Instead, Sarasota’s SEE Alliance offers training in political engagement.
By Tyler Oldano
Original Air Date: July 12, 2024
Host: Inside an office building on South Orange Ave. in downtown Sarasota, there’s a summer camp a bit different than most. Instead of going to the local museum or a swimming pool, this group of high school students take field trips to school board meetings and candidate debates. WSLR’s Tyler Oldano spent a day at this camp, and reports how it’s creating the next generation of political activists.
Tyler Oldano: At this summer camp, the floors and tables are covered with art supplies. This isn’t simple arts and crafts though. Over a dozen campers lean over handmade signs for an upcoming school board rally. Activities like these are commonplace in the Creating Awesome Movements With Purpose, or CAMP program, which looks to help train the next generation of student activists right here in Sarasota County. At its helm is a recent graduate of a local high school. Zander Moricz is now executive director of the Social Equity through Education Alliance.
Zander Moricz: We set up this summer camp with the idea that it wouldn’t be a summer camp just to have a summer camp, and it wouldn’t be a summer camp to entertain young people. It would be a summer camp to help young people become involved in a movement that inspired them, and it help them actually move that movement forward.
TO: Moricz is no stranger to the world of student activism. He helped found the Social Equity through Education or see alliance in 2022, focusing on the controversial choices made by schools in Sarasota, such as how they apply the Don’t Say Gay law and Title 9. Now, he’s taking that experience and passing it down to the next generation of difference makers.
ZM: We selected some of the brightest and kindest and most intelligent and instinctual and empathetic young people I’ve ever met in my life. It makes me feel so behind, like they’re all so brilliant and they know things at 15 and 16 that I’m just learning now, and it’s so exciting to be around them.
TO: The lectures cover a wide range of topics, from activism-heavy skills like canvassing and speech writing, to more broad lessons like talking comfortably with adults. Despite the serious nature of the issues, Moricz and the other counselors like to keep it light. Music plays during activities, campers joke with each other, and hugs are exchanged to show support. Moricz says that there’s often a barrier surrounding movement work, but it shouldn’t be that way.
ZM: Part of the problem with movement work has always been that people feel like they need to be invited or called into the movement, when in reality, anyone and everyone should wake up knowing the movement wants them and needs them to survive.
Kenedy Cole, right, lines up to quiz school board candidates.
TO: One of the students who felt that call to activism is 15-year old camper Kenedy Cole. He’s been involved with the school board since 2021, but he didn’t have a driver’s license, and sometimes found it challenging to go to the meetings that directly impacted him as a high school student. The camp not only provided him with an opportunity to go to meetings, but be an active participant as well. Just Thursday, Cole and other campers spoke at a school board debate in front of a room packed wall to wall with onlookers. He asked a question directly to the candidates, citing his own personal experience with anti-semitic graffiti at schools. He says that the SEE Alliance helped make his questions to board candidates more impactful.
Kenedy Cole: I came up with it, and then I applied some of the techniques I’ve learned here at camp to craft my question to be easier for everyone, not just the candidates, but everyone listening to understand how I can craft my question to be the best suited it can be, and that was and is top is skills like that that I learned that I knew to a point, but a faster as being a part of this that really have served me well
TO: And Cole says the impacts of his training go beyond just the world of politics.
KC: Those types of skills, no matter what field you go into, are incredibly valuable. And their skills that me, someone who loves activism and war and politics in general, those are skills that I will definitely 100% be using in my day-to-day life in the future as an adult. So by cultivating them at such a young age, I mean miles ahead.
TO: Cole says camp helps with more than just the material aspects of activism as well. It fosters a community of young people who are passionate about the work they do and want to make changes locally and beyond It’s a place that Cole looks forward to coming to whenever he can.
KC: I come in at 9 or 10:00 in the morning every single morning, and I’m happy to be here. I see energetic people ready to work. I am just so overjoyed because I get to work on stuff that matters
TO: Cole, Moricz, as well as many of the other campers and staff are either currently students or alumni of the Sarasota County School District, and are directly impacted by the issues they’re challenging, but the overarching goals of the camp go beyond just the local school system. It’s that focus on the local environment that Moricz says is key for more youth participation in politics overall.
ZM: The school board issue is really the gateway into saving Florida itself. If less than half of the currently eligible and registered young voters in the state of Florida voted, elections in every single district in the state would change and the entire state’s political makeup would change, and then the entire country’s political makeup would change. And so to secure or to change everything about the way Americans live their daily lives, we just need to turn out the youth vote in Florida.
TO: Reporting in Sarasota, Tyler Oldano, WSLR.
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