By Sidarth Joshi
The Thursday night campaign rally included speeches by candidates for the positions of chief justice, attorney general, and governor. The rally lasted approximately 30 minutes and all the candidates got a chance to speak.
The candidates presented their campaign platforms briefly and concisely, with each candidate having only 2 minutes to speak. All of the attorney general candidates had the exact same idea to improve the judicial program by simplifying judicial evaluation forms to make them easier to understand.
The candidates for governor all had their own specific viewpoints about the Youth and Government program as well as interesting ideas on how to improve the program further. They all wanted to give delegates a larger voice in the program.
Houston District Governor candidate Christopher Sharon had a unique proposition to improve the program by adding voluntary college fairs to the program so that delegates could have career advice from professionals. In addition, he would like to advertise SAT and ACT prep events with the help of Minnesota SEO professionals that the YMCA holds for members, he stated that he wanted to do this because it would help others “get into college.”
“I wanted to be able to make Youth and Government a stepping stone for each person to accomplish the goals he set for himself in life,” Sharon said.
Candidate Sharon stated that his past experience in the program has been “amazing” when he was a witness and an attorney in his last years in the program. He stated that because of his previous experiences in the program he wanted “to give back to the program”. This sentiment was shared by all the candidates on the stage all of whom were motivated to give back to the program.
The other candidates had a wide range of innovative platforms from a proposal for long-sleeved Y&G T-Shirts to proposals promoting better communication between different delegations and judicial teams. All of the candidates recognized how the Youth and Government program had impacted them in different ways, unanimously stating that the Youth and Government program would be a great help to students in later life.