True Kids 1 hosts final candidate forum tonight
True Kids 1, a non profit youth media education organization, will host an online forum for Taos mayoral candidates Thursday (Feb. 24) at 6 p.m.
In partnership with the Taos News and Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, the forum will gather Taos mayoral candidates Pascual Maestas, Genevieve Oswald, Dustin Sweet and incumbent Dan Barrone for an evening of discussion on youth-oriented issues. The student-produced livestream event will be moderated by Taos High School seniors Isabella O’Donnell Silfverberg and Lilith Safford.
O’Donnell Silfverberg said True Kids 1 is planning to include a debate component in the forum.
“I think the main difference is that we’re doing kind of a debate round,” she said. “So instead of just asking questions and having candidates answer them, we’re going to be asking questions and having other candidates respond to each other’s responses to get a more rounded sense of their answers.”
Safford said she expects that because Taos youth will be asking the questions and producing the event, it will engender different responses and reactions from the candidates, who she noted have already participated in forums hosted by an “adult organization” like the Taos News.
“The main voices leading this who have come up with the questions, are going to be moderating, and who are doing everything are all youth voices,” Safford said. “So that’s a huge difference from all the other forums that have happened locally. And it’s been structured very intentionally to be more engaging, and we’re packing a lotta questions into a short amount of time.”
O’Donnell Silfverberg predicted that the youth forum will be “more exciting” and give viewers “a different perspective than forums past.”
“Also these questions are coming from us, the youth of the community, which is a viewpoint we haven’t seen yet and gotten input on from the people who are running,” Safford added.
With 18-year-old Safford living just outside the town boundary and Taos resident O’Donnell Silfverberg having missed the voting age cutoff by 20 days, neither moderator is eligible to vote. For that reason, O’Donnell Silfverberg said it “feels especially important that we somehow get our voices heard, even if we can’t be part of the final decision.
“I think that one of the biggest things, and of course this is a concern for adults as well, is: How are decisions that you make now, and how are issues that are in play now —like education and housing — going to effect this community decades in the future,” O’Donnell Silfverberg continued. “Like, how is this place going to be somewhere where people are going to stay and be somewhere people want to raise kids?
“Also, because we’re True Kids 1, we’re asking questions about technology and improvements in that field in Taos and how it can benefit youth,” she added.
Sandy Campbell, executive director of True Kids 1, said the youth forum is the latest installment in the organization’s Democracy Project. During the last legislative session, O’Donnell Silfverberg interviewed Rep. Kristina Ortez of Taos and N.M. House Majority Leader Rep. Javier Martinez of Albuquerque, as well as state Sen. Roberto “Bobby” Gonzales of Taos.
“Our tag line is ‘youth media for the digital age,’ “Campbell said, describing the nonprofit’s mission to increase digital media literacy among youth: “We teach, train and inspire K-12 students all across northern New Mexico.”
We have three main areas,” Campbell said. “’In-school,’ teaching introduction to photography, doing yearbook, or documentary filmmaking, for example; afterschool programs — which have been on hiatus due to the pandemic — that are more for middle school students who need an introduction into the digital world, and whose parents might need childcare; and our ‘out-of-school’ programs, where we’re teaching about 600 students this school year” through projects like Thursday’s forum.
“It’s an opportunity for students to get paid and learn to shoot and edit,” Campbell said, adding that students are also currently working on documentary films in and around Taos.
In April, a student crew will begin producing a “safety video for Chevron and its work up in Questa,” Campbell said.
“Another huge project we have we call the CTE Video Gateway Program, [which is] media captures of skilled trades,” Campbell said, explaining that the program seeks to illustrate career opportunities by profiling local tradespeople.
“We have funding from schools to do this,” Campbell said, giving an example: “Like interview a Taos electrician who graduated from Taos High and ask them, ‘What did you do after graduation to become an electrician who’s making $110,000 a year?’ You can’t find contextualized information on how you do that in Taos.”
Campbell said the pandemic, remote learning, and the isolation many students experienced over the past two-plus years has increased the need for digital literacy.
“Kids are relying on phones more than ever,” he said. “School in 2022 is not like school was in 2019. The education system has been badly hit by the pandemic; we have kids who’ve lost two years of social-emotional learning.”
Despite teacher burnout and “interrupted learning” among students, Campbell said it’s not all bad news.
“The good news is there’s a lot of money in the system right now,” thanks to nearly unprecedented federal spending and the generosity of philanthropic organizations, he said. “There are lots of opportunities right now.”
In a press release earlier this month, Campbell said the Democracy Project project recently received funding from the Taos Ski Valley Foundation and several unnamed individual donors, as well as “an infusion of support” from the Taos Community Foundation, which he noted is offering scholarships to high school seniors.
The deadline to apply for the scholarships is March 7. Visit taoscf.org for more information.
To register for Thursday’s forum, visit bit.ly/35lUt26.
‘I think the main difference is that we’re doing kind of a debate round. So instead of just asking questions and having candidates answer them, we’re going to be asking questions and having other candidates respond to each other’s responses to get a more rounded sense of their answers.’ ISABELLA O’DONNELL SILFVERBERG True Kids 1 forum moderator