Cheddar Politics welcomes Cheddar Changemaker Zev Shapiro on the show. 
Shapiro is the CEO and founder of TurnUp, a non-profit that works to connect young people with activism and the ballot box. 
TurnUp uses an app to connect users with activist organizations based on their interests and passions. 

Cheddar Politics

New App Connects Young People to the Ballot Box

Welcome back to Total Politics. It's now time for cheddar changemakers where we spotlight young activists making a difference in the world and speaking up on issues regarding mental health voting and climate change. So joining us today is Eve Shapiro, founder of turn up, a nonprofit that works to connect young voters and future voters with both activism and campaigns to get out the vote. Thank you for joining us. I'm really excited to have you. But before we get into turn up, we gotta talk about you. According to your bio. You started your activism when you were in fourth grade. I have a second grader. He does not seem to years away from becoming politically active. So let's talk about how you got involved. So very young. Well, absolutely, thank you very much for having me. It's wonderful to be here. When I was in fourth grade, I noticed that most people, most of my friends in my elementary school were dissatisfied with the school lunch and as you can imagine, it was just table talk at the cafeteria. But I thought of an idea because of their dissatisfaction in my own to create a salad bar so that everybody would have equal access to healthy food. Most of the people in my school were on free or reduced lunch so they didn't have the opportunity to actually bring lunch from home like myself. So I figured we should enable everybody who wants to have a healthy option. So we created a petition. We brought it to the school committee and now there's actually a salad bar every public school in Cambridge, which is where I was born and live now. So, um, that's how I got involved. It was really just an idea because of an issue that I saw in the community, but anybody can do that. If you see something that's in your community where you feel like you could make an impact, I would encourage you to do that because young people have a tremendous power due to their life experience and our enthusiasm to make an impact. It's democracy in action from elementary school. Look, I think that the big issue for gen Z, which you're part of and millennials, especially younger millennials, is they feel like they have no power, right? They have no say no one's listening to them. In fact polling with gen Z in particular says that they really don't feel like companies or government officials or government bodies or politicians are listening to them. So how do you convince them? Like, hey, they may not be listening, but if you stand up and speak out, they have to listen. Well, absolutely. And one of the things that we're really focused on is making an impact at the ballot box registering to vote. And one of the things that we've learned the recent Harvard youth poll shows over 80% of young people want to vote, they intend to vote. And in 2020 we saw 11 point increase over 2016 and youth voter turnout. So our goal at turn up and my goal is to ensure that those 30% of people and hopefully everybody has the opportunity to vote, not that they just want to, but they actually take that one and put it into action. So what we're trying to do is to try to make it easy for everybody who wants to to actually take action upon that opportunity that they want to have to vote because they're already interested. So a lot of people might not think that they have the power, but polls are showing that that young people do feel that they can vote, that they want to vote and that that's a good way to exercise that power that they have. Aside from voting, young people have a tremendous life experience. They look at the world differently, they've had totally different experiences and so especially marginalized communities, we think that those are the people that should be taking action that people should be listening to and our goal is to lift them up. So one way is through the ballot box, there are a lot of other ways, but I think that's where we're focusing right now, because turn up isn't just get out the vote, right? It's also about finding activism that fits you. So, talk to me a little bit about turn up Yeah, talk to me a little bit about it. How did you decide this was the way to get people involved? So, we started out in mid 2019 and I had an idea which was for an app. So basically I saw lots of my friends wanted to get involved, especially after the tragedy in Parkland, but they didn't actually know how. So our goal was to create an app that would bridge that gap between wanting to get involved And finding out. So we now have an app that shows people all the events in their local community in which they could participate on issues that interest them. So if you go to turn up, you can see all the events that interest you based on a particular issue. And then we expanded, we started a training program in mid-2020. We had lots of young people who wanted an internship opportunity were actually the number one internship in 2020, if you search the word internship on Google at that point. So we had a lot of enthusiasm. We started a lot of other programs but there are two things that we look at. We look at voter turnout, we look at getting people involved in activism, We look at education. So we're trying to educate as many young people as possible throughout programs. So we now actually run six programs. We run our training program where we teach young people and then get them involved in issues that they care about. We run our app where they can do that on their own through our mobile app. They can find events that they care about. We also run a investment group where we're looking at new nonprofit ideas that young people have created, that we can invest in, that have the power to increase youth voter turnout activism registration. We run civics programs. Um, and we run a number of others focused on voting in particular. So we've really expanded. But those are kind of our three main priorities. Getting young people active, getting them out to vote and then educating them about the issues. It is a lot that you're doing. I have about 30 seconds left. So, um, I need to, to hear from you. How do you change the political system so that it's better at listening, not just changing the voters so that they vote, but changing the system so that it pays attention to you. Well, absolutely. What what we feel is that the young people are now over 25% of the electorate. It's growing. The more young people that participate, the more the system will respond to that important age group that were part of. So we feel that the more activities young people are part of, just look at what happened recently, where Congress should have done a lot more, but they did something on guns because of the activism of young people. So we see opportunities in which young people can make a difference. I'd also say that starting at the local level is very important. That's where I started in fourth grade and we run a lot of training curriculum around how to actually get young people invested in their local community. You can make a huge impact in your local community as a young person. So I would encourage that as one way that you can actually make a much more immediate difference. Oh, thank you so much of that was a great way to end it. Xev Shapiro is the founder of turn up a nonprofit, connecting with youth with political and social activism.