A Young Person’s Guide to Committee of Seventy’s Democracy Summit
Two days of panels talk about America’s democracy at 250 years old. In our series of articles, #VotethatJawn asks: Is it serving youth today?
In honor of the nation's semiquincentennial, the Committee of Seventy, an organization founded to combat corruption in Philadelphia in 1904, held a conference filled with panelists to discuss what is next for democracy within America. The Committee of Seventy in the past has ended cash gifts for Philadelphia’s elected officials, slayed the gerrymander, and banned ultra-rich pension bonuses, to name a few.
As Lauren Cristella and Thomas Hutton, president and chair of the Committee of Seventy respectively, shared, “There is no better place on earth to have this conversation than Philadelphia.” Philadelphia was where these initial conversations took place in 1776 when America’s founding fathers decided what it was that they were fighting for in their new nation.
The keynote speaker was Jon Meacham, historian and Pulitzer-winning biographer of multiple presidents, who argued that American democracy stands at a “moment of danger,” one that he said the American people created and the American people will have to fix. Throughout the next day, seven different panels filled with experts in their field met to discuss defending democracy in today’s political climate. Notable names such as Al Schmidt, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and U.S. Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon, and best-selling authors Roxanne Gay and David Brooks, spoke on elections, journalism, polarization, Congress, and more. One common thread across the speakers was power: in governance and among people, in communities of so many kinds. Another was care, and the morality of how we make decisions, spend money, and educate our youth: all issues that #VoteThatJawn’s participants report as top concerns.
Panelists agreed that today’s citizens must decide now what needs to change in our nation, because a 250-year-old democracy cannot be celebrated if it is unable to grow with what citizens call for-- passionately. The fate of the next 250 years of our country will be decided by the youth of today, and what decisions you decide to make, right now.
Over the next month, Vote That Jawn will release a series of articles highlighting some of the real, actionable ideas discussed at the conference to encourage Americans. The overall theme: how can we incite change in our own communities--and for youth, in our own generation--at a time when change and even democracy itself seem hard to envision.
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