Gen Z is keeping hope and empathy alive in Sarasota
Just when you’re feeling like democracy is doomed, Florida has become the object of national ridicule and Sarasota has sold its soul, you walk into a building on South Orange Avenue, spend an hour listening to the passion of a curlyhaired wunderkind in star-spangled pants and a rainbow tie-dyed shirt and suddenly, you realize you’re feeling hopeful again for the first time in as long as you can remember.
That was my experience last week after visiting “SEE space” and talking with the Social Equity Through Education (SEE) Alliance’s 19-year-old executive director, Zander Moricz. (You may remember Moricz as the Pine View alum whose 2022 graduation speech, using his wiry mop top as a euphemism for being gay to protest Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, went viral on social media.)
The youth power-building organization’s new “action-based collaborative” (ABC) is designed to give young people in Sarasota County the tools, information, support and resources they need to “create the kind of world they’d like to see.”
“The reason you have not seen a youth-led movement here is because you have not seen young people being given a space and the resources to organize and the agency to use them the way they’d like,” says Moricz.
“Often we mistake adult-led organizing for youth organizing, but young people do not want to receive instruction from adults on how they should organize or what should matter to them. This is exclusively about giving young people an opportunity to lead themselves.”
Julie Forestier, a Harvard-Kennedy School of Government graduate hired as the SEE space coordinator, says the goal is to provide a physical place where young people can “move away from disconnected isolation and toward empowered connection.”
A 2,000-square-foot former doctor’s office has been transformed into a circular flow of diverse spaces meant to fit every need. There’s a room with comfy chairs, Wi-Fi and free organic coffee; bar-stooled work stations surrounded by plants; a sensory-sensitive room to defuse light and sound; even a bathroom painted with tasteful graffiti which visitors can add to. (Look in the mirror and the words “You are beautiful” appear over your head, reflected from the back wall.)
“It’s a place where kids who are growing up in such a marginalized society can feel a part of something,” says Forestier, a 40-year-old mother of two. “There’s so much talk about the rightwing extremism in Sarasota right now and not much time is given to the countermovement that is growing here as a result of that extremism. It’s here and it’s really something to behold.”
Visitors can drop in any time from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to do their own work or join the work and offerings of the organization, which include voter education and registration, speaker trainings and collaborations with other nonprofits on social justice issues relevant to youth. (SEE’s strategies are not unlike those of the conservative Moms for Liberty, though their progressive agenda is just the opposite.)
Right about now, Moricz was meant to be entering his second year at Harvard. But that graduation speech elevated SEE – which began as a student club at Pine View – to nationwide attention. One week after he started college in Boston, SEE was awarded the largest grant ever given to a youth organization (more than $1 million) from the JDL Family Foundation.
For a semester, Moricz tried to juggle SEE activities and speaking engagements with school, but ended up missing more than half his classes. Watching the growing political extremism in Sarasota, where he was born and raised, at the same time prompted Moricz to “strike while the iron was hot” and return home to establish a new model for youth organizing. (Anya Dennison, a fellow Pine View grad and SEE founder, reached the same conclusion at Cornell; she is now SEE’s chief of staff.)
“Leaving Harvard was a really difficult decision,” says Moricz, who knows he will return, but not when. “But it will always be there. The same cannot not necessarily be said for Florida . ... It wasn’t so much a choice as an emergency. And we are emergency responders.”
In April, SEE organized the Walk Out to Learn, a protest against government censorship of culture, history and identity that offered marchers educational opportunities around voter registration, Black history and gay rights. It-became the largest ever student-led protest in Florida history, with more than 300 high schools and colleges participating.
Since then, in addition to remodeling SEE space, the organization has been focused on developing a technology called Ultra Vote that not only allows young people to pre-register and register to vote online, but also gives them an easy and automatic virtual way to stay informed on issues and magnify their influence with politicians who typically ignore the youth demographic.
As the first generation raised with omnipresent cellphones, internet and social media, Gen Z has not had many chances to connect other than virtually, which has defused their power, Moricz says. They’re “antsy” to come together in a more concrete and collaborative way.
“Unless there is a physical space and a grounded energy, it will get lost in social media,” he says. “The benefit of SEE space is, it’s not rooted in a candidate, it’s rooted in a community. We’ve been losing so much energy because we’re not giving young people a place to put it, to funnel it into productive movement.”
While the alliance’s target audience is ages 14-25, SEE space also welcomes adult volunteers – at least those who are able to keep their egos in check and take a back seat to their juniors.
“In almost every case, it’s the older generation who are leading,” Moricz says. “So we are proposing for the first time to organize intergenerationally, in a youth-led way, to achieve new results. There are enough young voters in Florida to change any and every election. The reason we’re doing this is because we don’t believe it’s a losing fight.”
The SEE (seeourpower.org) Alliance space is located at 615 S. Orange Ave. in Sarasota. Email them at connect@seeourpower.org.
Contact Carrie Seidman at carrie.seidman@gmail.com or 505-2380392.