This article is one of a series of articles produced by Word in Black through support provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Word In Black is a collaborative of 10 Black-owned media outlets across the country.
By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
Three years ago, King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay needed an avenue to connect with and collaborate with the youth of his community to enhance their knowledge of civic duty, learning what it takes to change the problematic conditions of their neighborhoods by running for office and what it means to be a policymaker.
In response, he started an initiative called “Build The Bench” to teach young people, and anyone else who wants to attend the monthly seminar, the fundamentals of civic duty and how to run for office.
“The goal [of Build The Bench] is to build out the pipeline of people who are passionate and talented and equip them with the tools they need to run for office or advocate for their communities in other ways to create positive change,” says Zahilay. “Through Build the Bench, I teach people who are interested in politics how to run for office, and how to advocate. So, this is my educational response to the traditional public school system type of education.”
Zahilay is a firm believer that the majority of the work of an elected official is grassroots. He believes that they must be grounded in the community and listen to the community if they want to be effective. They must not only have the ability to solve issues but also educate their constituents throughout the process.
In educating the next generation of leaders of change, Zahilay knew that he needed to think outside the box.
“I do a lot of work outside the scope of the formal duties as a councilmember,” says Zahilay. “I try to be out in the community, I try to be boots on the ground, I try to be grassroots, I try to be visible for my community, and so the formal duties of a councilmember if you read the job description would probably be sitting in meetings, drafting legislation, voting yes, voting no in the council chamber, but really to be an effective changemaker you have to be in your district on the ground, collaborating with people in a very real way.”
As it relates to building a pipeline of new advocates, the Build The Bench program has been successful in attracting large numbers of young people throughout his district to come and learn more about what it takes to be an elected official and to be civically responsible.
“We have had many young people, many teenagers participate in the program,” says Zahilay. “The structure of the program is that once a month on a Saturday, my team and I organize a workshop for anyone who wants to attend, but my audience is usually the younger generation, and we teach them how to run for office and advocate for their policy priorities.”
“It’s a two-hour session each month, and I invite elected officials, different policymakers, and community leaders to speak as well,” adds Zahilay. “One of the main topics is how to use your story to create a pitch for why you are running for office and what you hope to achieve.”
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According to Zahilay, if you are giving a campaign pitch and you are going around to endorsement meetings, townhalls, and you are telling people why they should vote for you, the structure should be here’s my story, here’s the change I want to create and here’s why I’m running for this office.
“Everybody has a story,” says Zahilay. “It is either their own story or the community’s story, and in that story, you will inevitably share examples of struggle or strife, or injustice, or opportunity, and then you will use that story to describe what needs to change about our society to make sure that people who have lived your story or lived the story of your community can live a better life.”
A prime example of this could be a young person who experienced homelessness growing up. They would say they are running for office because they want to build more affordable housing, and their story associated with their desire to advocate for change could be a powerful tool to address the issue because it is very close to their heart.
“When I go and talk with high school students around my district, and I ask them what is going on? What is leading to this? And of course, there are a bunch of different causes,” says Zahilay. “The lack of mental health resources, the pandemic itself, but the one thing that comes up a lot is that young people, teenagers feel like their problems that they experience in their lives whether on the individual level, the family level, or the societal level, are fixed problems that cannot be changed, cannot be improved.”
“They keep saying ‘even when we march, even when we protest, for decades and decades things don’t seem to get better’ so the feeling that problems cannot change is a source of anxiety and mental unhealth,” says Zahilay. “So, I want to show young people that in fact problems can be changed, through hard work, through collaboration, through advocacy, through knowledge of the system, through resource generation, problems can change.”
As our youth continue to feel disenfranchised, Zahilay believes that there is a lot of opportunity to teach our young people, to train them, to empower them to create the change necessary to transform their communities into a much better place for everyone.
“I tell them that there is nobody that can tell you more about what good policy is than the people who are living the consequences of bad policy,” says Zahilay. “So, you can’t just sit in an ivory tower, reading the work of so-called experts, you have to go talk to the people who have the least access to an elected official. That is the irony of all this, the people who are in need of the most resources, the people whose voices a councilmember needs to hear are also the people less likely to come and talk with you because of disenfranchisement.”
For more information on Build The Bench seminars, please email [email protected].