At this week's Round Table, Kenisha, Madeline, and Ava spoke with Lisa Kay Solomon, writer, Associate Professor and Designer in Residence at Stanford Institute of Design, and Co-founder of All Vote, No Play, exploring sports, civics, social change, and the interconnections between them. Lisa teaches an incredibly popular class on futures thinking at Stanford and is also a passionate public educator, spreading the civic gospel well beyond the classroom and onto the courts and playing fields of America. While Lisa is a trained futurist, she emphasizes that thinking about the future is a skill set we all can learn—and it doesn’t require having a crystal ball! It entails thinking about what is the range of possible futures that might unfold–recognizing that nothing is fixed or assured– and how we can learn to bring our preferred future to life. All that’s required is bold imagination and comfort with ambiguity along with socializing and sensitizing ourselves to different perspectives and world views in order to try to understand the fullest range of possible—and then to try to shape it! At root, futures thinking is about shaping systems and looking for levers of change that are high value and go unnoticed. You know, like student athletes, who have been wildly overlooked in the civic space yet if you think about who has influence on campuses, you can’t NOT think of this. On the heels of the murder of George Floyd and the public outcry for social justice reform, this led Lisa to partner with long-time basketball coach Eric “Rev” Reveno ("Rev") on a shared mission to help players register to vote and to flex their civic power more broadly. They asked themselves, “what if we empowered all student athletes to act like citizens, and to model the kinds of behaviors that create the types of societies we want to live in?” Athletes actually have a lot to offer with regard to some of the thorny civic challenges of our time, like bridging differences, which they do every single day in playing on teams and against others. Getting them to transfer those skills to the civic skills is powerful.The pilot Lisa and Rev cooked up together was so successful it led to the participating student athletes proposing legislation to the NCAA to take this an annual event for over 500k students and to form the powerful All Vote and No Play initiative–and they are just getting started! Lisa reminds us that democracy doesn’t just happen: it requires individuals putting themselves in positions—including sometimes at risk of harm or threat— in order to protect the kind of democracy we want to be part of. We are incredibly inspired by the vision of All Vote No Play and think you will be too. Thank you for joining us!
