Questions and Answers
Fair Elections Committee Rules dictate that candidates may only have a pre-Winter Congress team of three people, and three people cannot possibly come up with all the ideas that the ORV needs. For that reason, throughout the campaign, I'll be taking questions from JSAers all around and posting my answers here on this page. These questions may cover holes in my platform, clarifications of platform points, questions about my experience, or anything else JSA students deem relevant. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can find the form for submitting a question. You can also reach out to me any other way you wish!
Cordially,
Weston
Cordially,
Weston
Q: How can we reverse the massive decrease in ORV Winter Congress attendance? -Sathvik Rayala
Reducing the role of chance through expansion
When it comes to Winter Congress attendance, some of the downturn I think was due to chance. Chapters go through inevitable ups and downs in size, and some schools had other school-wide trips that were by chance scheduled the same weekend. The best way to reduce the role of chance is to increase the sample size, or the number of chapters through expansion. Definitely check out the expansion portion of my platform for how we’re going to do that. In short, the flurry of pre-Winter Congress expansion has been amazing. I’ve always been sold on using the personal connections of everyone to expand, because mass emails to schools which we have no personal connection to rarely work and didn’t see a ton of success earlier this year. But not only have we used people’s personal connections through the partners survey (and will next year through a question on the end of Fall State survey at closing session), we’ve also had people reaching out to other civic-minded organizations. That’s a strategy I hadn’t seen in my three years in JSA, but it’s one that has been working, so we’ll definitely continue that.
Communicating Winter Congress more effectively after Fall State
At the same time, though, I understand that when you look at the sheer number of chapters that decreased, it wasn’t all due to chance. I think that this year there was a breakdown in communication about Winter Congress a little bit. I know that as a Chapter President, I was caught a little off guard by the registration deadline because of Winter Break. In early December, I figured we had time to let people reflect on Fall State a little bit before we started talking about Winter Congress, but in reality our money had to be due the first meeting back from Winter Break. I know of chapters which didn’t introduce Winter Congress to its members until within two weeks of the registration deadline. I also know of at least one chapter in my district that registered after 11pm on the registration deadline. I strongly believe that these two things need to change, and so we will be very clear about communicating this to chapters as early as Fall State. When people only have a couple weeks to decide, they have a lower chance of going, and registering last minute is very risky because MyJSA can fail, and lots of other things can happen.
Releasing a recommended pre-Winter Congress timeline for chapters to follow, including a parent informational meeting to increase underclassman attendance
We’ll have a model and recommended Winter Congress timeline for people to look at and try to follow. For example, it will include some of these key events:
When it comes to Winter Congress attendance, some of the downturn I think was due to chance. Chapters go through inevitable ups and downs in size, and some schools had other school-wide trips that were by chance scheduled the same weekend. The best way to reduce the role of chance is to increase the sample size, or the number of chapters through expansion. Definitely check out the expansion portion of my platform for how we’re going to do that. In short, the flurry of pre-Winter Congress expansion has been amazing. I’ve always been sold on using the personal connections of everyone to expand, because mass emails to schools which we have no personal connection to rarely work and didn’t see a ton of success earlier this year. But not only have we used people’s personal connections through the partners survey (and will next year through a question on the end of Fall State survey at closing session), we’ve also had people reaching out to other civic-minded organizations. That’s a strategy I hadn’t seen in my three years in JSA, but it’s one that has been working, so we’ll definitely continue that.
Communicating Winter Congress more effectively after Fall State
At the same time, though, I understand that when you look at the sheer number of chapters that decreased, it wasn’t all due to chance. I think that this year there was a breakdown in communication about Winter Congress a little bit. I know that as a Chapter President, I was caught a little off guard by the registration deadline because of Winter Break. In early December, I figured we had time to let people reflect on Fall State a little bit before we started talking about Winter Congress, but in reality our money had to be due the first meeting back from Winter Break. I know of chapters which didn’t introduce Winter Congress to its members until within two weeks of the registration deadline. I also know of at least one chapter in my district that registered after 11pm on the registration deadline. I strongly believe that these two things need to change, and so we will be very clear about communicating this to chapters as early as Fall State. When people only have a couple weeks to decide, they have a lower chance of going, and registering last minute is very risky because MyJSA can fail, and lots of other things can happen.
Releasing a recommended pre-Winter Congress timeline for chapters to follow, including a parent informational meeting to increase underclassman attendance
We’ll have a model and recommended Winter Congress timeline for people to look at and try to follow. For example, it will include some of these key events:
- Seek administrative approval, because some districts require Board of Education approval for all out of state trips.
- Introduce the concept of Winter Congress to members
- Hand out all necessary forms to members with a very clear checklist of everything they need to include.
- Have a parent informational meeting (this is something most chapters don’t do which really really helps get underclassman parents to get on board with letting their kid come. I know some sophomores at Lakota East who likely would not have come but for the parent meeting)
- Set a deadline that is multiple days before the MyJSA registration deadline.
- Get registered a couple days before the deadline just in case there’s any technical difficulties or anything like that.
Q: How can we convince more people to fundraise?
Fundraising is incredibly, incredibly important to me. I have some fundraising points in my platform, so here I’ll go into some things I don’t explicitly say there. Make sure to checkout my platform too.
Personalizing scholarships through increased use of testimonials
Similar to expansion, I believe that one of the surest ways of fundraising is to use personal connections of people. We’ve done that this year to great success; we simply need to increase the number of people for whom we are doing that. It all comes down to effectively communicating why it’s important to fundraise and giving people the tools to do so. Oftentimes people don’t think they can really see the result of their fundraising, so to remedy that we should drastically increase the role of testimonials of scholarship awardees. On the bus back from Winter Congress, I spoke to one scholarship awardee who said they’d expressed they’d be completely willing to do a testimonial, but the Fundraising Department hadn’t followed up with them. If we can follow up, we can use that to show people why fundraising matters. It’s no longer just raising money to go to some account somewhere, but instead it’s raising money to help the faces and people that you personally know.
Making it so that chapters are no longer disincentivized from fundraising
Chapter fundraising this year has been somewhat poor, with a few standout exceptions. If chapters had money to cover students, then the state wouldn’t have to cover as much. The issue right now is that in a sense chapters are actually disincentivized to fundraise. If the ORV offers a scholarship to a student and the chapter has the money to pay it instead, they are unlikely to volunteer. If the ORV has a policy where scholarship applicants will always get money from their chapter first, then the state second only if their chapter has no money, chapters are less likely to fundraise. If the ORV refuses to grant scholarship money to a student unless their chapter has fundraised, then it unfairly punishes the student seeking money. The question becomes, how can we still give state scholarships while incentivizing (or at least not disincentivizing) chapters to fundraise as well? I confess that I don’t have a full answer to this question yet. I have some ideas, but none of them are perfect. What I do know is that we have to break this cycle where chapters are disincentivized from fundraising. Do you have any ideas?
Personalizing scholarships through increased use of testimonials
Similar to expansion, I believe that one of the surest ways of fundraising is to use personal connections of people. We’ve done that this year to great success; we simply need to increase the number of people for whom we are doing that. It all comes down to effectively communicating why it’s important to fundraise and giving people the tools to do so. Oftentimes people don’t think they can really see the result of their fundraising, so to remedy that we should drastically increase the role of testimonials of scholarship awardees. On the bus back from Winter Congress, I spoke to one scholarship awardee who said they’d expressed they’d be completely willing to do a testimonial, but the Fundraising Department hadn’t followed up with them. If we can follow up, we can use that to show people why fundraising matters. It’s no longer just raising money to go to some account somewhere, but instead it’s raising money to help the faces and people that you personally know.
Making it so that chapters are no longer disincentivized from fundraising
Chapter fundraising this year has been somewhat poor, with a few standout exceptions. If chapters had money to cover students, then the state wouldn’t have to cover as much. The issue right now is that in a sense chapters are actually disincentivized to fundraise. If the ORV offers a scholarship to a student and the chapter has the money to pay it instead, they are unlikely to volunteer. If the ORV has a policy where scholarship applicants will always get money from their chapter first, then the state second only if their chapter has no money, chapters are less likely to fundraise. If the ORV refuses to grant scholarship money to a student unless their chapter has fundraised, then it unfairly punishes the student seeking money. The question becomes, how can we still give state scholarships while incentivizing (or at least not disincentivizing) chapters to fundraise as well? I confess that I don’t have a full answer to this question yet. I have some ideas, but none of them are perfect. What I do know is that we have to break this cycle where chapters are disincentivized from fundraising. Do you have any ideas?
Q: How can we reach out to other civic-minded organizations like HOBY more?
Engaging in as much face-to-face interaction as possible
Reaching out to other organizations helped expand in the weeks leading up to Winter Congress, and it’s a great idea. My attitude is that the more face to face, in person events we can attend, the better. Emails can work too, but face to face interaction and calling tends to be more effective. Think about the difference between a situation where the Bill of Rights Institute had merely emailed us versus the situation where the Bill of Rights Institute actually attended our Winter Congress activism fair and talked to people face to face. I would definitely love to see the Expansion Director next year explicitly designate certain members of the department to head these outreach efforts by doing research on organizations like HOBY and reaching out to them.
Reaching out to other organizations helped expand in the weeks leading up to Winter Congress, and it’s a great idea. My attitude is that the more face to face, in person events we can attend, the better. Emails can work too, but face to face interaction and calling tends to be more effective. Think about the difference between a situation where the Bill of Rights Institute had merely emailed us versus the situation where the Bill of Rights Institute actually attended our Winter Congress activism fair and talked to people face to face. I would definitely love to see the Expansion Director next year explicitly designate certain members of the department to head these outreach efforts by doing research on organizations like HOBY and reaching out to them.
Q: How can we improve the resources JSAers have available to reach out to politicians to push the issues they care about? -Shahad Salman
Connecting JSAers to campaign, local government, and interest group internships
There's a side to this question which I'd thought about and have in my platform but I think there's also a side I hadn't thought about as much. One of my key activism platform ideas is giving people the opportunity to not only talk about government and politics but actually work in government and politics, like some people have done in the last year for the Portman campaign. As such, I'd like to have a person(s) in the activism department whose job it is to reach out to campaigns, local governments, etc. and make those opportunities possible. As long as all sides of the spectrum are contacted and presented, it'll still be consistent with our non-partisan brand. We do a lot of social activism in JSA, which I love, but we can also have awesome political activism if we make that effort. At the same time, I think what the question suggests isn't quite what I just described.
Giving JSAers the resources to lobby their elected officials from the outside.
The question goes beyond that and goes more generally to lobbying or trying to make a difference on a particular policy or topic. I know that 3 years ago (one of the advantages of being in JSA 3 years is you've seen a lot that's been done) we had letter writing campaigns at conventions for specific issues, so batches of letters would be sent to representatives on one particular youth issue. Under that model, JSA picked a non-partisan political issue to try to push our issues as youth. This is a long JSA tradition, as JSA was one of the groups lobbying for the amendment that reduced the voting age from 21 to 18. The other model is letting each individual push the issue they care about. Under this model, the role of the state isn't to pick an issue and run a campaign but instead to connect JSAers with the resources they need to push it to their elected representatives and such. Both models are possible in the ORV, but I tend to favor the latter. That's where making a list of contact information for elected representatives, publishing a "How to Reach out to your Elected Official" guide, and maybe even letting people write letters at conventions and have JSA mail them in all come into play. The list could have interest groups on it too. It'd sort of be like the activism fair at conventions but bigger and in paper form
There's a subtle distinction between what was originally in my platform and this idea, but it is there. When you're working on a campaign, you don't really have a lot of power over the campaign. Your job is to support everything the candidate supports when you're campaigning for them. If you agree with them on everything then it works because you're getting a policymaker elected who will push your interests. However, if you don't share their opinion on every issue, then it can be more effective to be on the outside lobbying them.
There's a side to this question which I'd thought about and have in my platform but I think there's also a side I hadn't thought about as much. One of my key activism platform ideas is giving people the opportunity to not only talk about government and politics but actually work in government and politics, like some people have done in the last year for the Portman campaign. As such, I'd like to have a person(s) in the activism department whose job it is to reach out to campaigns, local governments, etc. and make those opportunities possible. As long as all sides of the spectrum are contacted and presented, it'll still be consistent with our non-partisan brand. We do a lot of social activism in JSA, which I love, but we can also have awesome political activism if we make that effort. At the same time, I think what the question suggests isn't quite what I just described.
Giving JSAers the resources to lobby their elected officials from the outside.
The question goes beyond that and goes more generally to lobbying or trying to make a difference on a particular policy or topic. I know that 3 years ago (one of the advantages of being in JSA 3 years is you've seen a lot that's been done) we had letter writing campaigns at conventions for specific issues, so batches of letters would be sent to representatives on one particular youth issue. Under that model, JSA picked a non-partisan political issue to try to push our issues as youth. This is a long JSA tradition, as JSA was one of the groups lobbying for the amendment that reduced the voting age from 21 to 18. The other model is letting each individual push the issue they care about. Under this model, the role of the state isn't to pick an issue and run a campaign but instead to connect JSAers with the resources they need to push it to their elected representatives and such. Both models are possible in the ORV, but I tend to favor the latter. That's where making a list of contact information for elected representatives, publishing a "How to Reach out to your Elected Official" guide, and maybe even letting people write letters at conventions and have JSA mail them in all come into play. The list could have interest groups on it too. It'd sort of be like the activism fair at conventions but bigger and in paper form
There's a subtle distinction between what was originally in my platform and this idea, but it is there. When you're working on a campaign, you don't really have a lot of power over the campaign. Your job is to support everything the candidate supports when you're campaigning for them. If you agree with them on everything then it works because you're getting a policymaker elected who will push your interests. However, if you don't share their opinion on every issue, then it can be more effective to be on the outside lobbying them.