State Sen. Kesha Ram, D-Chittenden, was once a 19-year-old student speaker at a 2006 Bernie Sanders rally when a follow-up presenter — a U.S. senator from the Midwest, she remembers — shouted out a few encouraging words.
“He said, ‘You know what, Bernie, if you don’t behave yourself, we’re going to run Kesha instead!’” she recalled recently. “After the event, he said, ‘I meant it, you should run for office.’”
Two years later, Ram won election as a state legislator. Her vocal rally supporter was victorious, too.
“He became the president of the United States,” she said. “That was Barack Obama.”
The moral of the story: Young people can find themselves in public service in often surprising ways, Ram and several peers revealed at the Governor’s Institute on Global Issues and Youth Action.
The annual program, which usually pulls Vermont teenagers to a college campus, plugged into a video-conferencing platform this summer because of the Covid-19 pandemic. There, 40 high schoolers from throughout the state heard how several of today’s up-and-coming leaders got their starts.
Ram, 34, noted only 5% of all Americans in elected office are under age 35 and only a quarter of that number are women. She, for her part, is the first woman of color in the Vermont Senate.
“I grew up in Santa Monica, California, where my Indian immigrant father met my Jewish American mother and then opened an Irish pub together,” the Burlington-based state senator said. “And now I’m marrying a guy who’s of French-Canadian descent who grew up on a dairy farm in Charlotte.”
Ram was a University of Vermont sophomore when Obama propelled her into politics.
“So often you might think, ‘I don’t know how to get started, I don’t have the right connections,’” she told students. “I had no titles back then, I was just really passionate about solving problems and making sure people who are often left behind were at the table. And that led to big things for me.”
In contrast, fellow institute speaker Steffen Gillom listened to his own voice when he decided to establish a Windham County branch of the NAACP.
“You can never wait to be invited,” the 31-year-old recalled of moving to Vermont to discover a lack of advocacy groups for people of color like himself.
Gillom is a branch president of the nation’s largest civil rights organization, as well as a graduate of its NextGen leadership training program. But his path wasn’t always clear.
“I’m a Black person, I’m a queer person, I’m a young person,” he said. “In a lot of the spaces where decision-makers are, one of those three things is going to disqualify me. Too young? ‘Doesn’t know anything.’ Too gay, too Black? ‘We don’t want to hear that perspective.’”
Taylor Small understands the obstacles. The 27-year-old state representative from Winooski rewound back to when she was simply directing the LGBTQ+ health and wellness program at the Pride Center of Vermont.
“I was not planning to run for office,” Small said. “It was not because I didn’t want to get involved in politics or didn’t believe in democracy, because I absolutely do. It was because the pathways for young working-class out queer and trans people is not the path that has been paved before us.”
Then she received a call from her predecessor, former state legislator Diana Gonzalez.
“Getting that from a fellow queer legislator and out woman of color was exactly the push I needed — it was that extra piece of encouragement that allowed me to move into this role,” said Small, now the state’s first openly transgender lawmaker. “Democracy has not always worked in the favor of marginalized folks, so by having powerful and unapologetic representation, I feel like I bring a new lens to this.”
The Global Issues and Youth Action program is one of eight offerings — ranging from the arts to engineering, entrepreneurship and environmental science — that the nonprofit Governor’s Institutes of Vermont is presenting online this summer.
The program introduced students not only to new leaders but also to established ones, including U.S. Rep. Peter Welch and Vermont Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint.
“The future is here,” Welch told students. “It’s about reinvesting in our communities, addressing the climate and income inequality, and having respect for everyone regardless of the color of your skin, sexual orientation or ethnicity.”
Greater diversity leads to greater democracy, all the speakers said. But they acknowledged that many of the public don’t feel comfortable participating — even those in the majority.
“Some people have the opposite issue,” Gillom said. “They say, ‘I carry so much privilege, why would I ever assert my opinion on this?’”
Gillom advocated for everyone to get involved.
“Doesn’t matter who you are, what you look like, where you come from, your color,” he told students. “Don’t be afraid to invite yourself to the table when you feel the time is right.”
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