with the folks in these local offices that have thankless jobs and building empathy between sort of their work and the needs that they're not meeting for the folks in their community. And I think that working with also an office full of millennials or young people, oftentimes there's a lot of frustration that happens and there's a lot of tension between that work. But really humanizing these institutions because they're made up of people is tremendously impactful and sort of building that trust. So most of my job involves making sure people don't get detained and deported. The numbers right now are pretty stark in telling. The president, Obama has deported over two million people more than any other president in the history of this country. So he's like the worst president we ever had for immigrants and immigration. And right now he's building baby jails in different parts of the country where they're housing two-year-olds just because they came to this country. So all of my job involves organizing communities that are very decentralized that don't speak English that well, that don't have access to institutions at all to begin with. And how do we then, and most of us are young and people of color, so how do we organize people who are completely left out and who this country has failed completely? It's obligations to provide human rights laws. How do we help those people? And so a lot of my job has been sort of organizing outside of mainstream traditional institutions to build power in immigrant communities and to drive and push change through different channels. And to build communities that are resilient and over time can sort of win. And we had a huge win two years ago when Obama gave a deferral of reputation to about 500,000 young people. We didn't just wake up one day. Instead of do that though, he was pushed to do that because young people are occupying these offices across the country and emptying them out and he didn't know what to do about that. So he had to respond and be like, okay, I need to give a reprieve to these people. And that's how he won re-election really. But all of my job involves thinking of working outside the margins and working with people who don't have access to institutions. Just building on that into your question, Holly. I think a lot of us do with broadening what we mean when we're talking about democracy because I think there's a dangerous tendency to reduce it down to civic virtue and pulling the ballot box and sort of doing your duty as a citizen. I think that's completely backwards way to think about it, right? It's really, democracy is the most, it's not at all a bloodless neutral concept, right? It's the most radical, most kind of power related idea out there. It's all about resting control of the levers of power back from people who have monopolized it, right? Whether that's political control in terms of who makes decisions in government or economic control in terms of who shapes all of the macro forces that we've been talking about the last two days about the changing nature of the economy. So this is kind of what I mean when I think about democracy as a necessity. It's not an add-on that would be great if we did. It's the only way we can get to the stuff that we've been talking about the last two days. So how do we do it? So what do you think? So I mean, we've got, I mean, it's an exciting panel. We've got some great ideas already from the other panelists. So I mentioned before kind of the idea of innovation. To my mind, I think it's both in terms of innovations around democracy, how we do it, but also innovation through democracy. So innovations around democracy, I think that's about kind of going beyond elections and going down sort of the modal form of public participation through protest or kind of traditional forms of lobbying or advocacy. I mean, we're in this really exciting time where there are a lot of other tools, whether it's technological, institutional, or just kind of power politics, like sit-ins and kind of what Perna was talking about. So, you know, social movements, a wider range of institutional forms outside of elections and the federal government, is that's one area. And then the other idea of sort of democracy as innovation, I'm kind of drawn to examples where policymakers and stakeholders are able to co-produce the policies that we live by. And so there aren't a ton of examples. It's not the way that we do things conventionally, but whether it's something like participatory budgeting or any of the other kinds of new ways that we can set up to allow kind of a wider range of people to actually have political power instead of just making suggestions or kind of knocking on the door. Yeah, I would just add we, there's a new report folks have found on our site that looks at the link between civic engagement and economic opportunity and shows very clearly that if you build skills and networks in social capital, that pays off for you with positive economic dividends, which is a little bit intuitive, but we have some fresh research that backs it up and tracks with some of the simple idea. Spencer was just saying our friends at city just support us in that work and I know help make today happen too. But I think one of the limitations even with the report is that we only measure kind of traditional types of engagement, right? The current population survey and other data sources that we were able to look at, you know, ask you, did you volunteer in the last year? Are you a member of a group? These are important. Those are apps we should never stop collecting that data, but we should collect more data because we know that more and more people, especially young people, are engaging lots of other ways. And when they're asked if they volunteer, they might say no, when in fact they're doing a whole bunch of stuff that was sort of count as volunteering, but they didn't go down to like a service group or the Lions Club and do that. They had their neighbor with the project or they did some online activism that then pivoted to a meetup or they did something in person and both of those linked up or a hundred other things, right? That aren't sort of captured in these questions. And so institutions in the way we gather data sometimes aren't deaf enough and quick enough to catch up to the way this stuff is moving so quickly. So all the ways of engagement that are being mentioned here I think aren't often measured and sort of counted. And so younger adults often seem more disconnected and less motivated than they in fact are by some of our institutional leaders. Yeah. And jumping off of that, I mean I work with the most motivated young people that I've ever met in my life who work two, three jobs a day and then work at night to like, stop their families from being deported and stop everyone else's families from being deported. I mean this is volunteer work and it's something that they do around the clock. And to the point where I mean seven years ago I started an organization called Dream Activist which was basically to organize undocumented young people across the country. And we used online tools to do so to take action to target Congress persons, to target ICE agents, to target DHS as a whole organization to change immigration policy in this country. And through that also we met other undocumented people and sort of built an organic movement from the ground up where we have so many different groups of undocumented young people and now also their parents who are joining in and forming community and trying to stop ICE buzzes from going to Mexico and trying to stop deportations of people. Some young people have taken on more, they're doing sit-ins in offices and they're doing sit-ins at ICE and locking themselves to gates and this is all civic engagement and this is what democracy should look like. Right, this is very interesting. So one thing that I'm hearing is there is a lot of civic engagement and there is a lot of energy but somehow it's disconnected from the perception of millennials but also disconnected from these traditional institutions and traditional indicators when you see things like declining levels of social capital around millennials. One statistic that I found very interesting is that millennials are not brand loyalists. This is true in commerce and it's also true in politics. And there's a lot of political scientists who tell you party identification is a really big criteria for how people vote but we're not actually seeing that with millennials and one thing that they really value is solutions-based governance. So I'm hearing a lot of energy, a lot of excitement from you guys. How do we sort of translate that? How can we sort of bridge that divide to maybe paint a new picture for what millennial civic engagement looks like? So this came up a little bit in one of our breakout groups yesterday. So I think a lot of that is actually, there's a lot of potential there, the sort of liberation from conventional brands or the kind of two-party system but I think the danger is that, so I like the kind of solutions-oriented ethos as well. I'm also kind of among that older edge of the millennial generation but I think the danger is that we, solutions-oriented pragmatism shouldn't be taken to mean neutral or non-normative, because we still have values that we're arguing for very passionately. We still believe inequality and justice and dignity for all and those aren't neutral kind of concepts. They're non-partisan in the sense that they're not democratic or Republican necessarily but they are very political and so I think what we're looking for is ways to channel that moral energy but not necessarily through the party system or legislative politics or those kinds of brands and that's where there's a lot of new potential around new social movements, new forms of institutional innovation. That's very interesting. I also see it as an organizing challenge because it means that there has traditional institutions are not gonna have the power to organize the folks that we're talking about and there are so many reasons that like that statistic doesn't surprise me. We just released a data set last week looking at the composition of elected officials down to the county level. Spoiler alert, white dudes. 90% of elected officials from the top to the bottom are white, 68% are men. So what that translates to is that we're releasing an index coming out next week, folks that women of color like myself, proportionate to the population, white men have eight times the power that they should have and so it's really difficult to think and sort of be traditional pathways, like where's my place in that? And so that's where sort of innovation comes to figure out the pathway there. I agree and I think also you could have a disproportionate impact at the local level, right? Turn out levels to be much lower. I mean, young adults could swing those elections as they all came out, right? I mean, so could in the other age group. People hang back more because our media gives a disproportionate amount of coverage to our binary presidential choice over four years, right? And that's incredibly important and the president makes a lot of decisions that impact all of us. But we saw this sort of in Ferguson, right? In fact, these things will flare up and it's like, wait, how did this happen? How did the leadership structure locally not reflect the community and how are these abuse of practices? And then you go back and look at turnout levels and again, it's not all about voting. It's about a whole range of engagement across many, many months of accountability. You can't show up once and vote and be done, as we've been saying, but I think that's a place where people could make a bigger impact both to influence the people currently holding office and to change the composition of those people, as was just said, so that they do reflect the community a little bit more. So I would say to dig in there, too, locally. I think that's also pretty exciting that young people tend to be more independent than anything else. I mean, it means, for me, at least in my work, it means that politicians are not going to take Latinos and Asians as granted to be vote for Democrats because they're the ones that are running the worst policies imaginable right now, at least in office. So it's actually a pretty exciting time. And as far as opportunities to play one party against another by pretty much saying you're independent, so hey, you need to do what you want you to do. So that's been, you know, it's actually helped to grow our power in that manner. So I see it as a very positive thing, actually. That's very hopeful. That's quite a lot of uplifting because, you know, I think you're right. You know, one thing that makes me concerned is that the world in which we live in does not yet reflect these realities. And so we have this two-party system. And so I like this idea of sort of seeing the system for what it is and then trying to understand how do we work with it to achieve our own goals? Do the other panelists have any thoughts on that? Yeah, so I guess two quick things. One, just to add to that last round around the lack of diversity in kind of the composition of who makes decisions, there's also really big class problem in terms of the types of life experiences that people have by the time they either become elected or appointed officials of various kinds. But to your question, I do think it's hopeful. And one way to think about it is so a lot of the institutions we now take as given around how our democracy works, we're themselves the product of previous attempts to reinvent the process under extreme duress. So whether it's direct election of senators or party primaries, I mean a lot of those came out of the response to the first Gilded Age, 100 years ago when people were concerned about machine politics as kind of choking off the ideal of democracy, right? And so now a lot of those institutions maybe don't seem quite as vibrant or as valuable to us at this point. But I think it's worth remembering that these things aren't given. They don't come bequeathed from, they certainly don't come from the constitution and then they don't come from sort of any kind of, from on high, they come from history. They're the product of people like us in previous generations trying to battle out the kinds of problems that we're facing now. I just think that there is a ton of opportunity there to the extent for folks that do have access to institutions to work with and work within government, and I'm not just talking about sort of running for elected office, although that's like one pathway certainly, but the folks that I work with are public servants that are working at the local level and significantly impacting or have the potential to significantly impact and engage their communities. And these are the types of opportunities that I hope increasingly young people are engaged in as well. Yeah, I just, amen to all that. I think this is exactly right. And I think there's a huge, huge power in telling your story and marrying it with data. I think some people are more responsive to the head and some more to the heart. I think you really need both. I always tell people, you know, come in with hard and fast numbers and your sort of personal experience because the comment about the fact that our leadership does not reflect people's experiences certainly not racially, but also the income divide is actually pretty, pretty huge. It's extremely rare for a low income person to have the capital and the extra time and obviously the money given through their network to run for office. And that's just, it's almost a laughable concept. And so I think telling those stories to people about, you know, what is it like to live in some of the neighborhoods in this country where zip code ends up being a huge, huge determinant of outcomes. I mean, nobody wants to believe that because the American dream is such a powerful socializing force in all of their lives. But in fact, we know there's a massive divide in our country even among young adults, right? There's about a third of young adults that could make some pretty big problems, some pretty big mistakes and probably be okay, right? Because they have networks around them. They have really good parents. They have really robust networks that are gonna pick them back up. And then there's a third of young adults that can do everything right and it would be really, really tough to move up because they live in a neighborhood where there are no supports. There are no caring adults in their life and there's no cushion when they make a mistake. One mistake could really sort of be it for them or could set them way back on their pathway. And then there's probably a third of them that obviously have a more of a mixed experience. That's not the country we wanna live in, of course. And nobody wants that. And so I would say bring that story to people even to very unusual allies that you do not think would support you. Bring that story to them and let them react authentically in the moment because I think that's a very compelling narrative that we all wanna turn around. Whether you want a big business or whether you're liberal or conservative or whatever. Fantastic, I wanna do one quick last question and then open it up for questions. So if there was just one thing that you think you'd wanna sort of convey to millennials writ large. Let's say we can't win the media war, right? And there are some constituencies where it's easier to show the impact of policy. And I think that the turn, the re-interest in cities and local level is very exciting because people can be more connected to that. What's one way that you guys think we could sort of show millennials that there is this opportunity here? And you can think about it if you wanna take the questions first before you come back to this. I mean, the one thing that I would say that drives a lot of my work is that people who are most directly impacted should be the ones that lead their own struggle and so many times, our institutions, especially in DC, don't facilitate that. And we have so many immigrant rights organizations in DC that are not ran by non-immigrants. It's like, we're born here, what do you know about this? But, I mean, this is a problem throughout different communities and different places. Like workers should lead their own struggle, obviously. It barely, hardly ever happens though. So I think one of the takeaways that I would say is to try to facilitate people leading themselves and leading their own communities. I think that self-guidance, fantastic. Yeah, I think that that's exactly right. I think that showing millennials is not really a thing that is necessarily possible, but understanding sort of the relationship between your agency and your power and sort of the pathway to impact and hold accountable institutions is like one piece, but then actually getting involved in diving in and doing that and seeing your own power is sort of the only, one of the only ways to do that. I would just say this may sound, she's maintaining optimism. I mean, millennials having come of age in a really difficult economic climate, I think still polling shows they're still very optimistic. I think there's still some possibility. Like, great, the Obama campaign did a bunch of innovative things for the first time. Social media and the way they engage people, let's know a floor, let's know that we're a gold standard. Like, we can now be better than that and young adults will be showing away. So I think that sense of possibility and these new types of engagement and showing the country that optimism, even in the face of real economic obstacles, I think is incredibly powerful. We're gonna open it up for Q&A. Please be brief. As you know, this has been such an exciting panel and we wanna get the panelists to really have a discussion. Okay, that person there, please say your name and your brief question. Thank you. Hi, my name is George Chung. I'm from the Joyce Foundation. I'm really intrigued about your thoughts about the two-party political system. One could definitely play the two parties against each other or one could really shift towards some systemic reforms towards a real multi-party system through proportional representation. So I'd love to get your thoughts in terms of should young people and millennials lead the charge in terms of shifting to a multi-party system. Great, thank you. Fantastic question. Great question, too. Sure. Yeah, so I mean, that's a great question. So in theory, if you can get a bill through the state legislature, you can have states allocate their house seats proportionally. There's no reason why we have to have single-member districts. And we'll change a lot of the dynamics. I'm not sure how likely that is. I tend to see the party system as being fundamentally lagging and responsive to other sources of political initiative. So if it's a choice of strategy, I think I would lean more towards the social movement kind of emphasis that changing the baseline against which parties have to respond. But if we're kind of dreaming structural changes, then yeah, I mean, kind of a PR system would be great. I agree, too. And there are some states that have nonpartisan panels that draw their congressional boundaries. Every state should do that, right? That's another thing. You don't have to overthrow the two-party system. You can change the gerrymandering that we have. That wouldn't fix everything at all because we still stood ourselves, liberal, simple living cities, and so there will always be diluted. So there's some structural things there based on where people choose to live. But if we un-gerrymandered all the congressional lines, that would make a lot more competitive districts and that would allow you to play the parties off of each other more because you'd have, even if we stuck with the two-party system, you'd have two more reasonable people running against each other, presumably. Once the lag caught up. Yeah. I mean, I come from a parliamentary democracy, so I mean, I know the potential in a democracy where you have 10 different parties running for election and you can actually just have a no-conference motion and like get rid of them next week. It's fantastic. I mean, it's the best thing ever. And it's kind of shocking to me how the US is supposed to be some sort of a democracy but you like have two parties and do the same thing. It's kind of ludicrous. So, I mean, yes. I mean, ideally we'd love to see, you know, a kind of vibrant government where people, you know, actually are proportionately represented, obviously. I'm not sure if we'll ever get there though. We'll take another question. That gentleman over there. Hi, first off, thank you all for coming. I'm Nehemiah Royal. I work with the Rosalyn Institute Campus Network. My question is how do we frame the conversation around values-oriented governance to kind of constructively communicate across difference? To communicate across difference. To constructively communicate across difference. So, I'll throw out maybe a quick thought on that. I mean, I think a lot of what, so if you think a lot about what we talked about yesterday and this morning, right, about the changing nature of the economy. To my mind, that's a source of the problem that's really about economic power and domination, right? And I think that's a, it's not universal, but it's a very, it's a much broader, more capacious language, right? We're all trying to have agency over our own lives as individuals, as communities, and we're constrained in that by concentrated private power by the forces of the market. And these are kinds of economic power that are sort of taking decisions out from our own control, right? And I think there's room there to be able to engage a lot of different types of communities and experiences around a kind of a common cause, in terms of remaking the economy, remaking our political system. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of potential to think sort of past the framework of difference and more about intersections. And I think that a real way to sort of recognize those intersections has to do with telling the stories sort of what you had talked about before telling your own personal stories and sort of seeing, building relationships with other folks sort of more based on these commonalities and building empathy with them. We'll take another question. That gentleman in the blue, Mr. Mark Schmidt. Thanks Mark Schmidt with New America. I'm just wondering, suppose there was somebody on the panel who said, hey, you know what, you know, millennials, we're libertarians, we're techno libertarians, we don't need government, we work things out for themselves, for ourselves, what would be your response to imaginary panelists number six? Spicy. Before we disagree with me, I don't think the Pollux supports that. I mean, are there libertarians in the Millennial cohort? Sure, just like they're in every age cohort. And maybe those voices are particularly loud and interesting, but I think most of the polling shows millennials are pretty comfortable with government having a role, and in some cases it's a substantial role. Now, I think they want business to have some freedom, especially in the entrepreneurship space, they don't want to see lots of regulations, so there's always caveats, but I think in general, millennials answer questions about their comfort with the size of the government being that they're pretty okay with it. So I think that's right, but to take the kind of our hypothetical libertarian on, I mean, I would say two things, so first of all, I think there's a difference between being a hardcore libertarian of the sort where the market solves everything and we work anti-state versus being someone kind of leading libertarian in the sense that the idea of individual creativity and innovation, entrepreneurship, those are things that appeal to them. And that ladder, I think, is actually totally right because there are a lot of ways in which we've talked about that are kind of traditional, like the traditional liberal imagination of government solving problems, just it actually doesn't work the way we want it to work. I think as progressives, you have to take that on and be like, yeah, that's actually a real problem, but the answer isn't to throw the baby out with the bathwater, the answer is to like tap our entrepreneurial creative intuitions and use that to reinvent our institutions of government because the extra piece is that all of the problems we talked about today and yesterday are problems that we can't solve individually. You can't be, you can't, as an individual entrepreneur, solve the work-life balance problem or solve the debt problem or solve the lifetime kind of wealth accumulation problem or any of the things we talked about. Those are collective problems that require collective action, but we shouldn't constrain ourselves to sticking with the institutions and the toolkits that we have that we've inherited because they actually don't work very well. Yeah. You know, and just to sort of take that question on in a serious way, I do think it is something that we are gonna have to sort of have a good answer for because I think some of the folks that I, some of my best friends, it's not that they don't want a lot of the benefits that we all see, it's that they want sort of alternative structures to provide them those benefits and I think there really is going to be attention in this idea of solution-based governance and what do we do for the public sector and the public servants who have been there and I think it is gonna force us to sort of come into reality with some of these tensions and I think we're gonna see it in the run-up to 2016. I think we have time for a few more questions. These have all been really fantastic. Let's take this woman here and then the woman behind her. Either order, that's fine. Good morning, Mary Bruce with AmeriCorps Alums. Wondering, technology is a solution versus or in complement with actually sitting down and talking to people face to face and we talked a bit about the Obama campaign and the power of that technology played in his election but it was also house parties and people actually sitting and talking about real issues. So as you're thinking about millennials who are more mobile than previous generations and leveraging technology and place-based solutions versus or in complement with technology solutions. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I think that there are, I think some of those older and older institutions think oh, if we just have the right tech solution like we'll engage the young people and just sort of check that box and think that they're sort of done then. But I think you clearly need both. I mean, high tech and high touch, both are important. We've got the Obama campaign succeeded. We've got a lot of tech stuff. They also had an army, like the biggest organizing army ever, right? They had more people on the ground doing door knocking. The number of contacts they were reporting to their field operations was off the charts and so I think they're complementary. I totally agree that technology is among the things in your toolbox to be able to more effectively engage. It's one of the many tactics that you should be using. Could you say that one more time, really loudly? Among one of the tools in your toolbox. Wonderful, we're gonna take our final question. Is there anyone else? Because we could combine two. Okay, we're good. Just trying to engage folks. That's great. Thank you. My name's Angelica. So this is for all the panelists. When we talk about political participation, we do, I feel like, tend to look at civic innovation and the role of technology, but at the end of the day, a fundamental right we have is to vote and what are your thoughts on increasing voter participation particularly amongst millennials? Thank you. Thank you. All right. I'll take that first. Our political system is so complicated. It's criminal. One of the things that I've specifically worked on is that recognizing that technology is among one of the tools to better engage young people. Local election offices of the just over 3,000 counties, about 1,000 counties, don't have an elections website at all, which was shocking to me. And so one of the things that I have worked on to help make sure that folks have the information that they need for the fundamental baseline things and know how to even get to the box and vote has been working to develop this website template for local election offices based in a bunch of best practices about how people consume election information and helping to coach those folks in those offices to know how to actually populate and maintain and write in plain language and all of the things that are helpful to communicating that information as just one of the mechanisms of helping demystify the process and actually meet people where they're looking for this. Yeah, I would like to just note most of the people I work with don't have the right to vote. I mean, there's like talking about 20 million people who actually can't vote. And it's not just because they're immigrants but also because there's founded disenfranchisement, there's also ways of preventing people from voting nowadays through voter ID laws. And so a lot of this involves fighting back and actually trying to gain either the right to work or to put it in a different manner or to cost it differently, making sure that everyone can vote regardless of the immigration status regardless of the fact that they might have a criminal record or any of those things. So it's to actually extend the vote and redo it in ways that also promote most of the participation beyond just voting. Yeah, just to build on that, I think both of those are really spot on. I mean, we have all the tools at our disposal to kind of up the participation rate in terms of whether it's websites out online, direct mail, but I mean, I think the problem of voter turnout, it's much more political than that. I mean, we're living through the worst retrenchment of the right to vote since Jim Crow, arguably even worse depending on how you count between felon disenfranchisement, immigrants and like the new voter ID laws. And it's happening like literally in real time in the last two weeks, it's gotten even worse with the series of court decisions. So I mean, it's happening right now. We're living through it and it's a total outrage, but like that's to my mind, that's the real, like let's make it, it's not just a civic virtue thing, right, that we have to turn up and vote. Like no, there's actual power being exercised here in a really immoral way and that should be the story. Yeah, I just want to completely agree with that. And this isn't, I don't think this is, my organization is completely bipartisan. We work with everybody, we work with all sectors. And I don't think this should be controversial to say that the voter ID stuff that's going on is just clearly wrong. I would come into everybody in the room, Judge Richard Posner, who's a conservative on the federal bench, just wrote this opinion if you haven't seen it recently in one of the, maybe the one that was constant, but in one of the contested laws, his decision basically eviscerated every argument that you could make for supporting these voter ID laws, step by step, it's beautiful written. I would suggest that you read it and share it. So it's really powerful and coming from someone who sits on the right side of the ideological spectrum from him and basically knocks it down. This is about our sort of values as a country. And the second thing I would add, since we're sitting right now in the district and I'm a resident of the city and many of you probably are, we could deliver for president, but that's it. And so I think there's also fundamental injustice happening that there are 650,000 people who pay taxes and fight in wars that don't get to vote in the city as well. So I would just mention those two, those should not be controversial statements. Proud to work with liberals and conservatives at our organization. I think that those two things are true. Fantastic. Well, I just want to say, I think about this stuff a lot and this panel totally blew me away. And I want to thank all of you, both for all the work you're doing and also for all the great ideas and energy you put forth today. So big round of applause and wonderful questions. Thank you guys. I hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did.