The Campaign Finance Board recently selected a cohort of 15 high school students for the 2023 NYC Votes Youth Ambassador Program, and five of those students will be bringing their new knowledge and advocacy back to their neighborhoods in the Bronx.
The program, now in its fourth class of youth ambassadors, trains young people from across the city to become “voting experts with the knowledge and skill needed to help increase voter participation in their communities.”
Three of the cohort’s students — 16-year-olds Aisha Farooq and Jade Capellan and 15-year-old Mariama Touray— told the Bronx Times that their experience so far has been exciting because their instruction is always interactive and tied to their communities.
“It never gets boring in here,” said Capellan, who attends the Young Women’s Leadership School and lives in Fordham.
The new cohort has already led a canvassing event in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in which they registered around 20 people to vote, as well as a texting campaign ahead of the June primary election.
Along with their new knowledge, the students will be paid about $4,000 each. They will also collaborate on a final project examining the impact of New York’s party affiliation voting laws.
Capellan said she wasn’t aware that New Yorkers are required to be affiliated with a party in order to vote in political primaries — and her peers and family weren’t either. The students said this is the type of knowledge that needs to be shared within their communities.
With more and more schools cutting civics curriculum, Touray said the Youth Ambassador program appealed to her interest in what she called “forbidden education.”
“You’re getting paid to learn about something that’s not even taught about in school. So that really drew me to it, and I was like, yes, sign me up,” said Touray, who lives in East Tremont and attends Central Park East High School in East Harlem.
Funding for civics has lagged in recent years, as science and technology took priority. But in the 2023 federal budget, civics education finally got what Education Week called its “first boost in many years” to $23 million, “more than triple the annual spending in previous years.”
Capellan, who is student body president at her school, said, “I want to learn so I can educate myself and come back to school in the fall and further educate my peers.”
Farooq, who lives in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood and attends the High School for Health Professions and Human Services, said she will fill a similar role in her Pakistani immigrant community: “A lot of them don’t really speak English, so I thought it was a great opportunity for me to learn and then educate them.”
The students said they’re learning not only about voting but about how the city’s past and present power players, such as urban planner Robert Moses, shaped the current political context. Moses’ projects included the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which cut through neighborhoods, displaced residents and brought damaging pollution to the borough.
And while they’ve heard about low voter turnout in the Bronx , the cohort aims to turn things around, starting right in their own neighborhoods.
Capellan said a lot of people she knows are “swayed away from [voting] because they feel as though they’re not seeing the changes that they want. But that’s because they’re not voting. They don’t understand that’s how it works and how these smaller elections are so vital to changing our local communities.”
“To make change, you have to start in your own community,” said Touray.
The two other student ambassadors from the Bronx, Ricardo Valentin of Park East High School and Janet Cuatlacuatl of Bronx Legacy High School, could not be reached for comment.
Correction: This article was updated on July 19 at 6:15 p.m. to include a fifth Bronx student, Janet Cuatlacuatl, who was selected for the 2023 NYC Votes Youth Ambassador Program.
Reach Emily Swanson at emily.swanson63@journalism.cuny.edu. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
