About This Blog

Lobbying in D.C. with fellow RESULTS volunteers (I'm on the right)
This is a blog to help teens and people of all ages learn more about the issues facing our world today, and how we can make change through political advocacy.

Why "Thrill-seeking for nerds"? Ken Patterson, Director of Global Grassroots Advocacy at RESULTS, uses this phrase to describe the work of RESULTS volunteers-- writing letters for newspapers, holding meetings to educate our community, and speaking to members of Congress. Advocacy is scary and empowering at the same time! Yet, it becomes less scary as I go, because of the support I've had from friends and mentors. I hope this blog can be a place for other teenage activists to find support and ideas.

 Some posts are issue-focused, while others are about advocacy skills. Sometimes, I'll just write about my experiences as a teen advocate.

 Enjoy!

- Yara, she/they (17 years old)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to lobby a member of Congress

Image
Lobbying is one of the most intense and effective advocacy actions! And it's no wonder- a face to face conversation with your member of Congress gives both parties the opportunity to be heard and understood, and speak in depth on their positions and room for compromise. There’s an idea many people have in their heads of a cartoonish, fancy-suited man with a briefcase sneaking around Capitol Hill and bribing politicians to represent his interest. I, too, think of that image with extreme distaste. Yes, there are paid lobbyists, but that’s not what I mean by a "lobby meeting" with volunteer constituents . “Lobbying” as a general concept gets its name from people who used to wait around in the lobby of the office building, hoping to snag a few minutes or even precious seconds of a lawmaker’s time to promote their cause. [A panorama taken while my family waited to meet with Senator Blunt. My mom appears three times in the shot, among the crowd waiting in the lobby.] These ...
Read more

Tuberculosis in the MCU

Image
Spoilers for  The Falcon and the Winter Soldier  episode 3! This probably won't make sense anyway if you haven't watched the show, so you've been warned... So, I've been back in the Marvel fandom for nearly 12 weeks, since the first episode of WandaVision. Meanwhile, I never stopped doing global health advocacy. While Monica and Sam become my favorite characters more and more every day, the tuberculosis epidemic is becoming more and more urgent. What can the two tuberculosis references in MCU canon teach us about the real-life epidemic? Image description: my attempts at doodling the COVID-19 virus and tuberculosis bacteria Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne, infectious disease caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the number one infectious disease killer in the world, taking 1.4 million lives in 2019 and sickening 10 million . And it took a long time for COVID-19 to surpass TB- not until November 2020! TB is still bigge...
Read more

Sunrise Launch Party

Image
Today, I hosted a launch party for the Sunrise Movement at my house. What’s a launch party , you say? To kick off a year of action for the Green New Deal and make sure that climate change is the number one election issue in America, it’s going to take a bigger movement of young people than ever before. That’s why across the nation, Sunrise held over 2500 “launch parties” within one week! Young people gather in living rooms, campuses, and libraries across the country to learn about the Green New Deal and pledge to participate in strikes this Earth Day. As active as I’ve been over the years, I’m still an introverted sixteen-year-old, and until today, I’d never hosted my own event by myself. Somehow, I took a leap of faith and ended up leading a meeting with nine other people, my first action as a part of Sunrise. Here’s the story of how that happened... Thursday, January 2: I get an email in my inbox from Sunrise, asking me to host a launch party. It’s about tim...
Read more