KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEW, PART THREE

GREG BENNICK: Nice. Very nice. Okay. So, coins are one part of it for you. Tell me about the political side of your reality because there's an intersection too, that we're going to talk about today.

KELLEN HOARD: There's an intersection. One of them, I don't know if it's one you're referencing is how I got started in politics. I was at Summer Seminar, in 2017. I was 13 years old. I was sitting at a small table with some old men who were coin collectors and we were talking coins. One of them turned to me out of the blue and conspiratorially tells me, "Did you know Obama personally owns nuclear weapons?" I was 13 at that time. I was like, "That doesn't sound right, but I'm not a hundred percent sure." So I went back to the dorm, I was saying at Google, "Does Obama own nukes?"

And obviously he doesn't own nukes. But in order to fact check that I started reading journals to figure out what was true and what wasn't. The more journals I read, the more hooked I got on it. This was in 2017 when there was a lot of political upheaval going on. I realized that what I was reading about was not only impacting just the world at large, but also me and the people I cared about. What I was reading in these pages in politics had pretty direct, substantive, tangible implications on my life and in my community. And not just at the federal level where a lot of people were looking, but the state level, especially. That's where the day-to-day stuff was happening.

Around that time, I got involved with March for Our Lives, when those walkouts were happening in schools. From there, there was a point at which I put my phone number into some kind of form, truly accidentally. And someone called me and said, "Hey, are you one of Manka Dhingra's interns?" Manka Dhingra was my State Senator at the time. And I said, "No, but tell me more." So, I ended up as one of her interns. From there on I got involved on the campaign side of politics.

And then later, as a result of the connections from the campaigns into the policy side, which we can talk about more if you want to, and at the state level.

GREG BENNICK: Yes, absolutely. I would love to hear about all of this. I think all of this is fascinating because I could ask you, "What do you collect?" And you say, "Indian cents." I say, "Great. Thanks everybody." And the interview is five seconds long. Or, we can find out more actually about you. I think it'll be great to build connection.

KELLEN HOARD: Okay! Well then sure, we'll go into a brief history of Kellen's political experience. Basically, after the campaign was over, I got hooked up with this group called the Legislative Youth Advisory Council here in Washington State, and they are codified in state law as the official youth advisory body to the state legislature. It's a two-year term. I was appointed. In my second year I became the Chair of the council. It's 22 young people from around the state who work closely with the legislature. During my chair year with the state agencies, we really expanded out to work with the Department of Health, and Department of Children, Youth and Families and the schools and everybody else to really provide that perspective, which is so often needed in policy making. When you are making policy without young people engaged, especially policy about young people, you end up with gaps and less effective policy, and less informed policy and less political support for your policy from the community.

So, there's a real opportunity there to get youth engaged that way. I was involved with that for quite a while and that really snowballed into a number of different things. A couple of the main highlights. One was that I got engaged with different campaigns, at different levels and had a great time doing that. The other one was that I was the Student Editor of my newspaper in high school. Especially my senior year, when I was Editor and Co-Editor-in-Chief. Coming back from the pandemic and I said, "Let's go bold on this story. Let's not just do fluff." The school district did not take kindly to that. The District Communications Director made it be known that we were no longer student journalists who were allowed to speak to our own teachers or any district employees without her permission.

And we found that pretty unconscionable, to say, "Hey, you just can't tell public employees they can't speak to their students." So, we got lawyers involved. We did a public pressure campaign, private pressure campaign, and got the policy overturned. The employee left the district later and we won a National First Amendment Award. That got me really involved with student free press, which is a whole separate tangent, which we will talk about sometime. But the long and the short of it is that, since the 1980's, the Supreme Court has ruled that schools can censor student journalists or students for pretty much any reason. They technically had to have a pedagogical reason, but that's super arbitrary.

In effect, principals and school administrators will censor student journalists. Because they're embarrassed about what some of the students are writing, or perhaps, they just don't like it. Well, maybe they're writing about teen pregnancy or maybe they're writing about bad school infrastructure or maybe they're writing about anything, and if the principal doesn't like it? It gets censored. I think that's wrong, both on a moral level because students have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. And also on a practical level, we're trying to raise students to be young citizens, and so, by discouraging them from talking about the issues of the day, you are actually hurting your ability to do that. Also on a practical level, as local media dies, as local news outlets shutter constantly, student journalists are filling that void.

One in ten statehouse reporters today are student journalist. They're the ones covering their school boards and local communities. So, if we're censoring them arbitrarily, we're doing even more damage to local news. So, I've been involved with this movement called the New Voices Movement to really go state-by-state in state legislatures and pass laws which counteract the Supreme Court ruling and say, "Hey, student journalists have the same free speech rights as the rest of us." Of course, they can't be libelous or slanderous or break school rules or the law. There are exceptions, of course. They can't evade privacy but they have the same free speech rights.

Then also their teachers can't be reprimanded or fired for just defending those rights, which is often a problem you run into. So, I got really engaged with that. My home state of Washington already has one of the laws, but last year I was looking around. I had a background in lobbying through the youth council and through other non-profits. I've worked extensively with a number of different non-profits. So, I had a background in advocacy. I said, what would be a fun challenge? And I landed on West Virginia, which is about the most different state as you can get from Washington politically.

I called up a state senator there and he and I discussed it. We disagreed on just about everything except for this. I gave him a bill text. He liked the bill. He'd actually sponsored a similar one before and we got it passed in a couple of months. That was really kind of great. I've continued that work as well. What I really see with policy is that there's an opportunity at the state and local level, especially as an individual, to have a huge amount of impact. At the federal level, as an individual, you have relatively little power. It's at such a huge scale. At the state and local level, individuals can do so much. It's truly a pretty fascinating amount.

When I was in high school during the pandemic, mental health was a big issue. There was a huge mental health struggle, especially among young people. I heard this from young people I was talking to, especially through the Youth Council. And so, I talked with the state representative here in Washington state and we wrote up a bill text that would expand mental health access to a million students around the state. She sponsored the bill and I think like seventy days later, we passed it. It was just me as an individual, right? But by bringing my community together around this, we were able to get it passed. That's not really something you see at the federal level as well. So, then there was that.

And then the more recent kind of political development, even beyond nonprofit work I was doing, I've worked with nonprofits like PEN America in college who do freedom of speech work as well. I was working on their academic freedom team to protect classrooms from legislative interference at the university level, working with the Democratic Attorney General's Association to raise money for candidates there. But I was recently appointed to the board of something called Washington Conservation Action. So, it's the board of the leading environmental nonprofit in Washington state.

And how I ended there was a little odd. Basically, one of my main areas I work with, with nonprofits and with elected officials and private sector officials is getting young people engaged, right? And this is a totally nonpartisan thing, but it's in my view, young people really have a different system of thinking to contribute to organizations. So, what I say to nonprofits is, "If you don't have someone under 25 on your board of your nonprofit, you are missing opportunity and you're missing risk by not having that system of thinking represented on your board." It's not just a different life experience, but actually a different approach to the world, right?

If you're a private sector leader, you don't need necessarily young people on your board, but you should have them, people under 25, throughout your organization, talking to your C-suite leadership regularly. Once, twice a month, you should have someone in marketing and sales and HR, someone under 25 talking to your leadership team and saying, "Here's what we're seeing." If you're a public leader, like a public official, you should be going to schools once or twice a month and having a dialogue with students, not just talking at them, but having a dialogue. You should have a youth advisory council advising you on your role and your campaign. You should have young interns engaged.

Having young people allows you access to new opportunities and to new opportunities in line with your mission. And it saves you from systemic risk and demographic blindness. So, I ended up, you know, making that pitch to the environmental nonprofit. I ended up on their board and that's been an insightful way to look at state politics. But also, I've continued that work even beyond that, I co-founded the Civically Engaged Youth Council through the Seattle City Club. I don't know if you've encountered them ever. They do civil dialogue work to really try and help to make sure that we're getting young people into positions of authority, getting them a seat at the table.

And that applies to coins too, for that matter, but that's a separate thing as well. But getting young people to sit at the table so that they can help guide this forward and actually make better policy, make better organizations, make better society. So that's a long answer. I hope that was what you're looking for, but that's what I've been interested in.

GREG BENNICK: I love it. You and I are kindred spirits and not to throw this interview off the rails by telling you Greg's life story. And I hope that people are still with us. Anyone who's still with us and watching at this point are exactly our people, right? So, there was a law on the books in the city of Seattle called the Teen Dance Ordinance for many years. Which prevented all ages music shows from happening. This is going to be a 30 second version of a three-hour explanation. But my friends and I didn't think that that was fair. We think that art should be able to be accessed by people of all ages.

So, my friends and I petitioned and talked to people and tried to get meetings with city council members and talked to the mayor for many years. And the long story short is that the law was replaced by a law called the All Ages Dance Ordinance, which I wrote with my friend Dave Whitson, submitted to the city, passed through. The current law on the books in the City of Seattle that governs all ages music and allows access to the arts for people of all ages is the law that I wrote with my friend Dave. So, you and I are kindred spirits.

KELLEN HOARD: That's great. I mean, that's the thing, right? You have an ability as an individual or a group of people to, (bring about change). They're literally closer to you, these elected officials. They have a smaller constituency. So, you have amplified power and they're often part-timers. Like that's a big part of this as well. This is not the main thing. State legislators, they do this a couple months a year. These aren't professional year-round politicians. These are people who are often enmeshed in their communities to a certain level. They have that somewhat higher level of responsiveness. So, I am so glad to hear that. That is so neat.

GREG BENNICK: Yeah, it's fun. And what I love in listening to you is that this is the embodiment, the perfect example, of one person can make a difference, which often sounds like just such like a trite thing to say. It's so true. Especially in the context of what we're talking about. You really can. If you see something that you don't like, something you do like, you want more of, through your voice, amplifying your voice, you can go out and transform your world. There's no question about it.

KELLEN HOARD: The walls of the political institutions are less high than you think.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

To watch the complete video, see:
Kellen Hoard Interviewed for the NNP by Greg Bennick (https://youtu.be/tBb-Bt4NR8k)

To read the complete transcript, see:
Kellen Hoard Interviewed for the NNP by Greg Bennick (Transcript) (https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/641580)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n41a24.html)
KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEW, PART TWO (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n40a13.html)

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