NYC Taps 16 Young Leaders to Boost Youth Vote

02/26/2021

NYC Votes selected 16 young leaders for its 2021 We Power NYC Ambassadors program to help drive youth participation in NYC elections and educate New Yorkers about Ranked Choice Voting.

The new class of ambassadors range in age from 14 to 21 with young leaders from all five boroughs represented. All of the ambassadors currently attend or recently graduated from NYC public high schools and colleges.

"We Power NYC Ambassadors care deeply about their communities, and understand how local elections have a direct impact on their communities," said Olivia Brady, a youth voter coordinator for NYC Votes. "The Ambassadors program helps these young leaders inspire their peers to recognize their own political power, and use it to make a difference."

Thousands of young New Yorkers applied to join the program, which began in the spring of 2020. Now in its second year, NYC Votes looks to expand on the groundwork laid by last year's ambassadors with a focus on preparing New Yorkers for Ranked Choice Voting. Two of the 2020 ambassadors are joining for a second year to serve as mentors.

The ambassadors will meet multiple times each month from now through November. During this time, they'll host Ranked Choice Voting and voter engagement training sessions in their schools and communities, work on projects with NYC Votes staff including a mock participatory budgeting project, join NYC Votes text banks to help get out the vote, and complete a final research project that's presented to their fellow ambassadors.

All the while, the ambassadors will build a significant social media presence centered around voter education and election awareness, including participation in "We Got Issues", a youth-driven conversation on local political issues hosted in partnership with YVote, NYC Votes, and the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development.

Each of the ambassadors already have established roots in their neighborhoods and schools. Collectively, the ambassadors have participated in a wide range of programs, internships, clubs, and extracurricular activities with organizations like Boy Scouts of America, Crew Count, Coalition Z, CUNY Black Student Union, MinKwon Center for Community Action, Urban Word NYC, YMCA Teens Take the City, and many more.

New to the program this year, each ambassador may earn a monthly stipend from now until November 2021 by working on projects that increase awareness of upcoming elections.

In addition to reaching young voters, many of the ambassadors may also help NYC Votes reach one of the city's hardest to reach populations: people who speak English as a second language. Most can speak, read, or write in one or more language other than English including Spanish, Cantonese, Bengali, Arabic, Russian, and American Sign Language. Several of the ambassadors are first generation New Yorkers themselves.

Here is the 2021 Class of We Power NYC Ambassadors, listed by their home borough, their age, school, and other affiliations:

Brooklyn: Jahlil Allah, 16, Fort Hamilton High School, Crew Count; Labiba Iqra, 16, High School for Health Professions and Human Services; Caroline Ji, 18, Stuyvesant High School; Ryan La Barrie; 16, Williamsburg High School of Arts and Technology, YMCA Teens Take the City; Ana LuoCai (Mentor), 21, The City College of New York.

The Bronx: Siara Chowdhury, 16, Manhattan Village Academy; Camila Jimenez, 15, In-Tech Academy; Valeria Menendez, 21, Bronx Community College; Nafisatou Tunkara, 17, New York City Museum School, Founder of High School Black Student Union; Nathaniel Valdivieso, 17, Workspace Academy, Urban Word NYC; James Lherisson (Mentor), 19, Hunter College, Urban Word NYC, Civic Engagement Chair of CUNY Black Student Union.

Manhattan: Eleanor Fecko, 14, Nest+m.

Staten Island: Nikita Chernin, 14, New Dorp High School, Boy Scouts of America; Felicia Trestin, 16, Tottenville High School.

Queens: Kaisha Handa, 15, Queens, The Young Women's Leadership School of Astoria, MinKwon Center for Community Action; Ara Lopez, 15, The High School for Environmental Studies, MinKwon Center for Community Action.

The We Power NYC Ambassador Program comes as a result of NYC Votes's efforts to identify new ways to engage young New Yorkers and boost their interest in the democratic process. In September of 2019, NYC Votes set a goal of doubling youth participation in the 2021 mayoral election.

After a public hearing seeking youth testimony in November 2019, and a youth voting summit in early 2020, NYC Votes started to set in motion their plans to recruit and train young people to register new voters in their communities and lead civics lessons for their peers. Then the coronavirus outbreak put these plans on hold.

Rather than engaging in traditional tactics like field organizing and registration drives, the We Power NYC Ambassadors are focusing their activity online. The ambassadors receive training in digital organizing and leadership skills throughout the program, and will be organizing community building events of their own.

We Power NYC is a youth-led campaign to mobilize one of New York City's most underrepresented voting populations – young people. Initiated by NYC Votes, this campaign will help New Yorkers in their teens and twenties use their voices, build power, and develop leadership skills. The We Power NYC Ambassadors will develop a community of young people who want to have a voice in their democracy and play a key role in doubling youth voter turnout in New York City.

Young voters in NYC turn out at levels comparable to other age cohorts for presidential elections and in high-profile elections like the 2018 midterms, according to the 2019-20 NYC Votes Voter Analysis Report. However, young New Yorkers participate at a particularly lower rate in municipal elections. Through the We Power NYC campaign, NYC Votes aims to double youth turnout for the 2021 citywide election by getting 250,000 voters ages 18 to 29 to the polls.