YouSaid · the spoken record

Beverly Leon

lines on the record: 24
first: 2021-02-18
most recent: 2021-02-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This activation point of now you can vote to educate and inform and ensure that they had those channels to engage. And so that opportunity we can continue to innovate, but I do think there's a moment where the majority of our country is saying something has to change here and where do we start. And for us, our team will continue working with young people, but it's going to be in collaboration and partnership with at every other sort of entry point for this, for our democracy really to be a thriving one.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And this past year alone, one of the things our team reflected on not only was there a paradigm shift in how in education, right? Where an education company and that whole market shifted from the business side, we had a paradigm shift in this consciousness raising with social unrest. We had a historic movement for Black Lives. the opportunity is to create those accessible and inclusive spaces. We happen to do it in the midst of a 2020 presidential election where the majority of folks could not vote in person. Our whole country had to innovate in order to achieve that. We had to figure out how to deliver a census, take a census count in the midst of this. At the same time, we had to engage young people that were moving in.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we have in this moment in time is to actually open those channels up and not just for our focus is young people. So already we discount and disempower how young people participate. Well, you're 17. Just wait until you're 18. That's when you really can make a difference. That undermines and devalues actually the unique contributions every single person can have. And I think that carries on into adulthood. You haven't been invited in. If someone's telling you you're not important at 16, why do you think you're going to be any more important at 26, right? When it's carries forward. And so I think the shift that we can do and that we can all work towards is not fixing this broken democracy, but making sure that it's actually working, it's actually democratic.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting question. I do not think American democracy is broken. What I think has happened in American democracy and if we take a look to our founding, it's been extremely exclusive. It has not been an inclusive democracy. And we look at that at core amendments that have granted the right to vote to black folks in our country, to women. If we take a look at what American democracy meant in 1776, it's not the perfect union that we actually needed it to be. So while I didn't do not think it's broken, I think that we can create more inclusive pathways for our citizens. And until everyone is actually provided that unramp into our civic life. And so not just at the voting booth, but into spaces of power, we're going to continue to see this, you know, it's going to feel broken. But the operation.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the UK, when I was at Oxford, not just British citizens, anyone that lived in that city could vote on the city elections. I had just been transplanted from northeast England down to Oxford. I knew nothing about the community, but the skills I needed to explore that were, can I understand what's happening here? Do I understand how the policy will impact what I care about, the needs of my community, the needs of the country? And so I would take the step back and say, there are many elections, but if given the time, do you have the skills to think about each of those ballot measures as propositions and bills? And if the answer is yes, you're already on your way to being engaged for far too many people, that answer is no. They don't have the ability to actually”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, what I'm hearing you say that what I'm feeling is that overwhelming feeling of how can I possibly inform myself about everything that's happening? And there's a thread from there when we work with young people, there's that same, well, I don't know who I'm voting for because I need to study all the issues and I need to know everything about every position. And my first response would say We lean into critical thinking as students are starting to evaluate these. But even as adults, how can we use our thinking skills to say what's happening here? How important are each of these elections and how is it going to impact the values and the needs of my community, right? So even if we can't possibly understand each ballot measure, do you have the skills to critically examine each one? I'm thinking back to my experience living.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Schools, and the person that's paying us. And if we continue to grow and scale that, we will actually continue to have a generate revenues. And in the past year, we've been able to bootstrap our company through just a couple grants from Colombia, from different social venture funds to actually grow our revenues into the six figures. And that's something that we didn't take outside capital to accomplish that. And we're at an inflection point where we're looking to scale this and to engage partners that saying, hey, these are resources that we need. And that's our business, right? That's our sustainable revenue model that also makes achieving our mission a sustainable one.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To each of those different users. And what we found is that we're not just selling a technology product. We're helping schools actually use data to inform their decision making around school culture, use data to elevate their curriculum. What we also found is that educators needed training. So we also began engaging in professional development and we generate revenue through that channel. And finally, we work in partnership with corporations who help fund and sponsor some of this work. And on top of that, the core and the scaling methodology is through technology, right? We sell our technology on a per student basis. So it's really an enterprise SaaS model, but we've done the deep work to say, are we adding value?”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew at that moment when I was doing the research, I had to understand how to build a sustainable business, how to build a team that's motivated, and how to sell, generate revenues. So I brought that idea and really used Columbia Business School to incubate local civics. I lived in a classroom in the South Bronx working with hundreds of students and hundreds of educators getting feedback just on the entrepreneurial, you know, creating a product, right? So if we set aside our mission, which is a huge need and challenge we're facing as a country, but how do we build products that really solve a problem? What job did we need to complete for students, our student users and our teachers, and then the schools that are paying us? And if we could listen closely enough, we could build a tool that would add value at each”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the reason I went to Columbia Business School and to back up a bit, local civics, after I retired from soccer, I actually brought, you know, I went to study youth civic engagement at Oxford. I thought I was going to go do a PhD. As I started leaning into that research, I realized that, wow, this is way bigger than the lens of sport that I had inspired me, that it had activated my civic engagement. And the question I couldn't get out of my head was, in what ways can we use technology to better connect young people to community? That was the first question I had asked and how can we use this technology to build civic leadership.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to be really powerful for a young person when they start to say, hey, here's an opportunity for us to create a change here. Where do I start? Who are the stakeholders? What are the laws? And how does power work here? What is my power? And so at root, what we're trying to help young people do is find those opportunities, those assets, those civic spaces down the street. So when they're actually older and they can vote or actually even at their young age, they can connect it to our national level”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You understand all the spaces that that vote literally counted towards? And if you're not going to wake up at 18 and understand that, you're not going to wake up at 25 or 35 and understand that. So for us, at the root, it has to start in our schools. It has to start with our young people. And if we can provide that channel, not just the civic knowledge, we can provide a channel for them to also apply that knowledge and discover those spaces.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Name all three branches of the federal government. So even at the most basic level, we're not informed about how our government works and the powers we have as citizens. And what we're doing at local civics is the on-ramp. If you haven't been invited into spaces of power and community, you're not going to wake up at 18 and suddenly start exploring those places of power and one of those rights we get granted at 18 is the right to vote. If you can think back to when you were that old.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only about 43% of my age cohort voted in the presidential election. So that's 18 to 29 year olds, 43% showed up for one of our largest, our presidential election. You can imagine what that number looks like down to our local elections, to our school boards, to our town councils, much lower. This year, we had a boost in youth turnout, right? And I think the numbers are coming out around 55%, but it's still too low. So one Our team is hyper-focused on how do we allow young people to see how important voting is. Two, civic knowledge, you're talking about what are our constitutional rights, what are the processes and laws that we've actually built as a country and community to ensure that we have equal representation and justice and civic knowledge is at an all-time low. It's around one in four adults can”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That guy, you've named some of the biggest challenges facing our democracy. There's increasing polarization in our communities. We're seeing it every day on our computer screens, on our TV screens. And as we started to look at how we tackle this problem, how is local civics positioned to actually work on this in partnership with others, we started to see even, you know, what we're seeing are the symptoms that, right? How can we tackle that root cause? And we looked at some of the data. So 2016, in particular for young people.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Coaching young people in all of these spaces. My time in Italy in particular was really challenging. It was very isolating. I could see the spaces of community I wanted to be a part of, but couldn't connect to them, right? And that immediately reminded me, one of growing up as this black girl in Wrentham, right, where very much outsider perspective or what would feel like that as a young person. And it also reminded me of coaching young people in Harlem that had this same sense of disconnection or disengagement with community that was right down the street. And so I think that's really that feeling there was the seed of local civics. If I'm living my dream and being able to play overseas and live abroad and have these experiences, how can I use my gifts and passions and resources and channel it into a purpose to actually try to build?”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An incredible youth sports org, and when I graduated from Columbia, I actually got this, I landed this awesome job on Wall Street. On my weekends, I would continue coaching. And there was a moment where I'm telling young people, follow your dreams, lean into your passions. All the while I'm not living my own. And there was a moment where I had to take a step back and say, if I'm not willing to take this type of risk for my own life, who am I to ask a young person to actually dream big, right? So that was sort of what felt like the biggest risk of my life of leaving that comfort and stability of that job. And I moved to Iceland. I played an Iceland and then I traveled to Italy, spent a year in Italy, and then to the UK. But as I think about, I'm moving through different democracies. I'm moving through different communities, playing with women from all around the world.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up in this really small town, this red town in Blue, Massachusetts, called Wrentham. My family, my parents immigrated to this country in their early twenties, and so I'm a first generation American. We're one of the only black families in this town. And through my youth, I played sports. So sport was the transformative lever for me. It allowed me to be a part of community, to see my own power in community. So eventually as a young girl, I play soccer, but then I would go back and I would coach and mentor my younger self. That opened up opportunities and doors for me that I don't think would have been possible had I not been engaged in sport throughout my whole life. Brought me to Columbia University where I was able to play at an elite level and continue to coach. I coached in Harlem. I coached for FC Harlem.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can think of it like that It may be the athlete in me that this is a tool that I needed, right? These are the tools that you don't wake up and start running the 100 meter dash or running a marathon. It takes training. It takes practice in routine building, right? So you can think about it like that as if you're 12 years old, where do you start beginning to engage when you're 17 or 25, right? We're beyond the population and age group we work with, what does that look like for you to start?”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The founders of Teens Take Charge. They offer sessions on our platform that any young person can plug into and begin to grow that initial discovery of what does it mean for me to be an active citizen?”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your homework assignment. They can then use our platform to choose which event they'd like to engage with. But the next step after that, after you get that first touch point of engagement, you have a student that might go to the library event. So bring it back into your classroom. And the next goal is to say, I'd like to present at my library. I'm going to volunteer at the library. And so from there, you can actually start deepening your engagement once you've had that initial exploration or discovery. We've also launched our own event series so students can engage with events that our instructional team deliver. And so those are now all remote opportunities. So we bring in professionals, elected officials to come engage with students, candidates running for office in their local community, youth activists who discuss about their community organizing.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so right now it looks very different from what it looked like a year ago for when schools were open. There were events happening in our communities. But today on the platform for the hundreds of users we have and hundreds of educators that are engaging, students can find events. So take New York City, for example. We have events that are either happening in the school community, student government meetings. student council meetings. We have events that are happening at the New York Public Library. We have events that are happening that are part of our civic infrastructure, community board meetings that we should be plugging into as citizens. Students can go onto our platform and they might get a goal from their principal, from their history teacher, from their English language arts teacher to say, you have to get to two events this month.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. So setting the goal to participate is one of the key parts here. You can't just say, I want to be involved in community and jump right in. And it's really overwhelming, right? There's all these different spaces. If no one's brought you to those spaces before, I don't know about you. I don't like showing up to places without either a friend or a classmate. So how do you introduce young people into these really powerful spaces of community without creating that accessible on-ramp for them? And so through that platform, we can actually allow students to set goals that they can meet and then deepen their engagement once they've had that initial touch point to attend with friends.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Local Civics Guy, we teach kids about power. We help them navigate and explore power, we help them learn about their own power to create impact in their community. And through our goal-based technology, we help create individualized experiences for students to understand policies in their local community, build their own civic leadership, and ultimately to define their own civic journey. How do we do this? We allow students to set accessible participation goals. And this is either in your classroom, with your friends, with your teachers. They can use our platform to find events that meet those goals. So think about this like an event bright from middle and high school students. And then they can track their progress, set harder goals, set more challenging goals, and explore different parts of their community.”
2021-02-18 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Beverly Leon of Local Civics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT