‘Young People Are Going to Fix Our Democracy’

The Chronicle of Philanthropy | By The Chronicle Staff

Future Caucus president Layla Zaidane talks about how Gen Z and millennial lawmakers cross the aisle to find solutions. Case in point: The removal of Confederate iconography from Mississippi’s flag.

If anyone’s well-positioned to beat back toxic political polarization in America, it’s millennials and Gen Zers, says Layla Zaidane, CEO of the Future Caucus, a group that supports young lawmakers in Congress and state legislatures.

“Young people are going to fix our democracy,” said Zaidane in an interview with the Chronicle. They come to political office with a public-service mindset, determined to fix something in their community as quickly and efficiently as possible. “Very rarely is the most efficient way possible to just plug your ears and yell at the other side,” she added. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Millennials and Gen Z state lawmakers authored 40 percent of bipartisan bills passed in 2023, Zaidane noted, even though young leaders make up only 25 percent of legislatures. “It’s not just that they have this desire to solve problems and to get things done,” she said. “They’re actually punching above their weight.”

Zaidane spoke with Chronicle deputy opinion editor Nandita Raghuram as part of The Commons in Conversation, a new interview series featuring leaders in philanthropy and nonprofits working to bring Americans together and strengthen communities. The Commons is special project from the Chronicle exploring America’s toxic divides, solutions, and the implications for nonprofits and philanthropy.

The 11-year-old Future Caucus (formerly known as the Millennial Action Project) has served more than 1,800 lawmakers and now works in 34 states and Congress. Zaidane spoke with Raghuram about its work to help lawmakers find bipartisan solutions and build the friendships and trust needed to work together. They also talked about the success of caucus members on various pieces of legislation, including a Mississippi law the stripped Confederate iconography from the state flag.

You can see the full conversation on the Chronicle YouTube channel or with free event registration on LinkedIn.

Below is an A.I.-generated transcript of the interview.

NANDITA RAGHURAM: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining the third episode of the Commons In Conversation, a series of interviews that Chronicle just launched about the ways in which nonprofits and philanthropy are working to close divisions that persist across the country. Those divisions can include politics, of course, but also race, gender, age and location.

My name is Nandita Raghuram. I’m the deputy opinion editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. And today I’m talking to Layla Zaidane, who’s the president and CEO of Future Caucus, a nonpartisan organization that helps young lawmakers in Congress and state legislators collaborate with one another across the aisle to both bridge divides and enact bipartisan legislation. It does that in three ways.

First, it connects young leaders to each other through networking events and social events, so that can include ax throwing nights, happy hours, book clubs — that sort of thing.

Second, it also provides support, training, and professional development to the young leaders to help them both in their role as policymakers and kind of train them on their bridge-building skills.

And third, it also helps them create bipartisan policy solutions by connecting the young leaders to both policy experts and other policymakers, fellow policymakers, so they can talk through solutions that have worked in one state that might also work where they live.

Layla, Hello. Thank you for joining us. I’d like to start off by asking you why young people? Why does Future Caucus believe young people are a key part to fighting polarization? Because obviously, a lot of people have tried this. A lot of people have failed. So I’m wondering why Future Caucus thinks young people are uniquely qualified to succeed when so many others have failed.

LAYLA ZAIDANE: Well, first of all, thank you so much to the Chronicle of Philanthropy for inviting me to talk about my very favorite topic, which is how young people are going to fix our democracy.

“And that introduction was spot on, right? We started Future Caucus actually 11 years ago yesterday. We just literally just had a birthday cake to celebrate our anniversary. And we started it because we saw toxic political polarization as the greatest threat to our generation. The more that elected leaders and decision makers can’t agree on how to move forward on critical problems — everything from climate and energy to the economy, the national debt and education, you name it — the more those problems get worse, they metastasize. And it’s our generation that gets left holding the bag.

“And so we thought, if this is the biggest threat to our generation, we ought to be a part of the solution. And so Future Caucus was born. And I think what we started to see was that young people who are just stepping into political office, people who have a public service orientation about them, really are doing it because they want to fix something in their community. And there’s this interest in: How do we just get this done as quickly as possible, no matter who I have to work with. There’s sort of this willingness to transcend some of the artificial binaries that keep our political system kind of stuck.

“We started supporting young people to do just that, to act on those good instincts. And our sort of long-term theory of change is the more that we can create the structures and mechanisms for young people to get really good at doing it today to get things done today, the more and more as younger people sort of rise up the ranks into higher positions of leadership, the more they’re not swimming against the culture of toxic partisanship, the more instead they are setting the culture of pluralism and collaboration.

“We think young people face the biggest threat from the problem, and so they ought to be part of building the solution.”

NANDITA: I’d like to talk more about why they are really buying into the fact that they are the solution. So I wonder where that mindset comes from. How are the young leaders Future Caucus works with encountering polarization in their day to day work? Why have they bought into the idea that they need to fix this?

LAYLA: I mean, if you think about just how we engage in our lives with technology and the way we get things done, there’s sort of an efficiency or a speed — an entrepreneurial mindset, maybe — of how how we get from point A to point B, sometimes literally, right? If you want a taxi somewhere, you open your phone and you can call an Uber and you’ll get a car. And I think that the way we live our lives is full of choice and it’s full of efficiency.

“And so as young people are buying into this idea to solve problems, it’s let’s try to do it the most efficient way possible. And very rarely is the most efficient way possible to just like plug your ears, scream at the other side, and only use like half the available information to create a complete solution. That just doesn’t make sense.

“We did a report in 2023 that shows that 40 percent of all bipartisan legislation that gets signed into law by the governor — not just introduced — was written by a young person. And what’s remarkable about that number is young people are only 25 percent of state legislatures. And so it’s not just that they have this desire to solve problems and to get things done. They’re actually punching above their weight when it comes to translating that intent into action.”

NANDITA: It sounds like they’re having an outsized influence on the bipartisan legislation that’s being passed.

“I’d love to talk about some examples of that legislation. One example that Future Caucus talks about of its work in action is one effort in Oklahoma to pass a needle exchange program. Can you explain what happened there? And how Future Caucus members were able to transcend polarization in order to pass legislation? Like what did they actually do to get something like that done?”

LAYLA: Nandita, you sort of set the stage with that, right? We start with building trusted relationships. And that is the deficit that we have: we don’t trust each other. And so let’s start there; before we start talking about policy solutions, let’s start with the trust.

“We have a chapter of Future Caucus right now in 34 states. Each one is led by a young Democrat and a young Republican, and that becomes the vehicle by which people can meet each other and get to know each other. And from those working relationships come policy agendas come outcomes.

“In Oklahoma, we were thrilled to see them actually launched the Future Caucus there during the pandemic, when it was really hard and isolating to get to know your colleagues. This became a place where the younger members of the legislature were able to find community and find connection in a time where, let’s face it, a lot of us across the country were feeling kind of lonely and kind of scared.

“The Future Caucus for a couple of years became this really great place for them to build connections with their colleagues. And what arose naturally was this one conversation which you mentioned about needle exchange, a harm-reduction idea that one of our Democratic members, Senator Carri Hicks, had really wanted to champion. And she is a Democrat in a super-majority Republican state. And so she knew if she was going to get something across the finish line, she would need she would need to make it bipartisan.

“She went to her fellow Future Caucus member, Daniel Pae, and they had a conversation. She said, “Listen, I know you care about public health. What do you think if we teamed up on a solution to reduce harm in our communities through this, albeit kind of controversial, program to exchange needles.” And Rep. Pae is super open to the idea. He also really wanted to solve this problem.

“And what he started doing is going out and talking to people, and he discovered that police were overwhelmingly getting injured by needle stick injuries. In fact, one in three police officers in Oklahoma would be injured by a needle stick injury. And so he came back and he said, “OK, let’s do this together.” They passed exactly that bill. They advanced it. They got the police union to endorse it as a you know, “back the blue” solution.

“It absolutely would not have happened if they hadn’t worked together. That bill has already saved thousands of lives. And so you see this really tangible outcome of lives being saved, arising from friendship, from building trust, from working together. And they had to be patient. They didn’t become friends so that they could pass the specific bill. It wasn’t transactional like that, but it’s a logical outcome of what happens when you have that foundation.”

NANDITA: Sure. And I think, like, it’s interesting that you say start with trust. I think maybe sometimes that the building of the trust is the hard part. So how do you build that trust? How do you bring people together, and what are you doing to forge these relationships?

LAYLA: Nandita, have you ever been on a bad first date?

NANDITA: Oh, yeah.

LAYLA: Okay, so have I. And what made it bad for me was they did not ask me any questions at all. Right. And that is not the start to a good relationship. And so the advice we give everyone is: Be curious, lean into that. Create the conditions for curiosity. It sounds so simple, right? Be interested in other people and create opportunities to let that blossom. But it takes reminding sometimes.

“We’ve seen Future Caucuses take that advice by doing really fun and silly things, like having a night out where they go ax-throwing to actually just having like private dinners where they get to know one another. We’re not even there. They just do it in behind closed doors to just get to know one another. And we’ve seen some really fantastic relationships arise from that.

“I think it also starts to build this like glimmer around the group that is now forming. Most people run for office because they want to be effective; they want to govern. They want to solve problems for their community. And if they start to see a vehicle that is actually being effective, that’s having fun while doing it in the midst of an otherwise kind of toxic environment, that becomes a way to grow the circle as well. Even if it’s just two people getting dinner and getting to know one another, starting from that place of curiosity is critical.

NANDITA: A lot of that is connecting lawmakers within states. I know part of your work is also connecting lawmakers from different states to talk through policy solutions that have worked in one state that might work in another. One example that I thought was really interesting was when you brought together lawmakers from Colorado and Vermont to talk through a criminal justice reform bill. Can you walk us through what solutions they discussed? What those discussions led to and essentially what made it work?

LAYLA: This is one of the coolest ways that the Future Caucus network has grown over the years. We started just with Congress, right? So just a small number of people in a caucus here in D.C. And from that, we’ve grown to 34 states in the past 11 years. Now we’ve served more than 1,800 legislators, which means that we have people all across the country. And as we started sort of investing and building these individual stars, we started to realize like, we don’t just have stars, we have a constellation. And that is one of the coolest parts of the work.

“In Colorado, they worked together within their state to pass a bipartisan bill that essentially enabled incarcerated individuals to get time off for educational attainment. It was a criminal justice reform bill that they were able to pass in a bipartisan way. You know, the impact on reducing recidivism is tremendous cost savings to the states.

“And in Vermont, they were starting to have questions about: How do we make a more fair and efficient justice system in our state? And we were able to say, “Hey, we’ve got a great resource for you over in Colorado. Let’s set up a meeting.” They ended up having a briefing from the bill authors in Colorado. Vermont adopted the legislation and introduced it in their state house, and they’re working to move it forward now.

“That kind of cross-pollination is super fascinating. And it doesn’t just happen in states where it’s a blue state to a blue state. We’ve had Democrats in one state learn from Republicans in another and actually invite that person into their state. That recently happened when a Democrat in Kansas invited a Republican from Montana to share about a housing reform bill. And so that cross-pollination feels organic; it feels impactful. The Future Caucus network is really built like the plumbing for these amazing, good bipartisan ideas to just enter the bloodstream of what politics can be.

NANDITA: Are they sharing legislation? Are they also sharing tips for how to talk to your colleague from across the aisle? What ideas are they sharing with one another?

LAYLA: The short answer is yes — everything. We launched last year something called the Innovation Lab, which is essentially a policy accelerator for young legislators to learn about bipartisan opportunities, learn about what the actual bills do and the impact, as well as how do you build coalitions around that? Who are the groups to get involved? What’s the fiscal note?

“So the Innovation Lab is a great way to catalyze policy. But we’ve also learned that some of the basic parts about being a legislator are: How do you negotiate? How are you communicating with constituents effectively? How do you balance having a kid and having to go to work and get child care? Some of those wraparound dimensions of public service are also really important to connect lawmakers around.

“I think it’s really important to recruit good candidates and good leaders and get the right people in office. And it’s really, really important to retain good talent once they’re in there — these promising, rising young leaders who face burnout, who are at risk of not being able to continue their terms. Having a network like this one and sharing the information about how to make it work — that’s a really, really key piece in ensuring these green shoots of a healthier democracy sort of blossom into gardens that really are, I think, the future of what we’re all hoping to see when it comes to our democracy.

NANDITA: I know we’re almost out of time, but I think this example is really interesting and relates to what you’re saying about how sometimes this bridge-building work is a long game. I know there is an effort in Mississippi, I believe, to remove Confederate iconography from the state flag. And I know Future Caucus leaders were able to get that through. And I’d love to just hear quickly before we wrap up how that happened and how it took some years of work to make it make it happen.

LAYLA: This is what happens when you trust leaders, right? In Mississippi in 2017, Rep. Jeramy Anderson and Rep. Toby Barker, a Democrat and Republican, decided to launch the Mississippi Future Caucus. They sent an invite to all of the young people — anyone 45 years old and younger in Mississippi who’s in the state house — and they say, “Come to dinner,” because that’s like the number one organizing tool: you’ve got to feed people and then they’ll come.

“They have this dinner at which they get to know each other. They’re laughing. They’re joking. And around the dessert course, they start going around and saying, “OK, well, what are some things that we could work on together?” And they’re throwing out, you know, things like tax policies, housing ideas, education. And they’re sort of nodding like, “Yeah, yeah, that might be good.” And somebody says, “Let’s work on changing the state flag,” which at the time in 2017 had Confederate iconography on it.

“And a chill comes over the room that’s like, “This is a super polarizing issue. This feels like this could break the group. I don’t know if it’s something we can handle.” And so they set that aside. And instead of trying to force an outcome, they instead invest in building the container; they continue to meet. They continue to build relationships. They notch up some some easy wins that they can work on together, sort of build that sense of group identity.

“And in 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, when a racial reckoning spread across the country, what that looked in Mississippi was a renewed call to change the state flag and remove the Confederate iconography. And one of the big differences is that by then, the Mississippi Future Caucus had been meeting for three years. They had their own Twitter handle. They had created a sense of who we are and and how we act together. And so they brought the topic up the next day, and they decided to support as a Future Caucus moving forward legislation that ultimately passed and that has led to the changing of the Mississippi state flag and the removal of that Confederate iconography.

“I just think about how three years prior to that, it was a topic too polarizing to even argue about. And fast forward to actually having action, really meaningful, impactful action, thanks to this investment and trust, this belief in pluralism and this resistance that we often have in politics to get short term wins at the expense of long term outcomes. I think the Mississippi Future Caucus is a great example of what it looks like when it when it happens, right?

NANDITA: I think that’s a good note to end on. That’s all the time we have. Thank you, Layla, for talking through this with me. It was a really fascinating conversation. And thank you to everyone else for joining the conversation.