The Kids are Alright: Civics Ed Update

Two years ago today, we attended Civic Learning Week and produced an episode on the state of civics education in the US. We heard some good things and some frustrating things. Today we're getting an update on civics education with Emma Humphries from iCivics, hearing some student audio submissions from our friends at the Youth Media Challenge, and getting advice on how students can make change with Cheryl Cook-Kallio. Click here to livestream the National Forum for Civics Learning Week. Click here to listen to our episodes on civics education in the US. Click here to read the full State of Young People report published by America's Promise Alliance. And finally, click here to check out the work students are producing (and submit your own!) for KQED's Youth Media Challenge. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I don't know what I'm doing.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Need a break.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Forget it, I quit.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 0:05Hannah McCarthy?

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Shwing! Even our news is uplifting.

• 0:13Speaker 03

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Watch Tommy Boy, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more. We're not worthy! The best things on TV really are free.

• 0:24Hannah McCarthy?

  You just have to know where to look.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 0:30Speaker 04

  Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los bajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los optimistas y los pesimistas, los que valoran lo de adentro, para los que están lejos, los que no ven de lejos, y los que no ven de cerca, para los introvertidos y los extrovertidos, para los que piensan y los que hacen, para los que nos mostraron el camino. Coca-Cola, para todos. Compra una Coca-Cola en una tienda cerca de usted.

• 1:01Speaker 05

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• 1:31Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nikita Padije.

• 1:33Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 1:35Nick Capodice?

  I'm going to start today with a little bit of a throwback. Hannah, do you remember this?

• 1:38Speaker 07

  The good news is, we've actually reversed that dynamic now. We're up to 50 cents per kid on civic education. All right, so hey, we're moving in the right direction now.

• 1:49Speaker 07

  But look, look, now we can say we hit bottom, right? Because we've turned, we've turned it, we turned the corner. We've gone up from five cents to 50 cents. So that's better than a poke in the eye.

• 1:59Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, I do remember this. That's Danielle Allen from our episode on the state of civics education. Danielle is currently the Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard, by the way, also the Director of the Democratic Knowledge Project. But in this case, she was telling us a piece of good news. That funding for civics has increased tenfold.

• 2:20Nick Capodice?

  So we interviewed Danielle at Civics Learning Week two years ago. And I do mean two years ago. This is an anniversary of sorts because this is Civic Learning Week. Right now Hannah and I are going to the Hoover Institution at Stanford on Thursday. We're going to interview attendees. Any listeners out there can go themselves if they wish, or they can livestream it. I've got a link down there in the show notes. But I bring all this up because today is an update on the state of civics education in the United States. And without falling into hyperbole here, I want to say that civics ed is in trouble.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  What we know when it comes to civic learning is we don't have nearly enough of it.

• 3:05Nick Capodice?

  This is Emma Humphries. Emma is the Chief Education Officer at iCivics. They organize Civics Learning Week every year. And if you don't know iCivics, you should. They are an organization that we've worked with and collaborated with ever since our show began.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  There's a lot of support for it. Widespread, ideologically diverse support for more and better civic education. But we're still in a situation where students are not getting nearly enough, especially when you compare social studies or civics instruction to instruction in STEM or ELA.

• 3:37Nick Capodice?

  So Hannah, I'm using this anniversary of Civics Learning Week as an excuse to do two things today. First, to tell our audience why civics education is both extremely important and in a rough spot right now. And secondly, I'm going to share what students themselves see as the most important issues in the country.

• 3:57Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, Nick. So Emma said that there is, you know, support for civics education, that people want it. How do we know that?

• 4:06Nick Capodice?

  Right, so I've got anecdotal evidence and polling data on this. I'll get the anecdotal out of the way first. In our seven years of making this show, I have not met a single person, Republican, Democrat, diehard Libertarian, Independent, whatever, who heard about our show and said, "Civics 101, well, that seems a bit unnecessary. I think our kids study enough civics already." Never happened. And I will add, if that person was born in the 1970s or earlier, they then say, "You know, I remember being taught civics exhaustively when I went to school. What the heck happened?"

• 4:41Hannah McCarthy?

  My mother has said that to me.

• 4:43Nick Capodice?

  She has, Hannah, I heard her say it. And then more often than not, they bring up Schoolhouse Rock.

• 4:51Nick Capodice?

  Anecdotal evidence, nothing like it.

• 4:55Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, but let's have the data.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we've done the polling, or some of our partners have done the polling. So when it comes to the general public, it is more than bipartisan. Just striking overwhelming majority of Americans believe that civic education is one of the best things we can do to strengthen our constitutional democracy and enhance our national cohesion and to sort of push back against all the social divisiveness we're seeing. So recent reporting from the America's Promise Alliance, they recently released their State of Young People 2024 report, which showed that nine in 10 young people, so 91%, believe that everyone should have access to civic education. However, just four in 10, 43% of young people,

• 5:42Speaker 04

  feel even somewhat prepared. So we are failing them. They are asking for more and better and more engaging civic education, and they're not getting it. And as a result, they do not feel prepared to take up their important role as participants in our constitutional democracy.

• 5:58Nick Capodice?

  So Hannah, if I take a second and I try to remember what I learned in grade school. The first things that leap out are things like PEMDAS, you know?

• 6:08Hannah McCarthy?

  So yeah, the mathematical order of operations. That really saved me in math class.

• 6:11Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, or like the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, or FOIL.

• 6:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Keepin' algebra fresh.

• 6:18Nick Capodice?

  But if I'm thinking what school taught me, as in what resulted in me sitting in a chair right now in front of a microphone, being one of the happiest people I've met, it was in essence civics. And I don't necessarily mean social studies class, or knowing about the teapot dome scandal, or even how a bill becomes a law, which is super important. But in this instance, I mean being a good citizen, a good classmate.

• 6:47Hannah McCarthy?

  This is what we talked about in our live show, about civics writ large, that it's not necessarily just about learning how the government works. It's about how you speak to other people in your class, how you relate to your teacher, how you deal with conflict, or advocate for what you want in a larger community.

• 7:06Nick Capodice?

  Right, and learning to agree or disagree with someone, to use evidence to back up an argument. No, we do that in essays and other topics, but that is a really important piece of being a person, and that is civics.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  It's really interesting that, you know, for some time now, you've seen increasing calls for more and better civic education. It's getting a lot of attention. That hasn't fully translated into changes in state legislation. There have been some wins. We are going in the right direction. More states are providing more instructional time, more course requirements around civics. But still, all these years later, the vast majority of states only require one semester of civics or government, and they typically teach that in 12th grade. Another way to put it is, we spend 13 years from kindergarten through 12th grade, preparing students for careers, teaching them how to read, teaching them math and science, and

• 8:00Speaker 04

  then we spend one semester, their senior year, preparing them for the very thing that public schools were founded to prepare them for in the first place.

• 8:08Nick Capodice?

  I have to jump in here and say that we are gonna do a full episode on this some- But Emma's point is a valid and supported one. Madison, Jefferson, Washington, myriad others. They believe the point in education of school was to prepare students to be good citizens.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  If we saw literacy rates or math rates the way we see civic rates, parents would be up in arms. If you found out that your kid was only getting 10 minutes of math instruction a week, you would you would pull him out of the school. Yet that's exactly what's happening with civic education across this country, particularly at the elementary level. So that's what Civic Learning Week is about. It's about calling attention to this need for greater civic education and hopefully activating people to pay a little bit more attention and start demanding from their state legislatures that their students get these learning opportunities.

• 9:01Nick Capodice?

  And again, we are not talking about knowing the birth and death dates of presidents or what a discharge petition is.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  I'm not so concerned that students can't rattle off the names of all nine Supreme Court justices. It even takes me a second to do it. I have to kind of like picture them all in their official portrait and go through one by one in order to remember them all. It's not even that important to me that most people can't name the five freedoms of the First Amendment. I wish they could. But what matters is that if you were to give them those five freedoms, they would say, yeah, yeah, those are important. I value those. That's what matters. It's the disposition towards democratic governance, towards the common good. I think that's what matters most. And so we need to stop focusing so much on, you know, just rote memorization, although I am 100% here for promoting civic knowledge,

• 9:51Speaker 04

  and start thinking, how can we engage young people and all Americans to care? To care about American democracy and to care that they live in a democracy because they want to live in a democracy.

• 10:06Hannah McCarthy?

  You know what, Nick? This is for me bringing up that interview with Danielle Allen again. She told us that when people born before World War II were polled about whether it was essential to live in a democracy, 70% of them said, yes, it is. But when people in their 40s or younger were polled, Only 30% of them said it was essential.

• 10:28Nick Capodice?

  Right, that statistic has not left my back pocket in two years. And Emma continued on that vein. So to get back to the recent polling that America's Promise Alliance did, by the way, I've got a link to that full report in the show notes. Fair warning, there's going to be a lot of links to things in the show notes today. So if you're like in a civic mood, just, you know, get a big cup of coffee and open them all up.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  But here's the data point that stood out the most to me, which is that only 23% of young people trust the adults in their own community. Put another way, 77% of young people do not trust the adults in their own community. That shocked me. It's the declining trust in institutions and the declining trust ultimately in democracy, in this belief that a democratic government, whether it is a republic or a free and open 100% pure democracy, which I know we do not have. But that declining trust in democracy is real. It's getting worse. And to me, that's the biggest fallout.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Young people can't understand the value of living in a democratic country if they don't understand the alternative. So what they see is dysfunction and they see, okay, de-dysfunction, de-democracy. Maybe they're not putting the alliteration together, but if all you know about American democracy or democracy in general is what you see on 24-hour cable news or the very one-sided news sources that a lot of us tend to run to, then you might think that a different form of government could be better. You might think it would be better to have just one person calling all the shots. It would certainly feel more efficient than our slow-moving democracy.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  So I think if you were to ask this question of young people in the 80s and 90s, you would have had way higher percentages. So it's not that I'm shocked that there's declining trust. I was just shocked at how bad it is.

• 12:32Hannah McCarthy?

  So just to recap everything Emma has said. Students do not trust our institutions. They have lost trust and faith in democracy. And they do not feel prepared. But they want to.

• 12:49Nick Capodice?

  Exactly.

• 12:51Hannah McCarthy?

  Nick, it's a little bleak.

• 12:53Nick Capodice?

  It is Hannah, but I'm gonna bring you back from the void after the break, I promise.

• 12:58Hannah McCarthy?

  Did Emma have any words of optimism to share?

• 13:01Nick Capodice?

  Of course she did.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  What gives me hope is that young people care so much. Whenever anyone says, ah, kids these days, I'm like, they're amazing. Have you talked to any? Cause if you think they're all terrible, then you should go spend some time in schools and you should try talking to them. So they care a whole lot. They just care about different things and we thus far haven't cared enough to give them the knowledge, skills and dispositions they need to feel that they can effectively pursue change or advocacy, or just otherwise be engaged politically. That gives me hope. Another thing that gives me hope is our nation's civics teachers. These folks are patriots. They, they love America. They love our form of government.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  They love our history and our founding documents and they are so thirsty to share that with, with students. And we just need to band together to support them and to come together as Americans and say, we believe this is important. We know we are polarized. We know the parties are pushing us to the edges. Too bad.

• 14:09Nick Capodice?

  We are gonna hear exactly what some of the things kids these days care about and what they can do about it, right after a quick break.

• 14:16Hannah McCarthy?

  But before that break, if you're up for it, you can support our work and our only occasionally dampened optimism at our website, civics11podcast.org.

• 14:29Nick Capodice?

  There is nothing quite like having stuff in your closet that you love and you know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that feeling. And this holiday season, Quince is where I'm finding those pieces. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and it is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories that cut out the middleman. So you get luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. As this lovely fall is winding to a close and we slouch into winter. I wish more than anything, someone had gifted me a yak wool hoodie.

• 15:14Nick Capodice?

  I'm dead serious. It's good enough for the yak. I mean, it works really well for the yak, right? It would work for me. And it looks hot. So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK as well. And last thing, when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's the best way to support the show. All right.

• 15:49Nick Capodice?

  Haven't you out there ever Googled your own name? Like actually done it? You'll find your address, your phone number, maybe even that police report from the time you went to see Rain Man in the movie theater, but you were underage? Maybe that one's just me. But here's the thing. There are companies called data brokers whose entire business model is collecting your personal information and selling it to advertisers, to strangers, sometimes to people running scams. And once your data's out there, it just keeps circulating. That is where Incogni comes in. Incogni contacts data brokers on your behalf and sends them removal requests over and over. So your info doesn't just pop right back up. You set it up once and they keep working in the background.

• 16:34Nick Capodice?

  You can even track the progress on a dashboard. And for our listeners, we have an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Just go to incogni.com/civics or use the code civics at checkout. There's a link in the episode description. Remember, they can't harm you if they can't find you.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  I don't know what I'm doing. Need a break. Forget it, I quit. Escape to Pluto TV. This is objectively fantastic. Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Shwing! Even our news is uplifting. You stay classy, San Diego. Watch Tommy Boy, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more. We're not worthy! The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 17:26Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. You're listening to Civics 101. It is Civic Learning Week, and we are talking about the state of civics education in the United States. And Nick, you were gonna call this episode "The Kids Are Alright" at one point. Are you still gonna call it that?

• 17:41Nick Capodice?

  It's still in the air, Hannah. Only our listeners will know what we ended up calling it. I don't know if a reference to a song by The Who is spot on, but that is a sentiment I come back to year after year working here at Civics 101. We have done student contests. We've had kids propose legislation. We had a high school freshman create an Arrested Development-style radio mockumentary about the Constitutional Convention. So yeah, the kids are alright, gosh darn it. They care a lot. And that is something we, as a nation, want.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  First of all, the founders believed that the purpose of public education was to create participatory citizens.

• 18:22Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, Cheryl.

• 18:23Nick Capodice?

  Always a delight to have her on the show. This is Cheryl Cook Kallio. She is currently the president on the Alameda County Board of Education. She's a constitutional scholar and a former teacher and so many other things.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  And if you start right there, everything we do is to teach a young person how to be part of a community, whether that's their neighborhood, whether it's their city, whether it's their county. We want them to be connected to what happens to them. So in that sense, the reason this is important is it takes what they've learned in school and it forces them to apply it to the world around them, which is what they're going to be doing as adults. So where some parents would look at this and say, "Well, this is an add-on." No, no, this is the result of public education. It should be the result of all education, is that you become a participatory citizen.

• 19:13Hannah McCarthy?

  When Cheryl says participatory citizen, she doesn't just mean, like, running for office, right?

• 19:18Nick Capodice?

  Right. I mean, it could be, you know? I mean, I hope somebody listening to this episode will be the president in 30 years, but most of us won't be president or senator.

• 19:29Nick Capodice?

  But maybe, maybe we will be on something like the PTA, the Parent Teachers Association, or maybe you'll just be a parent who recognizes your kid is sprinting across the street in an unsafe place because there's no crosswalk.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  So what do you do then? Who do you go to? You don't go to your congressman. You go to your local elected, your city council. You're having issues with your school because the lights go off, or the pipes don't work, or the bathrooms are not clean. Where do you go? You go to your school district and you talk about it there. And so if you teach kids how to take care of problems at the very local level, then what you're teaching them is how to be adults in the real world and take care of their community.

• 20:12Nick Capodice?

  And to that point, to show everyone out there how students do want to take care of their community, I wanted to share the work done by Rachel Robertson and her whole team at KQED.

• 20:24Hannah McCarthy?

  KQED, by the way, is a member station, just like NHPR, our station is. This one's out of San Francisco, and they run a program called the Youth Media Challenge, which is a massive collection of audio, video, and images made by students.

• 20:40Nick Capodice?

  And any middle or high schooler in the country can submit one on a host of topics. There's a link in the show notes to their site. You can learn how to create your own project, or you can just look and listen to the other ones. And for today, I am sharing just a few short clips of a few of these submissions, just to let you get a feel of what's on students' minds. So first, this is Matthew from Edgemont Junior Senior High School in Scarsdale, New York. Did you know that in 2023, there have been more than 632 school shootings in the USA alone? That is almost two shootings a day. Crime rate has been on the rise, and with 10% of all violent crime being firearm-related, it seems obvious that we must do something about guns. Untrustworthy people-

• 21:24Nick Capodice?

  Have access to guns, which leads to violent crime and tragic loss of life. We should pass laws to ensure everyone who is in the possession of a firearm has taken the proper gun safety course to prevent accidental deaths, children obtaining access to guns, and enforced background checks that restrict gun access to unstable individuals. Matthew's piece was about gun violence in schools. And to that, Cheryl said, yes, the law is important. But it's not the only thing.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  The first thing, the knee jerk reaction is to go, we have, should have a law. But a law is a paper barrier if it's not enforced. You can have a law on the books, but the police don't show up and enforce it. It doesn't do anything. Does that make you feel safe to wave this piece of paper in front of somebody's face and say, you're not supposed to have the gun while they're pointing it at you? No, it doesn't. But that is the, the backup that, that, that you need to do things within your school to make sure that you're safe.

• 22:21Hannah McCarthy?

  So what should Matthew, or any other student who cares about this, do? If a law isn't protection enough, what is?

• 22:31Speaker 00

  So when you look at something, to your point about what do you do with a kid that has this on their mind constantly, and these kids, this generation of kids that had this on their mind since they were in kindergarten, they have practiced hiding in corners and getting into closets and putting, you know, screens over the windows and putting interior locks on their doors. Teachers have lived in fear about what in the world are they going to do? The, you try to start as small as possible depending on the age. And so if you're doing middle school kids, for example, you know, where do you feel the most safe? How, how do you, how do you take care of yourself? What would you do in this circumstance? And then perhaps the school ASB would come up with some kind of plan in order to address safety concerns, because the kids will see it in a way that adults don't.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Adults think, you know, one way, kids, kids are seeing it totally differently. And so having kids have voice in that is extremely important. If for no other reason that they feel like they're part of the solution. But the more important reason is that their voice is different because of their age and because of their experience. And so I think that that, when you look at that, the larger, you know, how do you help the kids feel like they have some efficacy? You break it down into parts.

• 23:46Hannah McCarthy?

  I really appreciate that because we sometimes look at students being active civic participants and say, you know, hey, this is great. They're going to really change the world for the better when they're in charge. But this is different. This is the idea that a student has a unique view and they can help find a solution right now.

• 24:05Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, they want to help fix the problem. And to echo that, here is Hai Fen from Lowell High School in San Francisco, whose submission gave advice to people on what they could do.

• 24:16Hannah McCarthy?

  It's important to understand the impact you can have on someone's life and what you can do to help them if they are struggling. You can advocate by supporting someone who needs help, volunteering for a mental health organization, and by correcting those who use stigmatizing language. Be an advocate today and start raising awareness for mental health. Please go check in on your loved ones from time to time just to see how they're doing. You never know what someone can be going through, so make it your job to care.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  You could do the same thing with mental health, right? The kids are worried about their own mental health. They're not really sure about what a crisis is and what a crisis isn't. What they know is that when they're in distress, they need to have a plan. And, you know, since the pandemic, that has become more of an issue with kids. So, for example, in their internal school, it could be just being part of a plan. If it is something one step beyond that, it's going to the school district, saying, we need more support in this area, that this is really a crisis, that, you know, that we need the mental health services. On a little bit broader level, for example, Alameda County,

• 25:28Speaker 00

  where I'm on the school board, we have a county-wide plan that allows us to build Medi-Cal, which is our version of Medicaid, for mental health services for students in school. So we've been able to provide help for the districts. Kids don't know that. And so part of going through the process of checking on what the mental health Services are would be them saying, oh, wait, we have these services. So how do we access them? Right? Because part of the problem may already be solved and they may just not know how to access it.

• 26:02Nick Capodice?

  And the last one, Raphael and Elijah from South Pasadena High School in California. Between all the horrors, though, I saw people who needed help, help getting back on their feet, help finding a job and functioning in society, help defeating their demons. I realized these aren't nameless people. They're human beings, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers. I became convinced we could not, no matter what, abandon these people. The United States needs to adopt a harm reduction policy to address the opioid epidemic effectively. Evidence from Switzerland demonstrates the potential success of such an approach. After implementing harm reduction strategies like supervised injection sites and medication

• 26:45Nick Capodice?

  assisted treatment, overdose deaths dropped by 50% and new heroin users declined by 80%, according to the Stanford Social Innovation Review. In the United States, the need for similar measures is urgent. I didn't have time to include the entire piece here, but In and Hannah, they talked about actually working in a safe house in Alaska, caring for people suffering from opiate addiction.

• 27:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, I've listened to the whole thing. It's actually incredibly striking, listening to a personal story. But it's also a statement, right? It's saying this is a problem and also here are some potential solutions that have been tried in other countries.

• 27:21Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it's a solid, powerful piece. And maybe Raphael and Elijah aren't old enough to vote, but they definitely could ask an elected representative to visit their class.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  There is not a politician alive who doesn't want that picture with the classroom full of kids with a smile on their face, right?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  They're all like that. And not only because that's a great photo op for whatever they're doing. I mean, they're not really supposed to use that for political purposes and that sort of thing. But it also is a well way for them to build community in an area that they can't touch otherwise. And I've said this to adults. I've said the same speech to adults. They go to the website, they do info@whatever dot whatever for a congress member, they type up their little letter and hit the button and it goes directly into a hole somewhere. That is not the way that you reach an elected official.

• 28:13Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, you know, I feel like we haven't really been over this on the show in detail. How do you reach an elected official?

• 28:20Nick Capodice?

  Excellent question, Hannah. Cheryl's advice is you call them. You don't email them first. You call them. You are polite when you call them. You say, quote, "The purpose of my call is to ask you about," in this case, "the opioid epidemic. Who on your staff deals with these issues? And would you transfer me to their office?"

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Sometimes they pick up the phone, hallelujah. Most times they don't. And you leave a very detailed message. You know, here is my email address and just for convenience, I'm going to send you a follow-up email. Okay, there's two touches there, right? You're still not going to get an answer most of the time. Right? So what do you do? You wait five days, you make another phone call, ask to be put to their voicemail, and then send another email. I know you're really busy. I know you get 200 emails a day, but I'm really anxious to talk to somebody in your office that can answer my questions. You know, and I'm putting this here so it's at the top of your email. By the time you've touched them four or five times, somebody's going to get back to you. You know, and so when people call and say, well, they never answered me, chances are you didn't hit the right person.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  And these people get hundreds of calls a day. So you need to be persistent. In a way that you're not used to being persistent.

• 29:37Nick Capodice?

  And it may sound time consuming. It may sound difficult. I know some people who never call anybody on the phone, ever, let alone five times.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  It'd be great if we all could reach our federally elected officials and have a mass amount of things done at one time. But you're also dealing with your congressman in your area, who also has to deal with the congressman in another area who may believe totally differently than you do, like on the opposite end of the spectrum. And you're trying to figure out where the sweet spot is. So, you know, compromise is hard. I mean, people get upset. They didn't do everything I wanted them to do. Well, that's what politics is, is they are to compromise, right? So I think that to get kids excited and to recognize that small victories are important. So you may have wanted to solve the unhoused situation

• 30:31Speaker 00

  in your city, but instead you provided an opportunity for people to have a place to take a shower, get a hot meal, you know, maybe have some warm socks, or at least have access to those things. That's a big deal for those individuals. And, you know, and it also affects individuals of whom you're unaware. So it's not a small thing to do that for a group of people.

• 30:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Start locally. Focus on your own community. Make a plan. Be persistent.

• 31:03Nick Capodice?

  I think that is the magic quartet, Hannah. And if enough students do it, it might be all of us, not just the kids, who are all right.

• 31:16Nick Capodice?

  That's it for today's show. Huge shout out to Rachel and the rest of the folks at KQED for their work on the Youth Media Challenge. You really should go check their stuff out. Youthmedia.kqed.org. And also, big thanks to iCivics, who we will see at the National Forum at the Hoover Institution in about 24 hours. Cheryl's gonna be there. Emma's gonna be there. I think 25% of the guests we've had on the show are gonna be there. This episode was made by Hannah McCarthy and me, Nick Capodice. Our executive producer is Rebecca Lavoie and our senior producer is Christina Phillips. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound, Haliz Niko, and my own personally elected member of my musical congress, Chris Zabriski, who actually emailed me back after one

• 32:01Nick Capodice?

  time. I emailed him one time and he wrote me right back. What a guy. Chris, you have my vote. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 32:16Nick Capodice?

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:46Speaker 01

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• 33:16Speaker 03

  Para los grandes, para los chicos, para los bajos y los altos, los pacifistas, los valientes, para los optimistas y los pesimistas, los que valoran lo de adentro, para los que están lejos, los que no ven de lejos, y los que no ven de cerca, para los introvertidos y los extrovertidos, para los que piensan y los que hacen, para los que nos mostraron el camino. Coca-Cola, para todos. Compra una Coca-Cola en una tienda cerca de usted.