Citizen to Candidate: Art Chang
MARCH 10, 2022
“To make a difference, you have to decide to join and belong.”
Art Chang was a mayoral candidate in New York City in 2021. We discuss his campaign and the big issues facing the City of New York. He shed light on the eviction crisis, the hurdles to adopting technology in government, and the power of joining and belonging.
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Technology Is Culture Change
Adopting technology solutions equates to culture change, which goes well beyond updating ways of working. Tech startups build things with users as their starting point and then work backwards from that. Government would have to also think of the outcome for the citizens first in order to successfully use technology. It would force leaders to be engaged and figure out what citizens need instead of thinking about what the government needs.
Joining and Belonging
To make a difference, make a decision to join and belong. Joining together on common ground is the most effective way to make change. Being a part of a team with a shared goal will help foster a sense of belonging. Finding a common purpose is essential if we are to make an active effort to fix any problem that faces us, from increasing voter turnout to saving the planet.
The Eviction Crisis
In the wake of the pandemic, many people across America are facing the threat of eviction. Homelessness comes with a stark burden on our society. For example, if a student is homeless for one year, it cuts their chances of graduating in half. Government has the power to anticipate and mitigate the eviction crisis because it has access to information such as income tax returns, and could use technology to get ahead of the issue.
FIND OUT MORE:
Art believes the key to solving our most important problems is visionary leadership. He has worked to advance democracy through NYC Votes, to improve child welfare with Casebook, to bring universal broadband and climate resiliency to the waterfront with Queens West, and to build an onramp to the tech sector for CUNY students with CUNY TAP.
Art most recently ran for Mayor of NYC in the 2021 Democratic primary based on his belief that New York City can work for everyone. Before that, his work involved creating a successful ground-up legal knowledge management program at JPMorgan Chase as a Managing Director. Prior to that, he founded and led Tipping Point Partners, a tech startup incubator that created products/companies that revolutionize work for frontline workers and the people they serve, including voter engagement, campaign finance, social services, television, publishing, fashion, e-commerce. They co-created NYC Votes, Casebook, and the CUNY Technology Apprenticeship Program. At Tipping Point, Art built a decade-long partnership with Pivotal Software, and eventually joined Pivotal to help the world’s leading financial services companies with digital transformation. His 40 year work experience spans New York City’s key industries and government.
You can follow Art on Twitter at @achangnyc
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Art Chang
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Art Chang Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Novo for supporting Future Hindsight. Novo is powerfully simple business checking. You're making something new with your business and to support you, Novo built a new kind of business checking. Get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes at novo.co/hopeful.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:23] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. We're continuing our focus on voting this week. It's a theme that's going to run through a lot of our episodes this year. It's a midterm year and it's another important and unsettling year for voting rights and American democracy. I think I've mentioned before that I'm what you might call a committed voter. I will trudge through the rain to vote in pretty small local races, but one of the biggest local races of them all is the New York City mayoral election, and last year's field of candidates almost had me, the very committed voter, totally overwhelmed. I think it was like 22 candidates. It was a huge field. I couldn't figure out who to vote for, but thankfully a friend of mine sent me a link to an online questionnaire.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:27] It was from the local news site, thecity.org. It promised to match me with my ideal candidate. I mean, the quiz was not short. It was in fact super long. But I stuck with it, and in the end it pointed me to someone I had never heard of. Art Chang was the candidate who most closely matched up with my views and priorities. Who is he? I went to his website and I saw he has office hours. What? In the middle of a pandemic, he was making himself available in a way that felt fresh and new. So I signed up, and that's how I met Art Chang for the first time in his Zoom office hours. And today I'm thrilled to have him on the podcast, in real life, sitting across from me. Art's going to give us the inside scoop on what it's like to run for office if you're not a professional politician, and hopefully he'll share some of what he's learned running for mayor to help those of us who might be thinking about running, or for us voters who'd like to know more about how the sausage gets made. Thank you for joining us.
Art Chang: [00:02:32] Thank you for having me. I'm so delighted to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:35] So I thought I would start with a little bit of psychotherapy. Tell me a little bit about your childhood. Wait, just I'm just kidding, actually. But but seriously,
Art Chang: [00:02:44] Well, isn't that where it all began?
Mila Atmos: [00:02:45] That's where it all begins. Well, so you know, a lot of us see the things we want to change, and we don't necessarily throw our hat in the ring and run for the mayor of the City of New York, which is really one of the most powerful jobs in the United States. So tell me about the moment in your thoughts, in your thought process, when you decided, I think I'm going to run for mayor. Like what happened?
Art Chang: [00:03:09] It wasn't actually a single moment, but it was a culmination of different facts that were all so extreme and so intense, and you can remember you have to go back in your memory what the pandemic was like, what it felt like. And remember that people couldn't get vaccines. There was a mask shortage. Kids couldn't go to school. There was remote learning. The economy collapsed. Chinatown nearly died. Thousands of people were dying, right? So much so that the hospitals were overflowing. We had refrigerator trucks to hold the bodies. And so when you take yourself back to that period and then you look at what happened with the Black Lives Matter protests. When George Floyd was killed was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis, people all around the country spontaneously got up and said, "This is unacceptable. We can't have this way anymore. We demand change." And what was so thrilling about that moment was that it wasn't just Black people. It wasn't just progressives. It was people of all ages, of all income brackets, of all religions coming out spontaneously to join people in the street to protest the way that our country has gone and how wrong this all was. At that moment, I said, You know, our city isn't working, it's not working for anyone. That we have to have change. That maybe for once, New York City is ready for real change. And that's why I decided to run. I said maybe I, who am a long shot candidate with zero name recognition, can somehow tell a story about how it's possible to fix the things in our city that need to be fixed to address the structural problems, the cyclical issues, and then to use it to think about how we move forward into the future instead of trying to recreate what happened in the past.
Mila Atmos: [00:05:16] You were actually going to tell me about your childhood. So tell me what makes you different as a child and your childhood that makes you think that you, even though you would be a long shot candidate, could pull this off?
Art Chang: [00:05:26] Well, you know, I think everybody's childhoods really inform who they are. Sometimes you run away from it. Sometimes you embrace it. Sometimes it changes who you are. You know, I think I have the privilege of of being somebody who had a very unusual and challenging childhood and that really shaped who I am and my worldview. My parents came to the United States from Korea, separately. They didn't know each other in the 1950s to pursue their studies. They met, they got married. They had me. I was born in 1963 in Jim Crow, Atlanta, at a time when Asian immigration was illegal, before the Civil Rights Act yhat said that all people are equal was passed. You know, in Atlanta at the time, you were either, you know, white or you're colored. And on my birth certificate, the race of the mother and the father were typed in white because they had no place for Koreans or Asians and some kind clerk listened to my mother's protest and hand-crossed out on my birth certificate "White" and wrote over "Korean." And that's a very powerful image for the kind of the world that they were in and the world as they enter. I mean, can you imagine leaving your home halfway around the world and coming to a place where all of a sudden not only do you not speak the language; not only do you look different; but actually the laws of the country do not really allow you to have fundamental rights. When I was four, we moved to Akron, Ohio, where we were the only family of color in our school.
Art Chang: [00:07:15] And I remember my mother making me watch the civil rights marches and say, This is important, you have to remember these people -- and she was pointing to Black people -- are risking their lives so that you can have a better future. That was so deeply powerful, and it remained a very vivid picture for me. And especially because also the other context, in addition to, you know, all the the anti-Asian violence, which, you know, it was just anti people of color violence that I was experiencing in my school was also compounded by the fact that I lived in a domestic violence household. My mother was beaten regularly and it called out all kinds of issues around race and class and and the role of immigrants versus the police and the school system and all the structures that were meant supposedly to, you know, protect me but actually didn't protect me. It didn't protect my mother didn't protect us as a family. And I said to myself that this is not how the world should be. And from a very, very early age, I said, I am
going to think about how to think about a different world, the world that I want to live in, a world where adults don't get to decide who's right just because they're older, but that I get to exercise my own capabilities and figuring out what to do, that adults aren't necessarily right, that the power structures aren't right, that I can figure it out and I need to forge my own path.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:53] Well, you said a lot of things here about how the system is not working and how it should, though, work for everyone. And one of the things that I've heard you say is that you wanted to deliver good governance. In fact, that if we don't deliver good governance, we erode our faith in democracy. So how would you define good governance? What does it look like to you?
Art Chang: [00:09:14] Well, in the 21st century, all policy is supported by technology. Technology allows things to be transparent. They allow things to be communicated in real time. They allow a for a two way communication. Right, that if someone communicates to you, you have the ability to communicate back and express your point of view that you're given an understanding of what these things mean. So you're able to understand how they affect your lives. And governance, by the way, is not about telling you what to do, but it is about creating a fair and equitable system that meets everybody where they are and delivers the things that they need the way that they need them, when they need them. And we don't do that. In our country our governance often works against you, and especially if you are poor, or an immigrant, person of color. It works against you.
Mila Atmos: [00:10:17] So, you know, this leads me back to your office hours, actually, I think what was really remarkable about this is that you actually made direct contact with voters in a way that makes good governance legible in a sense. You know, meeting people where they are. So what was your motivation in making yourself available in this way?
Art Chang: [00:10:37] I thought it was a powerful symbol. It was the time when I couldn't go out on the street and talk to people because we were in the throes of the pandemic. People had no way to know who I was. And so I needed to convey to people a sense of who I am and to be someone who doesn't tell but listens. Somebody who asks questions. And the important things that I hear are what people have to say, much
more so than what I have to say. And then when I say something, I want to ensure that that I speak from a point where I've heard other people and I can channel their pain and their frustration to be able to advance us even one tiny step forward.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:21] So then what did you hear in these sessions like, what was top of mind for the people who came to your office hours?
Art Chang: [00:11:28] Oh my God. The absence of direct contact from the government. If you were not a big company or even a mid-sized company, you got no immediate relief. If you were an artist, if you were LGBTQ, you got no direct relief. If you're a Chinatown merchant, you got no direct relief. And relief was months and months in coming and it finally came, but it was very little and it was late. And we look at the housing crisis and how that was accumulating and aggregating like people were going to debt for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars that they'd never going to be able to repay. No solution for that. People were hungry. We had a stand up mutual aid societies to feed our own people. How wrong is that? We were not taking care of people and we looked at society from these very, very kind of big groupings. But in fact, New York is a town of a thousand small towns. It's extremely fragmented, it always has been. So the role of government is to unify people, to unite people, to be able to work from the bottom up, to be able to meet people again where they are. And to understand all the different areas where they're vulnerable so that when you begin to offer relief, whether it's relief to small businesses or relief to artists, that the websites work. That you don't have to jump through 15 hoops, that there aren't conflicting regulations that you can smoothly and easily get the relief that you need to be able to carry on with your life for another day, week, month, until this pandemic is over.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:20] Yeah, so give me an example of what you think would have been a really easy solution during that crisis time in the beginning, in meeting people where they are, and making New York work for everyone.
Art Chang: [00:13:34] Well, the vaccine delivery. The mayor and the governor decided that they were going to focus delivery of vaccines to hospitals. But what about all the people who worked in the small health centers? What about all the people who worked in nursing homes? What about all these other people who worked in health care, who were first in line to be vaccinated but could not get the vaccine because they were only
being delivered to the large hospitals? There's something wrong about that picture. We live in the kind of the city that is so large, so geographically diverse, we have so many places. Why isn't there a system that actually says here are all the places where we have health centers? Let's push it out to them first or push it out to them in conjunction with the big hospitals. And then there are multiple systems that didn't talk to each other. Private systems and public systems. So it took a single human being, right? Hugh Ma. Right. Mr. Turbovax, to create Turbovax so that people had an easy way to find out where vaccines were available and to make appointments.
Mila Atmos: [00:14:44] What is TurboTax?
Art Chang: [00:14:47] Turbovax was the system that at its core, tied together many systems that didn't talk to each other. And so if you wanted to go and find an appointment, you could tweet at Turbovax, you could go to Turbovax's website and Turbovax would then ping all the different sites to find out where vaccines were available and just present it. Until then, there's no way to do that. There are stories I've heard of people who were calling for days for their grandparents who are unable to get vaccines, of elderly Asian people who didn't know how to read the websites because they were all in English, who had to be helped to be able to get access to these things. And then the frustration of going from one to the other to the other to the other. And Turbovax in literally in five days, he created this tool that solved problems for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers,
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Mila Atmos: [00:17:35] What was the biggest lesson that you learned from your race for mayor? Like what was the most surprising thing that you learned from running and campaigning?
Art Chang: [00:17:44] I was surprised actually at how much I loved it. Mila Atmos: [00:17:47] Oh yeah, tell me about that.
Art Chang: [00:17:48] When you run for office, you have a platform, so I could go to anybody on the street and say, Hi, I'm Art Chang. I'm running for mayor. Who are you? Where do you live? You know, I'd love to hear what what you're thinking right now. And I could go talk to anybody and 99 times out of 100, people were happy to talk. Sometimes they were a little dismissive at the beginning, but then they were able to talk, and I love that. I love talking to the strangers. I love feeling the connection with ordinary people and hearing their stories. And then very quickly, the thing that I got so often was kind of the pain, the injustice, the unfairness. And it didn't really matter what, what mode of life you came from, whether you're wealthy, whether you're a mom or a dad, or whether you had just come out of prison or homeless because I talked to those folks, talked to everybody. But you had the ability to talk to people and test whether you can actually connect with them. And that's a powerful feeling. It made me feel much more confident in myself. It made me love New York even more. It made me even want to become mayor even more. But it was really a phenomenal experience, and I highly recommend that for anyone who is not shy about talking to strangers.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:11] That's terrific. Well, you were talking about sort of the injustice and unfairness, and in some ways I feel like this is exactly how New York is. And when we talk about voting and elections, it's not really quote unquote democratic. I mean, New York City is a big blue city where the primary is really the main horse race, and very often the general election is a foregone conclusion. So it's a Big D democratic city
with a big democracy problem, in fact. So what was like the turnout and how do you make sense of that, especially now that you've spoken to people on the street and you get a better sense of like, do those people actually come out and vote -- the people who talked to you? Or what is the story that you have gleaned from your own experience?
Art Chang: [00:19:53] Turnout in New York City has historically been very low. I mean, as you know, I was on the city's campaign finance board for nine years. I was the first chair of the Voter Assistance Advisory Committee. I was the first Asian actually and only Asian to be appointed to that board. You know, New York has historically been a low voter turnout place. Typically, if you get in the high teens percentage turnout in the primaries on off years, that's a reasonably good year. Getting into the 20s is considered to be, you know, better. And then maybe on a presidential year, you might get up into the 30s or even maybe crack 40, but it's very unusual to do that. My observation from talking to people was that the turnout may not have reflected people's interests in the election. People get very jaded, right. They may talk to a politician. They may take the city survey and feel excited momentarily, but their lives are so busy and there's so many other issues and they go, "Well, what does my one vote really matter in the city that this big?" And by the way, this is not just a New York problem. This is an everywhere problem. And so I don't want to blame New Yorkers for poor turnout. But there is something fundamentally wrong with our democracy when people do not turn out to choose the people who are going to deliver government to them.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:22] Yeah, that's for sure true. I think there's also a disconnect when it comes to mayoral elections. I think people don't understand how much power this person has over your life in New York City. So it turns out that the turnout in the November election, so in the general, was 23.2%. So that's actually high, right from what you were just saying. So if you were in charge of the system, if you were to be able to change the system to like the next mayor, what would you change?
Art Chang: [00:21:47] There is no simple solution because democracy is not a simple idea. We throw that term around willy nilly without actually knowing whether we understand what it means and when students don't have civics in school in a deep and fundamental way, there's no way for people to really understand what an election is about, what the roles of the people they're electing, you know, are all about, what their powers are and how they're going to affect you. So when you have that kind of
disconnect, it is extraordinarily difficult for people to be engaged. And I look at myself and you know, there are lots of challenging issues about growing up in Ohio. But Ohio, when I was there, had an amazing education system by the time I graduated from eighth grade. I had read the state's constitution, the Federal Constitution. I had read the Declaration of Independence. I knew the architecture of the federal government and the cabinet secretaries and how they were appointed and what they did and what their relationship was between the president and Congress and the Supreme Court. And I understood how that was reflected in the state of Ohio. Now, when you have that kind of understanding, you are equipped to go forward and actually understand what these different roles do. And so you have this sort of architecture that allows you to have insights at a much smaller and much more pragmatic level.
Art Chang: [00:23:20] And by the way, there are other little things too that I think maybe surprising to people. The fact that we don't have arts education undermines our democracy or in fact, that we don't have shop or home EC in school undermines our democracy. And by that, I mean, when you actually work with something in your hands, when you work with other people to create something, you have the sense that you actually know how to make something. You know how to figure out a problem. You know how to take something which is abstract and turn it into some concrete reality. And you might fail, but you know that you can pick up and do it over again. So without things like the arts and and shop and home EC, it's very hard for people to get that intrinsic deep understanding inside of themselves that they can, that they're capable, that they will. And then when you leave out the education about civics, is it any wonder that people don't feel capable? They don't feel like politicians are responsive. They don't really have an understanding of how the levers of power actually work. I think it all comes down to some very fundamental things that are very philosophical about who we are and how we want to live our lives as as Americans and this democracy, the democracy that we wanted to find for ourselves.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:44] Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the erosion of civics education in the current age. So when you grow up, it was still alive and well, which is why I think, among other reasons, older voters are more engaged because they do understand better. So well, I wanted to talk to you about ranked choice voting because this is kind of related. It's a type of voting reform. But I have to tell you that as a person who is a very engaged voter, right? I mean, a host of civic engagement podcast, but I was totally
flummoxed. I was very confused. So doesn't a confusing system disenfranchise the voters in a way?
Art Chang: [00:25:19] Yes. And this is one of those things that was not going to be solved overnight, but the overall impetus for doing this, I think, came from all the right reasons. It's not a finished project. I think there's room for improvement. But the people who are responsible for promoting this have to see the necessity for improvement and then back to this idea of enfranchisement, then voters have to advocate for improvement of one type or another. So we'll see where this goes. But I will say this that if we keep going with this ranked choice system, eventually the 23% or 28% of people who do vote will begin to understand what it is and the power of it.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:08] Oh OK, tell me about that. What is the power of ranked choice voting?
Art Chang: [00:26:11] The power is really twofold. Number one is you get to vote for more than one candidate. How many times do you go to the poll and you see three or four candidates? And in your mind, like "Yeah, there are a couple who are OK, maybe one who's better than the others," but you kind of want to make sure that that your vote really counts. And I think what ranked choice voting does is it gives you that opportunity to say, "OK. This is my favorite candidate, but I find these other candidates acceptable. And then these other candidates I find less acceptable or unacceptable. So I don't have to pick them. But this way I get to put my the power of my vote for someone who is at least acceptable." And that's actually one of the major notions of democracy, right? That we we don't necessarily get exactly what we want, but we get something that we think is acceptable. And that's what ranked choice voting does for us.
Mila Atmos: [00:27:12] I have a question about technology because ranked choice voting in a way is a technology solution, right, for a civic problem, and you are very, very passionate about technology as a problem solving tool. And my question here is what stops us from effectively using technology in government services.
Art Chang: [00:27:33] I'm going to give you a what might be a surprising answer to this question. Ok. It has very little to do with servers and racks and software and systems and vendors, all those things are problems, but it ultimately has to do with culture, that
technology change is a cultural change. Think about tech startups and what they do and how they build things. They start from the users and the user's needs and work backwards from that. Think about government trying to do that same thing. Think about what that does to establish ways of having expertise, of ways of doing things, of systems that have already been invested in and designed, of the sort of the top down historical nature of government. You know, technology provides so much convenience to our lives, everything from, you know, delivery apps to restaurant apps to, you know, Amazon, social media. All these things were built from the user back to the company. And that is a profound difference. Think what government would have to do. Government would have to start to actually engage with people have to figure out what people need instead of thinking about what government needs. So I'll give you one very clear example. The City of New York has a tax return for every resident. So since it knows what people make, why doesn't it automate the calculation of benefits? For everything from food stamps to housing vouchers to medical assistance, to language assistance. There is no real reason, except that it just isn't done that way. So people, especially who are poor, run around from agency to agency, spending tremendous amounts of time, wasting tremendous amounts of time, and then often giving up in collecting their benefits. It would reduce so much friction if people could just get the benefits they need, so they could go on and move on with their lives and and do the things that they need to do to have, you know, better lives with greater convenience.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:01] Yeah, for sure, that's true. I think the idea is that... I think there are several ideas here why it's inconvenient in this way. One is that, you know, there are people already in place who have these jobs who determine whether you qualify or not. And so then if you made it convenient in this way, that person loses his or her job. That's one. And then to your point, people give up and then they don't collect those benefits, right? And so that's another, that's another goal. I think in some ways, like you said, sometimes the government is working against you, which is totally perverse. I mean, because the government is us or, you know, or it should be in any case, yes, right.
Art Chang: [00:30:39] But we don't think about it necessarily that way, right? As in the tax return example, so much of this comes down to fundamental data and what you actually do with it. So we know that people live in housing. We know that certain people are in threat of eviction. We could map that. We could use those numbers to start
planning for homelessness because what is homelessness? It's not having a place to live. But you know, that distinction is actually not made. We think about homeless as if, like all of a sudden they've changed the category of person they are. They're still a person. They just happen not to have a home. And so when you look at how we use data from things like affordable housing to public housing or a Section 8 housing, and we look at people who are subject to eviction notices and potential eviction for any particular reason. And then we can start to map the flow of things that lead to homelessness, which then contribute to mental health issues and substance abuse issues. We know that if a student is homeless for one year, it cuts their chance of graduating from high school in half. And so there are these longer term benefits from being able to manage this situation, and it all comes down to the data and having the data be able to go from place to place to place to place. It's another way in which our government has the information, but it's not connecting the dots.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:10] Yeah, that's so depressing when you put it like that, but so what are the biggest problems that you wish you could get to work on solving?
Art Chang: [00:32:20] Well, number one, the eviction crisis, every solution that we have pursued over the since the beginning of the pandemic has been kicking the can down the road and kicking the can down the road on the backs of tenants who are accumulating debt. And on the backs of landlords who are not receiving that money. There are many landlords who are large and well-financed. And you know, I don't feel terrible for them. But there are so many landlords who are immigrants who are using rental property as a way to invest and build their own American dream. And this is taken away from them. We don't talk about the retirees who rent out a unit in their home who use the income from that unit to pay for their property taxes and their mortgage who are at risk of foreclosure. And when it comes down to it, what frustrates me is that when we deliver government aid to tenants to pay their rent, they're paying the landlords. But the tenants still have this financial liability. They have ruined credit, they have all this debt that they're never going to repay. So there has to be a system that actually looks at the underlying fundamentals of the financial structure and has to create a way to give relief to tenants and to landlords by wiping out that obligation. To wipe out the property tax obligation for landlords, to be able to use the mechanics of the financial services system to be able to address this problem.
Art Chang: [00:33:58] And right now, no one is doing this. So we are right now evictions are back to where they were before pandemic. It is going to get far worse depending upon whose numbers you listen to. It's 500,000 people, a million people, at risk of being evicted. We have billions of dollars of accrued debt. What's going to happen to the people who have this debt? They're going to go bankrupt. So we take people who are already poor and can't sustain this, like you've just relegated them to dire poverty, where they owe money on a continuous basis to banks. Because we've also, by the way, over time, we have made bankruptcy laws much tighter. How do we actually eliminate this debt and enable them to be able to recover their credit rating and be able to move on? I want to work on creating structural changes that provide equity and justice to underserved people. And to do that, you know, it means that I'm going to have to find a place where I can make change happen or even better yet, work with someone who has set forth the mission of creating change and brings me in to be a change agent.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:13] Well, you're already a change agent just by virtue of having run and all the things that you've done. So this show, as you know, is about building your civic action toolkit, so help our listeners with what they could be doing. You know, not everybody is going to run for office. What we really like to do is sort of point out to people what they can do between voting and short of running for office. So what are two things an everyday person could be doing right now?
Art Chang: [00:35:40] To make a difference, you have to decide to join and belong. Joining And belonging are two sides of the same coin. By joining, you can have a sense of belonging. It's not necessary that it happens, but people who are parts of communities, join. It's an active effort, whether it's a religious institution or a mutual aid society or your block association or a community board. Regardless of the shortcomings of any of those, joining and volunteering is key to being able to make New York a better place. And when you do that, you're going to strengthen your community and you're going to strengthen your feeling about your obligation to your neighbors and to others. At the heart of it, that's what keeps us all together.
Mila Atmos: [00:36:33] Yeah, that's right. So looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Art Chang: [00:36:39] A couple of things, young people make me hopeful. I think there is immense vitality and passion and unwillingness to accept the status quo by younger folks, especially millennials, And and Zoomers. I'm so inspired by how they've taken up things like the climate crisis and housing justice and and other issues to really push forward. You know, we have a city council that is majority female for the first time. Right. People of color. Right. We have, you know, a queer South Indian. We have, you know, a queer half, Asian, you know, Blasian, on the council. These are the things. They're not just symbols, but also this deep understanding that this represents of our communities and the most vulnerable in them. That's really going to change our world. So that that's one thing that gives me a lot of hope. The second thing is that despite all of the inertia in government, there are so many efforts to improve how government works through technology, and they're happening in small ways; they're happening in big ways. They're happening all over the country. It's taking far longer and it's not as well accepted as I would like it to be. But there are so many promising signs out there of how technology is advancing in the city government setting, you know, in a state government setting and even the federal government. So that gives me hope. And while it may be slow, I'm going to keep exercising my sense of impatience to try to make you go faster because we need more of it.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:26] Well, thank you very much for joining us and sharing your thoughts. Art Chang is a citizen change maker, a true innovator and mayoral candidate in the 21 election.
Art Chang: [00:38:36] Thank you so much. It's a delight being here. Mila Atmos: [00:38:41] Next time on Future Hindsight,
Nathan Lockwood: [00:38:43] This is how we get the United States on the better track, where we can have a highly functioning government with competitive elections and politicians who know how to work together and solve problems, could be the way we get to making government work so we can be all we can be.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:59] That's Nathan Lockwood from Rank the Vote. He argues that changing how we vote could have huge benefits for our democracy. We're talking about the potential of ranked choice voting. Next time on Future Hindsight. Make sure you
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The Democracy Group: [00:39:38] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.