Today's Kindness #211: November 7, 2022
☑️🗳️Gen Z For Change!🗳️☑️
Tomorrow is the 2022 Midterm Elections! Please VOTE!
I had the recent opportunity to interview Zoe Shipley, the Research & Writing Associate at Gen Z for Change! Gen Z for Change was founded in 2020 to promote voting and participating in politics to Gen Z! In this interview, I asked about kindness and what GZ4C does, and how they do it!
As always, the first question we ask in interviews is "What's a recent random act of kindness you have seen or read?"
"Recently on my college campus, there have been, Some protests for things that are not super accepting. So, people have started standing there and handing out candy or asking people if they want hugs that day. It's things like that that I just think are really sweet because it's banding together to support each other.
"What is Gen Z for Change and what do you do?"
"Gen Z for Change is a youth-created and youth-led nonprofit organization that works to enact social change and to motivate all people, but mainly Gen Z to enact social change themselves.
So what that means in more tangible terms is that we do a lot of initiatives and we meet with a lot of politicians and creators. We do networking both on social media and on the ground to kind of push for progressive social policies and political policies that we really feel are important to build up our future."
"How does kindness impact the leadership in the organization?"
"I think in today's climate it can be very difficult to have a sense of like hope or you know, a sense of like trust that the future will be okay.
And so our leadership like, I'm not kidding when I say we are all friends. I think that is so important to show that kindness and that support. The kind of mutual sense of trust in those sorts of things in order to effectively enact change in the future. So how that kind of plays out is at all of our meetings, we always like open and close with just personal anecdotes.
We talk and show that support to each other and we all know each other kind on that personal level."
"What are some big wins the organization has had lately?"
"Olivia Julianna, who's in our organization, raised over $2 million, in response to some body shaping done by a certain politician and done it to abortion funds, which is incredible.
We've done some on-the-ground protest work for labor rights, and that's in the past month or two. We've worked with ALU leader, Chris Smalls, and that's been really exciting. Also recently, you'll be seeing a few things drop with people that we've been really excited to talk to. I'm not gonna name drop right now, but there will be some exciting stuff coming out there.
Just in general, I think midterms, we just did our 22-hour-long Twitch stream to help motivate people to go out and vote in the 2022 midterms. And we had a lot of, not only like politicians on there but also youth politicians on there.
And we really saw people kind of band together and really enjoy seeing that. So I think that was a really big success too. And hopefully, that'll translate into more voting on Election Day."
"Why is making the world a better place something you want to do?"
"I personally want to make the world a better place because the way it stands currently, disadvantages and disenfranchises far too many people. We are all human beings and we all live on the same planet, and that needs to be rectified for sure on a systemic level and also just on an individual level, which is I think, what you work for. So, I wanna make it a better place so that everyone can enjoy the same, comforts, and the same basic needs of life met and also the same comforts that are a little bit above that, that I think that everyone is deserving of.
The org as a whole I know wants to make the world a better place because we've seen how effective we can be at mobilization and youth mobilization. Going forward, youth are the future. We definitely want to play a part in building that future. And kind of going back to those same values is the fact that we kind of wanna promote a world in which people are not disenfranchised and are living the best quality of life if they can."
Thank you to Zoe from Gen Z for Change for answering the questions that I asked her today!
Again, Tomorrow is the 2022 Midterm Elections! If you have not mailed your ballot, please go to the polls to vote in person, or drop it off at one of the drop-off locations. Locations for those places around the US can be found here.
"The power of youth is the common wealth for the entire world. The faces of young people are the faces of our past, our present, and our future. No segment in the society can match the power, idealism, enthusiasm, and courage of the young people."
~ Kailash Satyarthi