My office, Powered by Youth and Powered by People is a Political Action Committee that is focused on State Level and National Level policies and voter registration. The goal of the organization is to register all the unregistered voters in Texas between now and 2022 and hopefully ensure the passage of voter expansion bills and protect voters against voter suppression bills. The office structure of reporting is Beto O’Rourke and Cynthia Cano running Powered by People and Powered by Youth as a whole and then the paid staff on the Powered by People Team including the social media director Jaqueline Westman. Then within Powered by Youth the power falls to Alexandria King and I, the co-directors of the twenty people executive team.

This past semester, my co-director and I have assigned ambassadors to register voters on five college campuses across the state of Texas and have designed and implemented a phone bank on the Freedom to Vote Act with over twenty college campuses nationwide. Our goal for the ambassador program was to begin college outreach especially on campuses historically left out of the voting process. This included Texas A&M University, University of Houston, Stephen F Austin University, Texas Southern University, and the University of Texas.

On those college campuses, we have facilitated ambassadors in three voter registration drives and have two more planned for the upcoming month. In terms of the phone bank, our goal was to have youth across the country calling to pass the Freedom to Vote Act in the Senate, while we were hopeful our efforts would help the bill’s passage, it did inevitably fail due to the filibuster.

My daily duties are ambassador outreach which includes keeping them engaged with our program and other organizational outreach to promote growth and connections within the state of Texas. This directly supports the original goal of not only Powered by Youth but myself as well. I have been using my growing skills to spread awareness about the program and support internal and external growth about the program. Overall, I feel as though I have come a long way in the past few months, and I am excited to learn more as a potential transition may arise if Beto decides to run for Governor of Texas.