Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter.
I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming.
For this episode, we take a break from ethical education technology to start our thread on the future of civics education.
Our guest today is Nathan Goldberg, former classmate and co-founder and current board member for Academy for Social Civics.
His work directly intersects with one of our focus areas, representative institutions.
It is also broadly relevant to anyone thinking about how institutions make decisions and how they can change.
Nathan is dedicated to using democracy as a force for good.
Today we're talking about representative governance, who gets a voice in the institutions that shape our lives, including our schools.
Our conversation, connects everything from who is in the room when decisions are made, to how we can make sure that those decisions reflect the values and needs of students, teachers, and communities.
Let's dive in.
Nathán: um, my name is Nathán Goldberg.
I, Was born, raised in Mexico City, but I've lived in the US for most of my life now.
and to not get too far into the things that I do, I will say that I am, uh, someone who really believes in, has dedicated his career to leveraging the power of democracy and the power of soccer to make the world a better place.
Priten: awesome.
Well, that's gonna, springboard a lot of our conversation.
but I'd love to, uh, share with the audience both your educational background and then what you've done int in between your two educational, um, journeys.
Nathán: Um, yeah, so I, did my undergrad at Harvard College.
Um, I was the university's first ever joint degree candidate in philosophy and statistics.
Um, so, you know, two ends of the liberal arts spectrum.
And then after graduating college, I've had somewhat of a two track career in soccer and in politics.
Um, so on track one, I worked for the US Soccer Federation.
I was the assistant to two US soccer presidents.
I've done some independent soccer consulting.
I've been a data analyst for Major League soccer team.
I've done operations for, Senior men's national team in the Caribbean.
and then I was the Chief Soccer officer for the professional women's team in New York before I became the vice president of the US Soccer Federation, which is the national governing body of us of soccer in the us.
I'm currently in that position right now.
on the political track, I used my statistics background to start volunteering and advising democratic campaigns on data strategy.
And from there I founded a nonprofit called Bluebonnet Data that is devoted to recruiting other people like me, people with data backgrounds, and training them and deploying them to also volunteer for Democratic campaigns up and down the ballot.
Everything from US Senate races to city council and County Commission.
And in the six or seven years where Bluebonnet has been active, we've very proudly recruited and trained and deployed more than 1500 fellows to support over 750 campaigns, all across the country.
Priten: I'm very excited to talk a bit more about Bluebonnet, but also, the, your journey through US Soccer, soccer in general, and the work you're doing there and how it intersects with your idea of representative institutions.
but before we get into the details, what comes to mind when we say representative institutions?
Like how do you define it?
What does that mean to you?
Nathán: I think the first question to ask.
Ask when you're talking about representative institutions is who is an institution meant to serve?
Ken, what is the target audience or clientele or just the group of people that is impacted by the decisions that an organization is making?
and once you have that answer, then in my opinion, it's very important to say, okay, well if this organization or institution is making decisions that impact.
These people, these groups of people, these kinds of people, then it's probably important to have people from those groups who have those perspectives in the decision
making rooms of the institution and the organization so that the institution itself can be better equipped to fulfill its mission or purpose in serving these people.
Um, I know that's kind of very abstract if you want to land it with.
An example that impacts everyone in the us.
our government is meant to serve its people.
And so there are a lot of different people who live in the United States have very different interests.
And so in order to have a government that is working to the benefit of its people, it's important to have a representative cross sample of perspectives from those very people represented in the halls of the government that is making decisions on our behalf.
so that's maybe one of the biggest examples.
But then there are institutions that are more closely connected or at a, lower to the ground level.
like your school board maybe, your local church.
You know, all those organizations that have an impact in your life, where there are people making decisions on behalf of those organizations.
You probably want the people who make those decisions to have some sort of perspective as to how you see things or the other people who are impacted by those decisions.
See things.
So that's, when I think about representative institutions, you have to think about, well, who is an institution meant to serve?
And then work backwards from there to make sure that the perspectives of the people that are meant to be served by an institution are represented and present in decision making discussions for the institution.
Priten: So I'm curious, so sometimes when folks talk about representative institutions, they think about voting and they're like, is the person, are people getting a
chance to pick who is being, who is part of the governance more so than like, are they act, is there, identity in some way being reflected in, the representative body?
why is it important that there's actually folks from within the community, that are the representatives themselves, rather than just giving the community a voice in the voting?
Nathán: Yeah, well I think when you are when you're making decisions about things that will impact people very directly and very viscerally.
It's one thing to say, well, yeah, all these people voted for me, and so then I get to make decisions on their behalf.
And it's another thing to say, well, I can see how this decision might play out in practice in the real world because I have experience, or
at least, you know, I have a group of people advising me who have direct experience with, hey, what happens with Medicare if we cut Medicare?
You know, so someone who has not been on Medicare.
Medicare, Medicaid has less experience with how that program works.
And so in trying to legislate it, they can benefit from the perspective of someone who actually has used those programs.
so if you kind of take that view and expand it.
On all these things that are impacting people that the government is legislating on.
It is helpful for Congress to have people that can share direct experiences of, Hey, I know what this looks like in practice, and if we make the decision, here's how it's gonna play out.
And so if you get people from a lot of different perspectives, then hopefully in an ideal world, you can build some sort of consensus that is actually informed by how the real world works, and not just by how one subset of people thinks the real world works.
Priten: the first time we talked about these ideas, it was in the context of Harvard, and you were very frustrated.
So I'd love for you to share the story of, what got you interested in representation at Harvard, and you know the projects that came out of that.
Nathán: Yeah, so in the, Late 2010s we'll say.
we were in a period at Harvard where for many years at that point, students and faculty, mostly with some alumni support had been really, really pushing for Harvard
to take more of a leadership stance in the fight against climate change and central to that was a demand that Harvard should divest its endowment from fossil fuels.
And Harvard refused for a long time to even consider the question of divesting from fossil fuels.
But it really set up a stark contrast between, okay, if students who had overwhelmingly voted for.
Divestment and faculty who had also overwhelmingly voted for divestment in some of their own referenda were also on the same side of students and alumni Were also on the same side as the faculty and the student.
Then Harvard, and I'm doing air quotes.
Harvard unquote, um, was on the other side of this discussion.
It really made me think, well, who is Harvard, if not the students?
And the faculty and the alumni?
Like, why is the, the institution of Harvard seen as a separate entity then all of the people that make it up?
And then so I started digging into, well, like how is Harvard governed?
Like who makes these decisions, if.
All these people that we think of as making up the university actually can all get shut down, even if they're all on the same side of one issue.
so, the way that Harvard discovered is actually quite, Particular, there's a very particular form of governance that includes two governing boards,
um, that are full of very, very impressive people because you can imagine Harvard can draw on a lot of really a, a pool of very impressive alumni.
To help steer its governance.
but one of the things it was not doing when looking at this very impressive pool of alumni was looking at alumni who were young and looking at alumni who had recently been students.
So in, in thinking of what is the role of, of someone who is charged with steering Harvard into the future, if in that room there isn't
anyone who could speak to, hey listen, you are all very smart, but none of you know what it's like to be a Harvard student in this century.
That's a really important perspective that was missing to form really well informed decisions, and discussions.
So we set, I'd say, okay, well we think part of the reason why there's a big disconnect between.
Harvard, you know, I'm doing quotes again.
Um, and its students and faculty and alumni is because the boards are missing this pretty big chunk of our body politic, if you will, uh, from having a voice in, in the decisionmaking rooms and the discussion rooms.
Um, so we, we founded Harvard Forward, which I know we'll get into.
we started an effort to try to address that directly called Harvard Forward.
Priten: go ahead and tell us a little bit about Harvard Forward.
what did you set out to do?
What was the process like?
and what did that teach you about representative institutions or institutions and their response to, calls for representation rather.
Nathán: So in doing this research about how Harvard is governed, we also discovered that one of these two governing boards called the Harvard Board of Overseers, has a very quirky, Characteristic that it is democratically elected by all Harvard alumni.
So Harvard alumni get to vote in an election every year to fill a handful of seats on the board of Overseers.
that is itself composed of only Harvard alumni.
So it's elected by Harvard alumni, composed by Harvard alumni.
Usually the way that process works is Harvard itself, or you know, some subdivision of this big machine that is Harvard.
Carefully select and vets candidates that it then puts forward to the alumni in this election so when you're voting for members of
the Board of Overseers, you get a slate of eight people and then you get the select five of these eight people that have already been.
Pre-approved per se, by the university.
But there is another provision in the governance where any alum can stand for election so long as they demonstrate having broad support from the alumni community by gathering signatures from 1% or more of all living Harvard alumni.
and so we saw this provision and said, Hey, listen, this is actually a very, very.
Lowercase D Democratic Avenue to one Galvanize alumni around.
Improving our governance.
And two, putting this question to the test, like, is it really true?
What I think, which is that Harvard alumni, by and large support the idea that Harvard should be more of a leader in the fight against the climate crisis.
So we found this provision and we said we're gonna set out to get people on the ballot who are young alumni, recent alumni who can speak to what it's like to be.
A student at Harvard in the 21st century and these people are gonna run on a platform.
They're gonna have values and ideas that they stand for, and alumni then are gonna have a natural choice to vote on, do I vote for the candidates that support these ideas, or do I vote
for the candidates that Harvard has already pre-approved and stamped with its seal of approval that they, you know, will be, good members of the Board of Overseers in Harvard's terms.
So that's, that was the vision, that we would run candidates through this petition process and hopefully get them elected on a very, open, very transparent.
We weren't shy about what we were doing.
Platform of climate action and inclusive representation.
Priten: tell us a little bit about the effort it took to make that nomination process happen.
Um, because I think when I think back to it, it feels mythical.
Like there is this like fantasy element to it now.
the fact that it was right before the pandemic, I think makes it even more so, just feel like a completely different world.
But, yeah.
Why don't you share with folks just how amazing that process is.
Nathán: It, it was, it did turn out to be a pretty herculean task.
What convinced us that we would be able to pull this off was that this was the first year in Harvard's, you know, 380 year history, that they would allow alumni to vote for this board online.
So up until that point, every single year, voting had always been conducted by mail or in person, but we said, okay, if, if it switches online, then we'll be able to capture all of
the more recent alumni who are online and, and might be inclined to vote and support this if it doesn't take them that much of an effort to just click a link and, and press a button.
What we didn't anticipate is that the process for gathering these, we needed about 3000 signatures.
So 1% of all alumni around 300,000 eligible alumni, three, 3000 signatures.
what we didn't anticipate, and Harvard didn't anticipate either, is that their online, air quotes, again, online process for gathering signatures was so archaic and so arcane that.
It actually ended up being more difficult than gathering signatures on actual pen and paper.
and so we thought, okay, we just send the link out to 3000 people.
They click it, we're on the ballot.
No problem.
Instead.
We had to go and fetch very large oversized parchment paper from the Harvard, office of the governing boards, that had the Harvard watermark seal on it.
So we, we couldn't even reproduce these forms.
We had to go pick 'em all up in person, and ship them all over the world.
Because one of the key differences in a campaign, when you're trying to run for Congress or something, is that all of your voters are geographically contained.
Your district has boundaries.
All the voters that vote for you live within those boundaries.
Well, even if you're running for senate, you know, US Senate, everyone lives inside the same state.
Um, that is not true of Harvard alumni.
They live in every corner of the country, every corner of the world, and we needed to go find them one by one to get them to sign these papers.
so what.
We thought was gonna be easy.
It turned out to be really hard.
But then what was really hard turned out to be the thing that was able to galvanize alumni to care and, and bring people together again.
This was, late 2019, early 2020 before the pandemic hit the, deadline to submit these signatures on parchment paper.
I think it was February 1st, 2020.
and the physicality of the parchment paper is something that allowed people to participate in the campaign and come together making this abstract idea.
Okay.
we need to push Harvard to be a leader in the fight against climate change.
Into a very, very concrete small step that you could take say, I need to sign this paper.
If I sign this paper, then I'm doing my part to push Harvard one millimeter in the right direction.
and some people who wanted to push Harvard 10 millimeters in the right direction say, well, mail me the forms and I will reach out to all the alumni in my zip code and go to their door and tell 'em what we're doing and get them to sign the petition forms.
so we were mailing forms from Singapore to peru to Germany, to a majority of US states, to gather all these signatures.
And it was a way to bring people together into a community that wanted to make an effort to.
Hold Harvard to its highest ideals.
so when all was said and done, we ended up submitting over 4,000 or 4,500 signatures to the office of the governing boards and massive, milk crates full and full of these parchment paper forms that had been signed by alumni from all over the world.
Um, and that was enough to get all five of our candidates on the ballot for the 2020 election.
Priten: some of my favorite memories from this are, there was a. Harvard alum, who is now like a Professor Emeritus at Columbia, who I had read so much by during my like South Asian studies, minor, classes.
Um, and he had reached out to us.
It was like I'm in the Upper West side, like I would love to sign this and I took an Uber to his apartment, like I was in his apartment and he's signing these six pages of paper.
and this is.
When we talk about represented institutions, and we're talking about how like the goal was to get, recent alumni elected.
it wasn't just recent alumni who were on board with the mission.
And I think that was another, reassuring, part of the whole process was that like we got broad support, from alumni in general who recognize the need for recent alumni, was that largely the case?
Like, I mean, I don't know, like you obviously got a chance to reach a lot more folks, on this, but did that match your experience?
Was it like, do we, we got broad support, right?
Nathán: For, we had signatures from alumni from every decade, from the 1930s onward.
we had Nobel Prize winners who were signing on to our petitions.
we had, high level government officials, not just in the US but in Mexico and in other countries.
and we had volunteers who were also,
Alumni from the times of like civil rights movements on campus, anti apartheid movements on campus, who recognized in our generation the same values
and drive to make the world a better place by focusing on the teeny tiny corner of the world that we can actually have an influence on slightly better.
so I, the Crimson actually wrote an article, the Crimson is the Harvard, student newspaper wrote an article about the cross-generational appeal of.
Our campaign and how there are so many retired folks who have had a lot of time on their hands to go around their neighborhood and knock on doors and ask for signatures.
how many retired alumni had really jumped in and become part of the campaign because they believed that having a more representative.
Body making decisions for Harvard would be good, not just for recent alumni, but for future alumni, like all the generations that come after us.
Um, so it, really warmed my heart to see how many people recognize the importance of having recent alumni representation, even if they themselves were not recent alumni.
Priten: Skipping to the results, we got folks on the ballot, folks successfully, won and we got folks on the actual board.
what did the process, or what was Harvard's reaction like and what does that tell you about, resistance to change or welcoming change?
Nathán: Yeah.
So, Harvard's reaction was very.
Funny, I'll say it, it, it really tracked with the, you know, first they ignore you, then they make fun of you.
And, you know, by the, by the time they realized we were, actually on track to win seeds, it was probably too late.
so at first, yeah, I, I don't think they, I don't think anyone took us seriously.
We, we, I emailed the officer of the governing board and I was asking for the rules and I was asking for, hey-ha, and they would just sometimes not respond.
I think I had to, on more than one occasion, just show up in person.
and then at the point where we're like, okay, hey, we're letting you know we're gonna do this.
We're gonna start collecting petition signatures.
And so just so you know that you should give us whatever it is, we need and whatever it is you're required to give us and inform us, as people going on this adventure of, of collecting petition signatures, trying to get on the ballot.
then we got on the ballot.
Yeah, I think.
Harvard had assumed that in the way that they had changed the requirements to get on the ballot, that no one would ever make it on the ballot again as a petition candidate.
And once we cleared that hurdle.
I think they said, well, okay, well these kids are for real, but we don't really have to worry about it too much.
The next phase of resistance, I will say is they tried in very, very vague indirect terms, start to educate, that's what they call it.
Educate alumni about what the role of Board of Overseers was.
So even though this is usually a very sleepy affair, no one really cares about, um, the Board of Overseers, again, you're, you're usually selecting a group of people for a subset of people that Harvard is already preselected.
Um, turnout is very low.
Maybe like 10 to 12% of alumni even bothered to vote on this.
But once they said, okay, well, you know, there are these people who are running on actual values, God forbid, we should tell alumni without alerting them to the fact that this is even happening.
just remind them, Hey, here's what the board does.
And the board is not a, a group that is supposed to have values or anything.
They're just supposed to be.
They're not supposed to make noise or they're not supposed to have independent thoughts.
they would start putting out in the, you know, Harvard controlled pieces of media.
The Harvard Gazette is the official university, mass communication, magazine.
They would have interviews with the chair of the board and say, oh yes, you know, this is what the overseers are supposed to do.
They're not supposed to take positions on issues.
They're supposed to just be there.
So that was the next phase is just like light education?
Just kind of throwing it out there.
and then I think once voting started, once voting opened, and there were people particularly in the alumni association.
Who felt like the fact that any alum could gather support from their fellow alumni and run on a platform that fellow alumni supported was actually such an insult to their years and years and
years of donations to the university that we were cutting in line in front of the people who deserve to be on the board because they have been huge financial supporters of the university.
Um, they took such offense.
what we were doing that then they, they attacked, you know, they, they started sending out, letters to the channels of communication that they controlled as leaders
of the alumni community through the, shared interest groups through the, geographic alumni association groups saying, Hey, there's this group they're running.
Candidates for the board, and they're really, really bad.
Just trust us.
Don't look up what they stand for.
Don't look up what they're trying to do.
Don't look up who they are.
Just trust us.
They're bad news and you should not vote.
so that was, shocking.
First of all, I did not expect, the people who are tasked with leading this very large, alumni community with just straight up lying to attack us and then kind of, you know, coming at my, integrity and reputation with very little factual basis.
but you could tell that we had really, really rattled them from, first they ignored us.
Then they kind of didn't take us seriously, but said, okay, we just need to tell 'em that kind of what, remind 'em what the board of overseers us and then
that should be enough to, okay, well these people are about to win seats, and the only way we can think of preventing it is to just attack them directly.
it didn't work right.
we ended up winning a majority of the seats that were up for election in 2020, which was a huge, huge historic result.
It was the first time that.
Petition candidates had won any seats at all, since 1989 when Anti-Apartheid activists had elected Archbishop Desmond Tutu to the board.
and I believe it was the first time ever that petition candidates had won a majority of the seats on any given year.
so I felt on the one hand, really disappointed in Harvard's institutional response both from the university itself, which was kind of disapproving, but kind of muted.
And definitely from the Alumni Association, executive committee who just came out swinging without ever reaching out to talk to us, just started making stuff up and putting it in letters and signing their name on it and sending it to everyone they could.
That at the end of the day, Harvard alumni were smart enough, to be able to see through that and say, okay, these, you know, these group of candidates have been very clear from the beginning about what they stand for and what they're trying to achieve.
If you agree with 'em, you can vote for them.
If you don't agree with 'em, you can vote against them, but there's no need to attack their character.
There's no need to make things up.
and at the end of the day, you know, more alumni supported the vision that we were putting forward, which is a positive vision, both in the sense, I
thought it was positive because it was a better vision, but also it was positive in the sense that it was an actual vision as opposed to a lack of vision.
Um, which is what, you know, the executive committee was suggesting candidates should stand for a lack of things as opposed to for the things.
Priten: so this was, um, obviously this was the start of some of your work in the space, but it didn't get limited to Harvard.
what was the vision, beyond Harvard and how did that come about?
Nathán: Yeah, so when, from the very beginning, from the very beginning of the idea of Harvard Forward, we could tell that we had kind of stumbled onto something that might be bigger than ourselves, that might be bigger than Harvard forward.
and so we set it up deliberately in a structure, like a legal entity structure that would allow for other campaigns, other schools that saw what we were doing and, and liked, didn't want it to replicate it to also do that.
and so we created in conjunction with Harvard Forward as actually as a parent, company or parent entity to Harvard Forward, The Boarding School, which
was a five one C3 nonprofit with the specific mission of recruiting and training young people to serve on boards of organizations that impact their lives.
Um, so that way we could have.
Harvard forward under this umbrella of the boarding school.
And as we were going through this experience and we were learning things about how Harvard works, how to run campaigns with very diffused, populations that we could aggregate that knowledge, keep it stored somewhere safe.
And then if other people reached out or raised their hands, they could also avail themselves of these resources, which is what ended up happening.
people from Yale and people from Penn State at least so far, reached out to us and said, Hey, our governance, our board of governance has some similar elements to what is
going on at Harvard, to the point where we think that this type of grassroots driven campaign could also be successful in effectuate affecting change at our universities.
And we said, great.
We can fit you into this, umbrella structure where Harvard Forward and Yale Forward and Penn State Forward can all kind of coexist and learn
from each other, support each other while being led as individual efforts by people from those communities and those schools in this case.
Priten: for folks who, don't closely follow investment policies at major universities, did it make a difference?
Like, did any of these places, change their policies just because you got some young and old mind on the board?
Nathán: I, as a philosopher and statistician, I'm very, very careful about drawing al inferences.
Uh, but what I will say is that.
After a decade of Harvard saying, no, we will not divest and we will never consider divesting that The idea we can consider divesting is just so far out of the norm that we're not even gonna entertain it.
Um, within a year after we elected our first round of candidates, Harvard divested, and it was a culmination of a decade long effort, again, mostly led by students and faculty who had been advocating for this.
Sometimes through civil disobedience, sometimes through, you know, communication in the media and, and like every method that they could think of, for this outcome, for the better part of a decade.
And then, kind of when this.
Effort and this movement was reaching, its fever pitch.
we figured out a way to say, Hey, students and faculty have already had these avenues to very clearly demonstrate what side they're on.
What if alumni could do the same thing?
Then you would have overwhelming pressure from.
These three groups towards Harvard, and importantly through leveraging the, Board of Overseers Avenue as a, quasi referendum because it's a vote that alumni can engage in.
it also was an opportunity to place people on the inside.
So whereas faculty and students in this kind of model of activism, were pushing for an outcome from the outside in.
By getting people on the board, we could push for an outcome from the inside out.
And so at some point you get people pushing from the outside in, people pushing from the inside out and something's gotta give somewhere, somewhere in the middle so that was a piece of the larger puzzle.
but I mean, even in our most optimistic calculations, we had not anticipated that within a year of electing people for the first time.
Harvard would just straight up divest.
Priten: Yeah.
what about Penn State?
Nathán: Okay.
So Penn, Penn State, Penn State forward, I will say, has gotten, three people elected to, their board of trustees over the course of three elections as well.
and they have not divested, but, the.
Politics of Penn State and the, Overton window of what is possible in, in a public institution that has different governance mechanisms, um, is not fair to compare that to Harvard.
But we elected a climate scientist to, to the board a couple years ago, and within a couple months, Penn State adopted new policies to certain parts of their investment strategy to make it more sustainable and more green.
And not only that, but in written newspaper articles on the record, there are other board members crediting the Penn State forward elected board member with having pushed the board to the point of not just adopting the policies but actually.
Getting them on board with the adoption of the policy, kind of making the case for why this is a good thing for the university and one out of, you know, I think their board is maybe like 48 people or something.
One person being in the room is able to make a real difference in saying, Hey, I'm gonna put forward this case, and I don't by myself have the power to institute any of this because I'm one of four votes.
But I do have the power to speak up and if I make a compelling enough case.
Then I can change the course of, you know, the university's direction.
which is kind of what the, the theory behind electing people who bring this different perspective was from the beginning.
And it's been, vindicated, you know, time and time.
Priten: I think that the news articles that came out of that were some of my favorite on general because I think proving that like, it's not just about like getting power and just voting.
It's had the voice at the table makes such a big difference.
I think is a great, lesson but also a great motivator to keep doing this work.
Now you obviously had not only thought about this in the context of universities and education, you also think about this in terms of soccer.
So, tell me a little bit about how you viewed the importance of representation, at soccer institutions and how it overlaps.
Nathán: so, you know, when I, worked at US Soccer, I was staff at US Soccer.
I could see how all the different, um.
Membership based councils of US soccer work and US soccer oversees all of soccer in the us from youth soccer, you know, the kids kind
of playing in the parks, to amateur adult soccer or, you know, friends going out with their coworkers playing a game on Sunday before.
You know, going to the bar for a couple beers, and all the way up to the professional leagues on the men's in the women's side, and first division to second division, third division.
And then kind of at the very top, we directly oversee the national teams.
so if you're the best in the country, women's soccer and men's soccer, you play for national teams.
We have a lot of other disciplines, disability disciplines like deaf men's, women's national teams, cerebral palsy, men's, women's national teams, Power Chair, electric, the electric wheelchair, national team.
we also have beach soccer.
We have indoor soccer called Futsal.
so all of these people fall under the umbrella of who US soccer is supposed to be looking out for, advocating for the interest of everyone.
if you split it up by numbers, then by far the youth group.
Is the largest by, orders of magnitude.
And we have 4 million or so, just under 4 million, youth soccer players playing soccer.
And we do not have, as you can imagine, people who are youth soccer players, who also are the decision making bodies of any level of US soccer membership.
do you necessarily want someone who is, a 13-year-old on the board organizations?
not necessarily, but I did think it was a missing perspective to have people who had been recently youth soccer players themselves, and could see things from the perspective of.
Youth soccer players in the same rooms where decisions were being made that impacted these 4 million youth soccer players.
Um, so that was just a thought that I kinda held in the back of my head for a while.
while I was staff at US Soccer in my own time, in my personal capacity, I was running the Harvard Forward campaign thinking about how to make universities more representative
of the people, it's meant to serve who are by and large, young, you don't have to be young to be a university student, but that is the big, you know, bend of the population.
and soccer was similar.
And at some point after doing some other, you know, odd jobs in the soccer world, I felt like I could bring that perspective, or, some of that perspective to the US soccer Board.
Two years ago, almost exactly, I decided that I would run for an elected position on the US Soccer Board as vice president on a platform of generational change and being a new generation, with a different perspective that could bring
a vantage point and new ideas to bear in discussions at the highest levels of soccer governance in the US that had been missing up until that point.
Priten: All right, so let, so you obviously, there's the work on the.
On the side of actual representation on these, within the institutions.
but you've also worked on grassroots campaigns, um, in the political world.
Um, so tell me a little bit about Bluebonnet data, how that ties into your larger mission, and some of the success stories there.
Nathán: So, this goes back to I study statistics.
I see statistics and data analysis, data science as a really helpful tool in making better decisions in any field.
Um, so when I got my American citizenship and I wanted to help democratic candidates, against Republican candidates because they align more closely with my vision of how the government should work and what the government's priorities should be.
I said, well, the way that I can be helpful to these campaigns is by crunching numbers.
And if I help campaigns make smarter decisions about how to run their campaigns, then they're more likely to win.
And then once they win, hopefully if they win, then the same idea of you can crunch numbers for elected representatives to help them make better decisions about how to represent the people that they represent.
so I reached out to a young guy by the name of Beto O'Rourke, when he was running for US Senate seat in Texas against Ted Cruz and said hey dude, I have a statistic degree.
I'm about to get my statistics degree, and I want to volunteer for your campaign.
You know, what do I need to be doing?
and he, he responded to my cold LinkedIn message in two minutes and said, Hey, this is great.
We don't have anyone doing data for us.
we would love.
You know, can you hop on a call with my campaign advisor in 10 minutes and within 10 minutes I, yeah, I was on the phone with this campaign advisor was telling me all
the ways in which they had not set up proper, data analysis or clean, I mean, like, they had not even thought about how data was gonna come into play in their campaign.
so I was looking at a more difficult task than I anticipated.
I thought I was gonna be interning for someone who was already running this stuff.
but in recruiting some of my friends and sending emails out through the statistics department, the computer science department, offering the opportunity to volunteer for this campaign, I got a lot more interest than I anticipated.
And that was, it was so much so that instead of actually doing data science for the Beto O'Rourke campaign.
Very quickly I was managing a group of dozens of people who wanted to do data science for the beta order campaign.
Um, so we.
Expanded our map and offered help to every congressional democrat, running in Texas in 2018 and said, hey, we can offer you volunteer data help.
We have a lot of people who are willing to provide it.
and I was overseeing this group that was now involved in eight or nine campaigns in the 2018 midterm cycle.
so by the end of the cycle, I, and some of the people who've been most involved kind of took a step back and said, okay, well we've obviously stumbled into.
A missing piece of the political campaign ecosystem, which is that campaigns, even the largest campaigns, I mean, Beto O'Rourke went on to
become the most expensive US Senate race at the time, raised $80 million and he didn't have data support eight months before election day.
so on top of Beto, we were helping,
If you think that he didn't have the right data infrastructure, everyone was running smaller campaigns below that.
Congressional city council, you know, state, state government.
so there's all these campaigns that need this help, but also we found out there are a lot of people.
With that skillset who are willing to volunteer it because they believe in the campaign, they believe in the cause.
The same way that some people go knock on doors and some people go make phone calls, some people write postcards.
We found people who are willing to do data analysis as volunteers for campaigns they believe in so we created Bluebonnet Data, which
is a nonprofit that is devoted to bridging this gap between the campaigns that need help and the people that are willing to provide it.
and for the last seven-ish years now.
we've been fulfilling this mission and recruiting and training people who have a background in data analytics, on how to apply that background to the campaign world.
And then matching them with campaigns where they can get to work, they can roll their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and actually do the real work of being part of a political campaign.
Um, we've been very proud.
At this point that we've deployed, over 1500 fellows in our, couple years of existence closer to 1600.
Um, they've helped campaigns in 45 states, at every level of the ballot.
And, yeah, there's a lot more work to do in front of us, but people keep raising their hands because they want to apply their skillset to campaigns that they believe are worth fighting in.
Priten: And how do you view the relationship between, the work that you'll provide through Bluebonnet, and your larger, drive to make, institutions more representative?
Nathán: Yeah.
so one thing that I think some people.
Miss when they're thinking about the model of Bluebonnet is okay.
Yeah.
You guys are the data guys.
You guys are the numbers people.
you help run campaigns more intelligently by looking at numbers, and we do do that, but we're not just the numbers people.
We are the people.
the most important asset that we are providing to campaigns are smart, dedicated people.
Who have data analysis skills in their toolkit.
But really when we're bringing in these people into the campaign world, we might be kind of diverting them from the Meta, Google, Amazon, pipeline, and instead keeping their brains in the.
Pro-democracy space and the, progressive ecosystem.
and those people, once they volunteer through Bluebonnet, then they say, oh, well that was really fun.
I'm gonna keep working in the political space.
And they go on to work for, political, like data groups as full-time workers.
They go on to work for political campaigns full-time.
They go on to work for members of Congress.
and I think how we are making.
Our government more representative is by getting these smart, motivated young people and showing them how they can make an impact in the political
system and the civics space so that they then devote their careers to that instead of to, optimizing cost per click, for Facebook or something like that.
Priten: the projects you're working on all intersect so deeply with some of the work that, we care about.
at Academy First Little Civics.
but I'd love, to wrap up with three quick questions.
Um, the first is, there's a lot of disillusionment about institutions, especially democratic institutions, not only nationally, but globally.
but what gives you hope to keep trying to make, democracy more democratic?
Nathán: Well, on the one hand, it's the only way out is to keep trying.
the only way out is through, and if we give up, you can never get it back.
So, I don't know, I don't know if that gives me hope.
That keeps me going.
what gives me hope is I think the candidates that I've seen that are most clear-eyed about the.
Size of the task in front of us have been younger candidates, you know, and those candidates because they see how gargantuan of task we
have ahead of us are better at connecting and explaining with everyday people, here's what we need to do in order to build a better society.
And so some of the exciting.
Young candidates that you can, you know, AOC is a great example, great communicator, very clear about her values.
I think even though not everyone shares her political,
you know, construction and her, her vision.
I think no one can fault her for being someone who doesn't stand by her values.
and I think that is a really, really great source of respect for people, even when you disagree politically that you can still respect someone for having core values and standing by them.
Um, Zohran Mamdani, who is the odds on favorite to become the New York City mayor?
also kind of.
Generational talent communicator.
do I agree with every single one of his policies?
No.
But he has created this wellspring of enthusiasm about the democratic process that you just don't see in other places.
once you bring people in by getting them excited about your campaign, he's actually leveraged that into.
Deploying people to make New York City a better place even before he's won, so he's been able to tap into and harness this people power.
That gives me hope, like makes me more optimistic.
If we find people who are able to do that, then we can start to make the world a better place even before you win your election.
I think that that is like such a clear sign that someone.
Is in it for the right reasons and like has their heart in the right place, is that they just care about the place that they want to represent.
They love the place they wanna represent, and they can talk about how they're gonna make that place a better place to live in plain English in a way that people can understand and get excited about.
Priten: if.
Youth, who are listening to this want, to get involved and help make some of these things possible and real, what would your piece of advice be to them, and how can they make institutions more representative?
Nathán: Yeah, I would start by thinking really locally about, you know, what is an institution around me that impacts me and their.
For that I can impact this institution in return.
Uh, you can think about government, you can think about, you know, your city council, your, city council district, your state legislative, district, your state senate district.
if you find in one of these government capacities, someone who is fighting for the things that you care about.
Reach out and join their campaign and figure out how you can support them.
if there aren't people who are fighting for the things that you care about, raise your hand, you know, do it yourself.
Um, there is a really great organization called Run for Something, I believe.
The, URL is run for something.net, where you can get, step-by-step instructions on, hey, you want to fix a problem.
Here's how you do it.
Here's how you run for your county commission.
Here's how you run for your school board.
Here's how you run for State House.
instead of, looking around for someone else to save you, for someone else to do the work.
if you feel strongly, you don't even have to be perfect.
You just need to have convictions about.
Why you want to make this part of your life better.
And it can be government, it can be, your local YMCA board.
it just, any organization where you can have an impact in a small area of your life, just go for it.
Priten: Thank you to Nathan for the conversation and for showing us how collective power can be used to change lives for the better.
Nathan's work in representative institutions in grassroots movements like Harvard Forward shows us that change happens when people engage locally and demand accountability from the institutions that shape their lives.
And while Nathan and I spoke mainly about civics, his thoughts on institutional governance directly apply to better decision making in schools, including unethical technology.
Stay posted for more on Academy for Social Civics and our core focus areas in upcoming episodes.
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