Ignite, like many other advocacy groups, is also trying to combat the entrenched idea that women, especially young women, should “wait their turn” to enter politics.
In a keynote address, Mónica Ramírez, president of Justice for Migrant Women and founder of Esperanza, an immigrant women’s rights initiative at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the students: “You are not our leaders of tomorrow. You are our leaders of today.” Then she instructed them to stand and chant, “I am enough, and I am what this world needs.”
“That was life-changing,” said Maddy Garber, 16, a high school junior in Lancaster who wants to serve in Congress and eventually run for president.
“You’re kind of told from a young age, especially as a woman and a girl: ‘You aren’t good enough to run for president. There’s never been one. Why should there?’” Ms. Garber said. “You just have to remind yourself you are enough. You are worth as much as you want to give.”
Researchers and advocates have long understood that representation, in gender and race, begets more representation: More women and people of color getting elected, for example, will encourage more women and people of color to run. The same is, in theory, true of young people.
“I think it’s about breaking the cycle,” said Jenna Fawcett, 20, a junior at Wilmington College in southwestern Ohio who started an Ignite chapter there. “I think that young people are afraid or not ready to run for office because they don’t see a lot of young people. So if we just get the brave few that are ready to do it and stepping up, which I think we are seeing more and more, that’ll encourage it.”
To an extent, what groups like Ignite are doing is harnessing the organic energy of a generation that has grown up under multiple existential threats.
