Andrew Goodman Foundation: Making young voices and votes a powerful force for democracy

The LEADing Justice podcast is honored to welcome Charles Imohiosen, the President and Chief Executive Officer of The Andrew Goodman Foundation, established to carry on the work of Andrew Goodman. Andy was a college student when he was murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, along with two other young men, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner.  

Their tragic deaths in 1964 contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Andrew Goodman Foundation works to make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy with their Vote Everywhere campaign and training youth activists and leaders. The Andrew Goodman Vote Everywhere program now operates in 26 states and Washington, D.C. and includes a network of nearly 100 campuses that enroll 1M+ students. 

Dr. Janet Dewart Bell • Executive Producer / Host | Chris Neuner • Producer / Editor | Theme Music • First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn

Transcript

The Leading Justice podcast is honored to welcome Charles Imohiosen, the President and chief executive officer of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, established to carry on the work of Andrew Goodman. Andy was a college student when he was murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, along with two other young men. Their tragic deaths in 1964 contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.   The Andrew Goodman Foundation works to make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy with their vote everywhere, campaign and training youth activists and leaders. Charles has a deep and abiding commitment to civic participation, social impact and innovation. He has a multidisciplinary strategy, an operations background that bridges private and public sectors, including serving as chief executive officer for New York's leading economic development agency and serving in policymaking roles for the White House and the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the private sector.

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Charles earned a B.A. with honors and philosophy in physics from Williams College and a law degree from Harvard Law School. He lives in New York City with his wife, two daughters and an adorable dog.   Charles, welcome to the Leading Justice podcast.   Thank you so much for having me, Janet.

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I'd like for you to start and tell us how you came to this important work. What compels you? What is your vision? And of course, please share with us the story of Andy. James and Andrew.   Well, my connection to social justice work and to the foundation in particular is very personal. At the height of the civil rights movement, as you mentioned, my cousin Andy, who was then a 20 year old student from Queens College, joined the Freedom Summer Project in 1964 to register black Americans to vote, among other things, on his first day in Mississippi. He was murdered by the Klu Klux Klan, along with two other civil rights workers, James Earl Chaney and Michael Schwerner.   Their murders

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, struck a public chord throughout the U.S. and contributed to the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I never met Andy. I was born many years after his murder, but I knew his aunt. I met

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my aunt, Carolyn Goodman, and I grew up going to her apartment and learning about who he was and what he stood for through her. I found when I was young. His story really inspired me and made a difference in terms of my decision to go into public service as well as my father's story.   My father grew up in Nigeria and he moved to this country for college, and when he was in Nigeria, he was very involved in the Nigerian civil war and inspired in me a commitment to continuing to do that kind of work myself as I got older. Although I was interested in civic life for as long as I could remember, I will say my journey into public affairs really accelerated when I was around 16 years old. I worked for as a volunteer. Jerry Ferraro has campaigned for U.S.   Senate. She was she was campaigning to become the first female United States senator at the time, 1992 in New York. It was also that year that I attended my first national political convention, which also took place in New York City. During that year, the Democrats nominated as its as their preferred candidate for president, a young governor named William Jefferson Clinton.   Yes, we remember that.   Yeah. For those of you who are listening, who are too young to remember, candidate Bill Clinton was a saxophone player and he was at the time extremely popular among young political enthusiasts like myself. That experience at the convention was really life changing for me and propelled me to want to get into public service. Since then,

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I've worked extensively on national, state, local political campaigns.

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I've served in community organizing programs and activities and been on boards of nonprofits in addition to the work I've done on voting rights. Really? I had an opportunity starting in 2007. David Goodman, the brother of Andy and the son of Carolyn Goodman, ended up taking over the organization. And his mother, Carolyn, had launched it in 1966, two years after her son's murder. And David really impressed upon me the importance not just to our family, but the importance to the country of continuing this legacy story.   And I was happy to be able to join. I joined the board of directors, and we started thinking through how we could continue to honor the memory of his brother, the work of his mother, who herself was an activist. And she found a tremendous inspiration in young people and oriented a lot of her work around young people, a lot of the foundation's programming to support young activists. When I joined the board about 16 years ago, I encountered an organization that was really more at that time of up of a private family foundation, hence the Andrew Goodman Foundation.   It looked very different than it does today.

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we really didn't have a core program. We were focused more on celebrating history. And what we really wanted to be able to do is to take the work of celebrating our history and connect it to today's youth. And so what David Goodman did, along with his wife, Sylvia, was to build a program called Vote Everywhere.   That is a fantastic program. Can you tell us a little bit about that and why that program exists and what the impact of the program is?   Surely so the vote Everywhere program number one is our is our signature program that is focused on reaching college students around the country. Today,

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we reach around 1 million students across about 100 colleges and universities in 26 states, plus the District of Columbia, all of whom are focused on organizing and advocating for their right to vote and for equal access at the ballot box. The way the program works is that we partner directly with these colleges and universities.   We tend to work with 2 to 3 students on a campus, and then we have a faculty advisor that we work with. We work with these students for three years, and then they actually replace themselves with other students that they bring into the program. Through this, we can establish continuity in our work across these campuses. What we found students in particular, young people ages 18 to 29, are among the lower propensity voters in in this country and have been for some time in 2014.   I believe the numbers were around 13% for the midterms of 18 to 29 year olds. Turned out those numbers increased significantly through the work of my organization and other similar organizations. By 2016 were up to 39%. By 2018 were up to 28%. That was a midterm. So it's actually an increase from 13 to 28%. And then in 2020, where we saw a lot of interest in the elections, we were up to 50%. So what you've really seen from organizations like the Andrew Goodman Foundation with the Vote Everywhere program is that by working directly with these schools and partnering with them long term and working with these students, over time, we're able to build a culture and an ethos of engagement and participation in our political process.   And we drill down a little bit.

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what exactly are the programs that you do

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with these students? 

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So our programs are focused on a number of different activities, principally where, you know, essentially when a program first works with us, a school first works with us, they may be, you know, fairly unsophisticated on how to how to get young people to really. Indeed. So what they'll start off with is essentially voting registration work and then get out the vote work. 

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They'll bring in, 

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outside speakers that are really energizing from celebrities to politicians to academics to to really get folks interested and knowledgeable about these activities. And they'll do very basic things

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or set up a table outside of a campus and just wait for their friends to come by and grab them. You know, very traditional kinds of activities for campaigns. But through this work, they're able to really build relationships with their peers and convince their peers the importance of voting and the importance of participation.   Some of our more sophisticated schools will actually go beyond that. And they'll do things like something we've done with one of our colleges at Bard Art College, where we've worked over years to establish an on campus polling site for Bard because we found that turnout increases really significantly when students have the opportunity to vote near to where they go to school, actually upwards of 8% in some cases. So we'll look for more robust campaigns like that. In fact, we just launched a national campaign with a number of other national partners to to increase the number of on campus polling sites we have around the country.   Tell us a little bit more about that.

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Yes. So this campaign, it's called the Student Vote Choice Campaign. 

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and we launched it with a number of coalition partners, including the Anti-Defamation League, Deliver My Vote, Hillel International, the Tufts Institute for Democracy and Higher Education and the National Vote at Home Institute. And so the concept of student voter choice is that it's a campaign to promote both accessibility to in-person voting, but also vote by mail, which a lot of our students have a preference for, and really showed that in 2020.   The idea here is to give the student the opportunity to choose how they want to participate. Do they want to continue to use their registration at home and vote at home while they're on campus, or do they want to be able to vote on campus and be able to exercise their franchise in that way?   How significant is that difference between voting from their home state or voting from where they go to school? Is there a significance in that?

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it's complicated. And also a very interesting question because a lot of a lot of the discourse today about voting, particularly around young people, tends to focus on partisanship. And what we've actually found is that a lot of the issues around voting are actually more complex than that. Mm hmm. Number one, why is there a low turnout? It's because young people actually haven't voted before. Literally haven't. You know, it's like you wake up every day and you brush your teeth and you get used to brushing your teeth and you just do it automatically, reflexively.   If you think about it, you know, a very significant percentage of the young people, they're 18 is the first time they voted. If they haven't had a parent, teach them how to do that, take them to the polling place. I actually remember when I was a local party leader here in New York, I worked with my Congressman Jerry Nadler, and we launched a Take Your Child to Vote day. It was actually a press conference we did right here at the subway station at 72nd Street. But the idea was to incentivize young people to really understand what does it mean to vote by having that experience with your parent where you walk in And it's just one of those things you'll always remember.   You walk in there with your parent, they show you how to how to vote, and you know, you carry that with you as you get older. Not all of our young as we know, a lot of our young people are facing their own challenges when they may not have parents who were able to do that, working parents, they may have parents who are, you know, experiencing other challenges and just may not be able to provide that kind of support and lifelong training to those young people. So we provide that. And the idea is to do that for as many students as we can using their student experience to to sort of replicate that experience, they would have great.   Well, I have some experience with the Andrew Goodman Foundation, and what I find is that it's very inspiring. And what it does is it says to students it it helps them develop their vision about voting and about the future. Tell me what that is to you. What do you say to students? Why should they vote?   I think it's a really important question. You know what we've seen, I think not just in the United States, but around around the world, really is a very difficult time for democracies. We're seeing a lot of folks questioning the commitment in some respects to each other. And what I find to be most important for the purposes of our work about Andy Story is the fact that in that. You have a 20 year old white Jewish young American college student from the Northeast moving into a totally different region to work with folks from a different typically a different socioeconomic, you know, position, different geography, often different religion, different age.   And being able to form common cause with somebody who's so different from their own experience to be able to achieve an outcome that's so important. I think it's critical that we think about stories like that as a way of talking about what's possible today. So rather than having conversations about the things that make us different, we ought to be looking for the things that make us. Aligned with each other. And I think through that kind of proactive storytelling outreach to our peers, a communications around difference, diversity, inclusion, we are able to tell a story that motivates people, that there's hope, because really at the end of the day, what I actually think this is about is hope.   It's about hope for the future. It's about hope for young people feeling that the political process speaks for them and can enable them to have the kind of lives that they would want for themselves and for their kids and for their kids kids. And so we really spend a lot of time talking about what is the future and what is your role and commitment in helping to realize the kind of future that you want? And what is the role of the political process in voting and helping you to get there?   I'm glad you mentioned the word commitment because they can make a difference and they make the change and we need to follow their lead. It's so exciting to attend the various gatherings of the Andrew Goodman Foundation with your investors and the young students because they are just so hopeful, but they're also realistic in the sense that they know that it takes work they have. It's not something that will come easily. And I was looking over a statement that Andrew Goodman wrote in his school paper, and it said in May of 1964, when the historic Civil Rights Act was under attack by segregationists in Congress in that paper, and he wrote, the senators could not persist in this polite debate over the future dignity of a human race if the white northerners were not so shockingly apathetic.   And within days of writing those words and he asked his parents permission to join Freedom Summer, which was the voter registration project in Mississippi. And we pick up with the story with the tragic end of anti-government, his corporeal end, but his legacy lives on. Is there anything else you'd like to share with us today about the work of the Goodman Foundation and what it is you plan to do in the future? Where are we?   We're on a hundred campuses, but there are a large number of students out there who really can benefit from what we're doing. And so our plan is to actually expand pretty significantly over the next couple of years heading into 2024. And I think one of the things we found that students can get most out of working with the foundation, it's not just about turning out the vote. Again, you know, a lot of people focus on Freedom Summer, the voter registration component of it, but there is actually more to Freedom Summer than that.   There were Freedom schools, there are Freedom Houses. And a lot of that work was geared towards educating people about the civil rights movement. It was geared towards generating intergenerational and intercultural exchange. And we see ourselves as a modern day version of that. We want to give students a broader experience. We think that the student experience on higher education and on campuses is critical for being able to build the kind of democracy that we want moving forward.   And we think by engaging in projects like voting, that we can get peers to work with each other, these students to work with each other and to learn from each other and to really grow beyond simply the act of voting but actually maturing into the citizens. We need to create the democracy that we need. So our purposes is broader. Voting is is critical, but it's a first step in becoming an active citizen in the country and a necessary step. And it's it's an experience that, for me was a personally life changing experience when I first got engaged in this kind of work.   And I think the same can be true for these students. And and by working with our program and more importantly, by working with their peers, we think that they can they can really become the citizens that we want and need for the future of the country.   There are a number of contemporary works being done now on the Mississippi freedom struggle, the movement in Mississippi. One movie recently that's just out is still on the murder of Emmett Till, which of course occurred in 1955, a number of years before. In that movie, we have portrayal of the great late Medgar Evers and and Myrlie Evers and talk.   And then for some of us, we remember the assassination of Medgar Evers occurred in 1963. So Mississippi was still hurting from that. And then 1964, you have the murder of these three young people. And I should also say, as a side note, Mrs. Evers, Myrlie Evers stayed in that house where her husband had been assassinated in the driveway through the summer of 1964. At that and before the bodies of the three young men were found.   It's very interesting that Andrew Goodman joined the was the third person in that group. It was his first stay in Mississippi. So tell us a little bit how he became the third person in the group and we know what the what the end result was.   Yeah, I think it's it's really important what you say. This idea of using media and art and film and other other mediums to connect these stories of the past to today, I think it's an incredible way of connecting with young people. It's an incredible way of taking the oral tradition and moving it into contemporary society in a way that people can really feel that connection between the past and the present. Interestingly enough, we had a fellow by the name of David Dennis Jr, this son of David Dennis Senior, who was one of the folks who helped put together Freedom Summer.   He was also a freedom writer and we had David David, Dennis Jr on one of our webinars and actually for our training we do a national training for all of our students and he was our keynote speaker During his presentation. I learned for the first time that his father, David Dennis Senior, was actually intended to be a third passenger in the car with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, because Andy was new and and recent to the activities.

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David was supposed to be in that car.

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for for a number of reasons wasn't wasn't able to do it

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this was the first I learned about this story really a few months ago. And he talks a lot about this in a book he's written called The Movement Made US. It's about conversations between David and his father about the legacy of of freedom rides, about the legacy of civil rights movement.   And, you know, I would commend that is really an excellent read as a way of making that connection and bridging the gap between the past and the present as it relates to a lot of the issues like Black Lives Matter that are around today. So very interesting to see how how the past continues to have a real reflection for the present in terms of the type of work that we still need to do.

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Yes, indeed. And I would also mention, since we're talking about books, a Carolyn Goodwin's book, My Mantelpiece, her very intimate and moving story about her son and her family. What a wonderful time to talk about these things,

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which are not pleasant, but which help inform us in terms of the commitment, the inspiration, the courage of people who have made a difference in their lives and through their legacies.   Why should students vote? What is important about the activity of voting itself?   I think there are a number of reasons. One reason that's most critical is because it gives students an opportunity to feel heard in the system, gives them an opportunity to really express themselves and to show up in a way that enables their voices to be part of a system of policymaking decision, decision making that will impact not just today, but their lives in the future. So it's really critical that they do that for their own sense of experience and their own sense of feeling, belonging and inclusion in the system.   I think another reason that's important is because collectively. Their voices are critical to policymaking in our country. A lot of the issues that we face are long term issues that go beyond the current folks who are the majority voters in the country. These are issues that will impact future generations and indeed, the young people who are voting. Whether it's climate change, whether it has to do with health care, has to do with student debt. These are long term issues.   And when young people's voices are disproportionately not at the table for those discussions, politicians are going to make decisions that may be shorter term in nature and to the detriment of the country's long term success and to the detriment of the individual and that individual's successors experiences in the country. So there's at least two great reasons for people to vote. One is a very personal feeling of belonging and inclusion, and another one is it really does make a difference for the future of the country in very, very material ways.   The future of the country and the world.

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We thank you so much for sharing with us today the work of the Andrew Goodman Foundation. Thank you, Charles. And we'll hear soon. President and Chief Executive Officer.   Thank you so much, Janet. Enjoyed being here today. Appreciate the time, our honor.