AHHHHHH CHARGE! DEFEND THE BABYS! DEFEND THE BABYS! BABYS ATTACKING! Oh god he's stunning me. OH NO! That's the fighty end! Hello everyone and welcome back to Fish Feed and Grow! It has been a long time since we have made a video on this game and there has been survival put in and a lot of people request this for me. Hey hey hey! Thank you! And we can either be a bleak, a perch or a pike. I'm assuming the pike is probably going to be the easiest and the perch and so on and so forth. So the bleak will maybe be the hardest? I'm not so sure but I want to be a perch because a perch was one of the first fish I actually caught as a kid. Oh god! Whoa! What's that? Defend your eggs! What do you mean defend my eggs? I don't have eggs! So I have health, I have hunger and this is what I look like. Wow! Better enough I suppose. So we're playing in the river! Oh this is going to be interesting. Um oh can I eat this? Can I suckle? Oh look at them! They're doing nothing! It's waiting for me to eat them. Oh there's shells as well! Oh wow there's snails! Yes! Snaily poos! So I have one out of three levels when it comes to being a bleaked BABYS! Why are you making a weird noise like you're scared of something? Hey! Stop it! It'll bugger I'm almost... I'm hungry! Really really hungry! Oh okay maybe that's why they're... Will you stop eating my stuff? He's following me! You bug off!  Wow I'm really like a fighter jet when I speed up on it. Okay so we've got two more levels to go through and then if I eat this last one I should beat level two. No? How about now? No? We're close! We're close though! Oh it's like a boatman! I don't know what Americans call them but we call or at least I call them boatmen. They look like they're just hovering on this. Will you bugger off? I'm trying to grow! Ha! Bugger off! Ha!  Oh no! Trout trout trout trout! Still following me. Can I lose them?   Oh it's a bleak! Oh do I have a mission to eat ten of those? Sometimes I think he doesn't eat them dry anymore. There's no way I'm catching a bleak right? I've got to become not a baby! Is he going to eat all of that? Oh my god yes! Yes! Yes yes yes! Oh yes! XPs! I mean very dangerous!   Level up! I have a perch! I have a perch! Oh no! Ah there you go! So good! Oh god is this something after me? Okay so wow look at me! Oh trout! You're leading a right! I hope you die! I hope you die! I don't have any eggs. I need to eat ten of these normal fish now. Oh god this is hard! Oh no! Oh god! Got him! Yes! Come on!  I can eat you! I can eat you! Oh I should have held on to him before he ran away. Are you eating it? No!  That was mine!  Yes babies! Rip him to threads! Yes! I've killed him! I think we got him! Oh yes! All right let's eat him! Almost got him! You can't run forever! Oh the baby got... Oh I've leveled up as well apparently! Is that because I got a kill? Oh I could just eat them whole! Oh I didn't realize! Oh man! I like this! It actually gives me a purpose rather than just you know eating things. I've got each suit and things now! Game development then! Don't know what that was. I got it though. Oh I leveled up as well. Am I just getting experience for having stuff in my stomach? I think I am. I want to stay away from that though. I want to stay away from the current. Are you scared of me? Are you babies? I think they are scared of me you know. Oh there you go! There's a little barbie barb thing! I can eat you right? Can I eat you? Yes! There we go! Oh what was that? Was that big? What was that? Oh I don't know what it is but it is big! What is that? That's a bass! Yeah I eat the baby! I don't care about him! Oh oh a crayfish! Oh he's killing the crayfish! You killed the crayfish! How did you do that? What legend! The baby took that thing out! Wow! Oh look at that! I can hone in on this guy. He thinks he can swim away from me. I have to actually bite him? He's too big! He must have eaten some things then. Oh there we go! Haha! Are you running?   No! Too left! My baby is going to be the death of me! There you go! See my baby! The baby is going to be the death of me! And that baby's following me around bringing the bass near me and therefore like almost killing me! Yeah we go! Okay I did it! I did it! I did it! Right where am I? Where are my eggs? Do I have to be a certain level to lay eggs? Oh my god my life bar is going down! I actually have a life span! But I don't know where my eggs are though! I'm pretty sure I haven't made any eggs! I came from this way! This is where I'm from right? God damn! Why does this game have limited instruction? Is it if I stay a certain level for a period of time then I'll just die? So I have to keep growing? All right this could be the death of me! I'm going to go out! I think I'm big enough to at least take care of myself. Oh god! Oh god! Oh god! Oh god! What was that? Was that an eel? Oh no! Oh no! He's after me! No! You're bugging me! No!  I couldn't see him! I turned around and I couldn't see him! Okay what does that mean? What was that? Wow! There's so many perch here! So I have to eat the blacks again. I just need to find something that's killed something else that's big. I think there's low risk if I die now. I'm not really losing anything and if I do find something, hey! I'm going to grow really quick! Like that bloomin' tiger shark!  You're my bloomin' friend aren't you?  I need this! Oh look at that tiger shark go! Oh watch out Arabima! Oh! Still don't understand!  Whoa! That now that's a big perch! Jesus! I'll help! Oh that's a that's a bloomin' salmon! Oh! Oh god we're in salmon waters! Oh that's not so good! Get out of here! Oh I know where I am! No wonder the air isn't Arabima here! Ah! We're right at the bottom of the waterfall! Geez yeah this is dangerous territory! Oh there's a chunk of food! I'll take that! That's good! Oh there's a black! Finally! Yes! One of my objectives! Yes! Blacks! Oh that's a crayfish! Careful of that! Look at the crayfish you just saw hiding in the grass trying to like snipe any that come too low or under rocks!  Because why not? This is a perfect place! There's loads of them over here!  Oh no I almost had them! Still running like crazy! There we go! Got him! Oh yes! Okay last one! Oh no I thought I bit him! Oh god you're already bleeding! There we go so that's that mission done and I really don't get why! What's he doing? He was having fun! Jumping around! Oh hold on there we go Q! Top left! Oh I can mate with this thing it's huge! Okay okay there we go! Do the mating dance! I don't know what this does! I'm clicking Q! Oh I have eggs! I have eggs! Yes! Oh where do I put them down? Where do I put them down? I need to go this looks okay! I mean there's crayfish over there but they're not going to come here! Okay we're going to take them down into the reeds! Then oh god what was that? Is that my purge friend? Don't eat me! Okay! Oh no no is that not it? Oh do I do I just have to keep eating? Do I have to hold them for a while? Is that it? Do I need to find more food? Haha Mr Trout! Run away will you? Don't think so buddy! Oh I like to put the scales in that's all!  Oh this is where it was before! It's like a little shortcut!  I need to find my blooming purge! I think I'm dying! I don't know! My stamina is refilling really slowly and my health's below half! I think I'm gonna die if I don't find more purge! Oh I knew it was gonna go for me! I had a feeling! Oh god this is a dead end! Oh is that a purge? That's a purge! That's a purge! Oh do we not do anything?  Oh that actually scared the life out of me! Oh no I was doing so well!  Yum yum! Baby will grow big! Why can't I eat this?  Oh I got health regen! Why do I have health regen? What does that do? Is this regenerating? Oh no! Bye bub! Never to be seen again! Eating alive! Oh no! The cycle! Now to take on a tiger fish! Don't know how I expected that to go! Like a racing car! Oh that's Piranha Door! Let's run away!   He's the purge that's following me! The big one! Watch! Yeah look it's him!  How did you get so big? Big bit of meat? No!  You greedy bugger! You wasn't going to eat any of it until you went for it! I just want to be able to lay eggs! Is that so hard? I think I can only eat these guys if I'm an adult. No! Bad Piranha! Bad! Oh no no no no! No no no! Oh no no no no! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Oh my god! What? What? What are you still after me? What's going on? How is he sticking to me like this? What? That was incest! Oh my god! No! No! I'm dead! I'm done man! I am done! Oh my god! Oh! I was a baby for what? It felt like 10 minutes. Sometimes I'm a baby for two seconds, sometimes 10 minutes. I mean they're all bots but you know what I mean? Like there's no way without an algorithm or something you could have tracked me. Well that was horrendous sounding wasn't it? Like a real murder going on. No! Why would it take a fish waste its time on me? That is completely unrealistic! That's crouched by the- Ah! Carried away with the current! Carried away with the current! Carried away with the current!  No! Wow we're coming out it's a lot harder than it looks. Oh no! No no no no! I'm gonna be taken away! The hide behind the sign there we go! There we go! Oh no! I'm gone! I'm gone! I'm going! I'm going! Oh no! This is the worst place to be as a baby!  This is where the arpimer is! I'm gonna go easy! I'm gonna go easy! Sot it! Sot it! I'm going easy! I was on medium! But like that's impossible! Hit the keyboard! Right what's the difference? No! Oh! Yes! Tiger fish! Give me the things! Oh beautiful! Beautiful! No! No way! I want this! No! I found it first! See you later! I did good! Yay! I think I'm gonna do it! Yeah! There we go! I did it! Now I'll eat these guys! Yes! Come on James! We can do it! This is gonna be the one! On easy! This is what we're gonna do!   Just gonna watch him that unfold! There you go! There's a black! No! Thank you! Oh right! So at the waterfall place! Okay there's the arpimer! Got you! Got you! Got you! I think I know where there's loads of minnows and stuff! Don't! Don't! He is! He flip! Flippin' is! You!  Oh! Why! Ah! Even on easy! He was like, oh I definitely can't see you! Too bad! I got you! That's more like it! Yeah! Eat it! Ah! No! For God's sake! I was just happy that the other guy was big in! I knew it! You're all sods! You're all sods! I was there eating that thing all fine!    Thank you! Oh no! Don't! Just approach it slow! It feels like as soon as I notice something, all the PCs decide, oh wait! Look! They just... Ah!  Follow me! I wanna lead you to the piranhas! Look at me! Silver boys! Oh wait! I'm eating them! Oh! This could be it! This could be it!  I'm gonna do it! Oh! The other one got me! Look! A pilly bass! Ah! Yeah! I bet you didn't see this coming! Did you? No! You didn't! That's right!  Is that an arpaima above me? You can't get away from me dude! You can't get away from me!  Look at you, coward! Coward! You're trying to get away! You're trying to get away!   This could be a grave! Cabas? You could be dead bass! Oh hello! Where'd he go? Ah! That's right! Coward! Coward! Come back! Oh god! There's too many basses! I'm gonna lose them! I'm gonna lose them in there! Oh! I better get out of here! Oh! Oh no! Oh! Look at them! Look at them! I could be a million miles away and you'll still come after me! I think I've just gotta be aggressive! That's it! I just gotta be aggressive! Let's go for this piranha! The hunter becomes the hunted! Haha! Oh no! No! This is not fair! Literally! Why are we on him? Why are we on him? Okay! This would be so much easier if it was only one level to become an adult. The fact that it's three is almost impossible! I mean it's not possible! I've done it a couple of times but that is all down to absolute chance! It's all down to me finding meat, eating that meat and then I don't know how it happens but I just level up randomly! I'm sure it's got something to do with the food that I'm eating! Oh there you go! See I got some XP there and I don't know what that was! I think it was because I ate so much food! Like if you filled your food bar up, something happens! I'm not exactly sure but you get XP after a certain period of time if you just filled your food bar up! Yeah! See it's white now? There you go! Now I've got this stomach regeneration kind of thing! There you go! See I level up! Awesome! Now to fall down the great big hole! Bye! The heart! Can't get me there can you? Like a friggin dolphin! They keep losing me if I do that! Look at them! Look at them! Oh my god! Still after me? I don't even know! I don't think so! Oh my god that was ridiculous! There's like a tiny speck! I was like what's up with that? There's a girl closer and closer! Yay it was friggin piranhas chasing me! They don't know what's with that AI but they can spot you from 20 miles away! Oh my god! I think I'm doing it!  Oh! I see a trout there though! Are you serious?! Finally!  You think you're the hunter? You're about to be the hunted my friend! Oh he just ate! Dammit! He's regenerated all that health! How are you not going to last much longer though? How are you not going to last much longer? You're losing one health every two bites!  Are you scared? You should be!  He's dead! Go away minnows! This is my kill! I will bite you! No! No! No! No! No! No! Mine! There we go! Eight, two of them! Oh I've been three!  Oh yeah! Okay wait for him to str- Oh he's dead as well? God there's loads of these that are just dead! Right there you go that's four! Yes! Oh happy day! They're all dead! I don't know how this has happened but they're all dead! And there's a perch over there! Oh get in! Guys are we gonna do it? This is taking me an hour! You have no idea! You eat all my minnows! Four! One point four! Yeah there you go! He's dead! He's dead! You know what? I'm gonna leave you to it! I'm just gonna leave you dead there! Right where is this perch? We have to go back! He was here though! I've got to get out of here! I've got to get out of here!  Go go go go! Come on! This is where I get born! Yes! Yes! Oh that's big love! Awesome! Is it filling up? Oh there we go! Bar's filling up! There we go! I have eggs! I have eggs now! Now what? We're gonna do it! I'm actually gonna do it! I know how to play the game now! There we go! Okay so now I need food! So I need to fill up my bar! It doesn't matter what with! So I'm just gonna eat truck! It doesn't have to be the small things! It can be this big thing here! Boost to the surface! Come on! Come on! Right now once I fill up this food I get that stomach at the bottom right! Okay once I just digest that I'll get bars on my eggs! There you go! I finally worked it out! Yes! I know how to do this! I'm gonna play the game now! Jesus! It took me forever! This is the second day! I was gonna say give me one of them at least! Jesus! Oh and one spawn! Perfect! Whoa! Don't you! Okay we're regenerating as well! I know you don't son! Oh that's a salmon! Okay! I don't see that! Oh god! Is that throwing me for a loop a little bit? Have I done it? No! I need more! I need more! I need a little bit more food! Is that salmon still there? Oh god yes he is still there! Do you think I can dart in and get some food? Because he seems to be missing it! Okay let's go! There we go! There we go! Got some food! Right! Oh I'm playing risky here! I'm playing risky here like... There we go! There we go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Ha ha ha! Yes! Okay this should be the last bit I need now! Although I'm super full! Look at me! I'm not even moving! I'm trying to move forward and I'm barely doing it! Because I'm trying to digest! Oh I need to stay still to digest! Oh we need a little bit more! We need a little bit more food! There we go! Oh god!  Just kill one more thing and then we can nick the scraps! Oh yes! Come on! Come on! Come on! I need to be careful here! I need to be careful! Don't want to go into him! There it is! There it is! There we go! There we go! Okay! Anybody stay still! I need to digest! No! No! No! Don't go for me! Don't go for me! I'm digesting! I'm digesting! There we go! Wait what? That didn't count? What? How did that not count? What? My bar's like full! Is it glitched? How? How? How? How? How? How? How? How is this happening?  I'm going to get away from that salmon! I've had enough of that! I know how to do this now! There he is! Oh! He's already dead! Oh okay! Fair enough! Up you come son! Up you come! There we go! Oh god! I don't know what's happening with that texture! But there was loads of little babas in here! This is perfect! We're going to do it! We're actually going to have 20 other minutes later! Okay buddy! And oh look! You can see the babies inside them! And now! Wait are they going to go for me?  You get away from me eggs! I didn't realize you'd eat them! Scavengers! No you don't! I'll defend my little babies! Oh look at them! Oh they're adorable! They're my little babies! Ah! Eggs! Some fish keep their babies in their mouths! Oh I'm holding it! Oh I didn't realize! Oh okay! Right! They seem to be... Yeah! Look at them! They're actually trying to go for my eggs! No you don't! Get to get it back! Get back! Ha! Oh they're hatching! They're hatching! Yes! Yes my babies! Rhythm up! Complete! On easy! You know what? Now I don't... I don't think I'd have a problem! I don't think I have a problem doing it now! So all my babies are going to follow me! Come babies! Put yourselves up for your... for your mama's expense! Let's go get eaten by an Arab Pime! Charge! Defend the babies! Defend the babies! Babies attacking! Oh god he's stunning me! Oh no! That's a bitey end! No! This is just like finding Nemo! No! We gotta kill him! Oh we're regenerating! There we go! Regenerate some health!  Oh there's another one! We've lost all our babies!  No! I've only got one left! No! Oh he's dead! He's dead! I lost all my babies! I lost all my babies! But at least I killed the pike or the salmon! That's it! I won! Three! That's a victory for me!  Kill him too! How big can I get? Like survival you're not supposed to get very big! Oh! No! Yeah! See I've levelled up! I'm a level seven now! He doesn't stand a chance! He's trying to digest! He can't move! Oh this is perfect! Oh now he's digested! He's digested now!   Who would have thought about this? A perch killer! Oh god! Oh we got him just in time! Yes! I avenged my babies! Oh well it was a happy family for at least a little few seconds wasn't it? There we go! Oh whoa! What happened? What happened there? He just got sucked away from it! Piranha that's my stuff! Excuse me! These were my babies! I'm redigesting my babies! Okay just got dusted and that's more health!  Okay just wait digest it! Oh it's a little bit longer! Okay!  I get it! So you know instead of just eating, regaining your health instantly you need to eat then stay still to digest your food and everything else has to abide by that! And then if your health's already full if it's not you'll regain that health! And then you get XP! Oh it's such a cool idea! I love it! Well guys we're gonna wrap it up then! We finally saw it all and until next time enjoy it and leave a like and I'll see you later! Bye!


Thank you, Ms. Flurry. And now for the Denouement, as they say in the theater. We have with us this afternoon Cat Kerwin. She is a Rhode Island native. She ran the in the fall for the City Council for Ward 12. She's the youngest person serving on the Providence City Council. Cat was featured in Teen Bogue's story, 18, 18 Bogue's story. Cat began working at Providence in the Providence City Hall as early as 13 years old. She moved out of state and attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she made local and national news, running her organizations, her university's outreach and civic engagement activity. Currently, she's the director of communications at the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, a non-profit advocacy group with the mission of passing gun violence prevention legislation in Rhode Island. She's led many campaigns. For example, she facilitated a city-wide youth engagement campaign around gun violence prevention. The campaign trained over 100 administrations, 100 students, I'm out of my notes, pardon me, in an effort to de-escalate gun violence and to add to peace strategies and over 50 states of the union. Ladies and gentlemen, Katherine Carlin. So hi everyone. This is my going key for me pretty well. Okay, so thank you so much, Lee for asking me to come to speak for Roger Williams. I'm excited to see so many high school students in the room, and I'm excited to be here. Who here is coming from out of state today? Oh, well welcome, welcome to Providence. My name's Kat Kerwin. I am a city councilwoman here in Providence. I ran for office for the first time at 20 years old. So I'm really excited. I took office in January and I'm serving as the youngest person ever elected to the city council in Providence. And I think why I got involved and why I'm excited to see so many high school students in the room is in the past few years, there's been a really incredible inspiring uptick in youth organizing. And I think in youth engagement, we saw a lot of organizers doing national work like Emma Gonzalez when she called BS on the NRA. And a lot of those youth organizers then kind of got what organizing was and they realized that they needed to start taking their work across the country and incorporating youth of color, incorporating youth who were most at risk of being impacted by violence and making sure that the youth that really were being impacted by the work that they were talking about were at the forefront. And so that's why they were so successful in this amazing effort to register youth to vote and to get youth engaged. And so I'm going to talk a little about the youth work that's happening here in Rhode Island today. And I'm going to talk about the Coalition Against Gun Violence here in Rhode Island today. And I'm really coming at this from a local perspective. I think that when we talk about public administration, we talk about leadership. You know, Janice was totally right. It's stuff that is happening at the local level. It's running for office. It's running local issue advocacy campaigns. And it's really doing the work on the ground level in the community that you're in and the community that you love that will make the biggest difference. So, yeah. So my background, I am a student currently. I know a lot of people can empathize with that. I'm going to be graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in next week. That's crazy. So I went away to school in Madison after I graduated from high school here in Providence in fall of 2015. And I did a lot of work in Madison around organizing and combating a lot of the political things that were happening at the state level in Wisconsin. There was a very conservative legislature and a very conservative governor and Scott Walker. And there was a lot of attacks at the university. They kind of saw the political science department of the university and they saw the campus as too progressive. And so they were defunding the political science department and they were criminalizing student protests. And I started to realize after the presidential election in 2016 that a lot of the work that was happening in Wisconsin was an uphill battle. And by then, you know, we didn't have a Democratic governor in Wisconsin. They hadn't even, no one was talking about Tony Evers or the state going blue. And the state legislature was on the brink of passing a bill called campus carry. And campus carry is a bill that would have allowed anyone on campus to carry on their person a firearm wherever, whenever, all the time. And for me, that was scary. It was scary because we had a football stadium that held 250,000 students. And there was drinking at that football stadium and there was drug use in that football stadium. And when you mix in firearms, that's often a dangerous concept. And so we decided in Madison to start organizing and we held a successful protest that really got me connected to my work here in Rhode Island. And it's a little edgy. It's called the Coxknot blocks protest. And so folks from Texas in the room may remember this, UT Austin piloted this. And what they did was something that is a really strong organizing tactic. And for the older people in the room, I'm sorry in advance.  But guns were about to be. And what we saw was it took off just as it had in UT Austin. People thought it was hilarious. People thought it was an effective organizing strategy and people that wouldn't have been talking about gun violence prevention, gun policy. We're talking about gun policy. And so as an organizer, I think that sometimes the best ways to build power and the best ways to start conversations about issues and make people excited and make people feel engaged is to do things that drive headlines, is to do things that get people talking and get people excited about different issues. And so that's something that I've been really excited to do here in Rhode Island. So after I led that campaign in Madison, I ended up getting a job offer here in Rhode Island at the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence. I did a kind of crazy thing. I was a junior in college. I saw that my dream job was up in Rhode Island. And I was like, you know what? I need to be in a community where I was born and raised. The president was president. And I was like, I need to be somewhere where real change is happening. Here in Providence at the time, the Providence City Council had just passed the community safety act. And then it was up. It was the most progressive community control of the police bill in the country. It basically eliminated our game database and provided a lot of really powerful tools, mostly for people of color in the city to use when they were facing discrimination by law enforcement. And that was happening in the Rhode Island Legislature passed the Protect Rhode Island Family Act, which was one of the most progressive gun safety bills in the country, disarmed domestic abusers. And I was seeing all this work happening in my home state. And I was working on all these uphill battles in Madison. And I was like, I need to go home. I was like, I need to be somewhere where even in the face of a very combative national political scene, I needed to be somewhere where real change was happening. And I recognized that that was happening on the municipal level and the state level here. So I made a decision. I came back and accepted my job. I moved home to Providence where I was born and raised. And they do the thing that people of Rhode Island do. I was raised right behind the Gregg's Restaurant on North Maine. I love death by chocolate cakes.  It's still my favorite. But when I got back to Providence, I was learning a lot about a city council person that represented me. And he had done an office. It's a year I was born. And it had never been challenged. And there was a reputation about him. And I'm hearing a lot of people talk about what this organization does and how ethics is really important. And ethics is important to me too. And I was remembering when y'all were bringing up ethics as one of the kind of cornerstones of public administration. I was remembering how the men that I had got running against in this city council race. The reputation about him was whoever got handed the bar before the city council meeting, that's how he voted. And there was this old school Providence politics that was associated with him. And I realized that I wasn't okay with that. You know, it was the same thing. Real change was happening here at the local level. We still were having these lingering feelings of corruption that we had been sick and tired of. And I have been sick and tired of hearing about since I was growing up here, since the buddy Nancy era. So I had time for office. It was exciting. It was invigorating. It was hard. And I think more young people need to do it. I think a lot of times once we realize we're preventing us, we realize that they don't look like us. They don't vote the way that their constituents want them to vote. And they are doing their job with integrity. And when that's the case, I think it's time to make sure people go on the record and have to start working harder. And for me, I knew that there was a chance I wouldn't win. And if I didn't win, I knew that I would be pushing him to the left. I would be pushing him to be a better politician. So I'm going to talk less about running for office and about being in office in this presentation. So I'm going to focus on the work of the coalition against gun violence. But during the Q&A portion, if you do have questions for me, please raise your hand. And we'll talk about that as well. But yeah, so this is a funny thing. When I was running for office, there was a bunch of national media around someone so young running. And they would often not talk about the policies that I wanted to do. They often would talk about how I was standing up for myself, or how I was standing up against the older, whiter male folks that I was communicating with or working with. And I just thought it was funny. You know, I was talking about policies like affordable housing. I was talking about climate change. And this was kind of what the conversation always centered around. And so I think that speaks a lot to running for office as a young woman. That kind of was the major focus of my campaign, unfortunately. But so the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence is an organization that does a lot of incredible grassroots work in Rhode Island. And I think when you're talking about public administration and getting involved more at the level, often issue advocacy campaigns are a really good way to start because you can really see all the way through a piece of legislation and real change in your community. So the Coalition Against Gun Violence was founded in 2013. It was a response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook. And what we found is that even here in Rhode Island, where a lot of people think of us as a very progressive, a very blue state, is we didn't have the greatest gun laws. And after Sandy Hook tragedy, a group of Rhode Islanders kind of stood up and said, you don't have an assault weapons regulation. We don't have a ban on guns in schools. And we don't have a regulation of high capacity magazines. So since the organization was founded, we've seen a lot of headway. We passed the Rhode Island family back. And this is one of the strongest gun safety bills in the country. And it basically just disarms domestic abusers, right? So really common sense stuff. If you're going to beat your wife, you're not going to own a gun. If you're going to beat your kids, you're not going to own a gun. Very, very common sense. Make sure that people that should not have weapons do not have weapons. And then another thing that the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence says is we do youth organizing work. And I think that this is more important now than ever. A lot of times, and in a lot of spaces, the work around gun violence prevention organizing has really been dominated around trying to prevent mass shootings and school shootings. And that's important. We do have a mass shooting problem in this country. But the reality of it is a lot of the gun violence in our country is in our urban core. It's gang related. It's suicide related. And it's not discussed by gun violence prevention organizers, which is really disappointing. Because when we don't talk about the illegal gun use and we don't talk about youth violence and how to really get to the root causes of gun violence, we're not thinking about the issue holistically. So working with youth organizations in the city of Providence has really helped us as an organization grow. What we found is that you can't address gun violence without talking about joblessness, poverty, without talking about the education system here in the city. And I think that that's true of a lot of progressive organizations. When you're dominated by leaders that don't necessarily represent the communities that they share, you don't think about these issues like root causes. And so I think it's been important for us to interact with youth and interact with populations in the city to talk about how we can combat these issues in a real way. So one of the bills that we work on is the Safe Schools Act. And in Rhode Island, something a lot of people don't know is that you can conceal carry in schools. So we're one of only just five states that allows this to happen. Anyone can walk into a school that's teachers, administrators, parents, any visitor can walk into a K-12 school here in Rhode Island and they don't have to notify anyone, but they can be carried in. And so there's really no structure in place for us to know when these people in our schools are carrying. And a lot of people say that it's very likely for a good person, a good concealed carry holder to stop an active shooter's scenario. But the reality is in a lot of situations more guns and more violence and also, you know, concealed carry permit holders can lead to accidental violations. And so we feel that people that are trained and that are tested annually are the people that are most likely to stop an active shooter's scenario. We're also working on assault weapon regulation. This is military style assault weapons. Weapons like the AR-15 are kind of the go-to weapon of choice for mass shooters. So we were talking about the shooting at Sandy Hook. We were talking about the shooting just last week in Missouri, California. We're talking about weapons that aren't really used for hun. They're used for locality. And so really what we're trying to do is get these off the streets, you know, simple supply and demand. If it's harder to get something, if it's harder to have access to something and buy something, there's going to be less of them out there. So that's something that we work really hard on. And it's important to know that this bill, as well as the State Schools Act, is something that the Coalition Against Gun Violence has introduced every year in Rhode Island since 2013. So as I said, you know, Rhode Island as a state, we think of ourselves as being progressive, as passing a lot of good bills. But the reality is, because of state leadership, we often don't get votes on really important bills that would save lives. And not just bills like these. We're talking about reproductive health care. We're talking about bills raising the minimum wage. Although the rank and file numbers of the legislature may support initiatives like this. State House leadership is really where the power is. And they're the people that decide if a bill is going to go before and get a vote. And in most cases, these bills have never gone before for a vote. So how about we come to Long River Island? Pretty basic stuff. I always like to go through this. Representative or Senator introduces it. The recording secretary numbers the bill. The Speaker and the Senate President refer the bill to committee. And the committee makes a decision on the bill and fits past. It goes through the same procedure. And then the Governor gets to sign it. So health for further study in Rhode Island. So this is what I was talking about. In Rhode Island, we really have a culture of holding for further study, which is why a lot of our bills don't go anywhere. What happens is they're referred to the proper committee. In many cases, House Judiciary Committee in Rhode Island is the committee that holds the power. And once they go there, they're held for further study and they're left in committee. And this is happening year after year after year for many bills. And I think it's important because a lot of people think, you know, I have a Democratic representative, we're fine. My representative supports common sense issues like reproductive justice and, you know, gun safety and environmental justice. But the reality is a lot of these bills will never go to the floor for a vote. They stay held in committee. And when we're talking about this and we're talking about the culture of politics in Rhode Island, I think a lot of this is waiting out, waiting for the leadership to kind of turn over because as I said, there is the rape and file on both the House and the Senate side of Rhode Island really support these initiatives. But it's also really vigilant, you know, staying committed and keeping up this organizing work and trying to remind constituents of elected officials that the reality is the majority of Rhode Islanders do want to see a lot of these initiatives that we work on go through. And so I'm going to talk a little about power building and tactics for organizing. And hopefully, you know, as I'm talking about this, you'll be thinking about who your representative is or who represents you and what you can do to make sure that they're on the right side of these issues. So who are your targets? These are our Senate president and our speaker. These are real pictures. And your targets can be city, municipal, state legislators, state level politicians like the governor, secretary of state, federal delegation. And your targets are not always the people that represent you. But that doesn't always matter. I think, you know, some people will say, well, I don't want to call the speaker of the House because he's from Cranston and I live in Johnson. And I think in a lot of cases it's important for people in leadership like the House Speaker and the Senate President here in Rhode Island to hear from the collective of what the whole state wants because it is their job not just to represent their districts but to represent the state. We look up who represents you really easily here. It's like www.ri.gov. I usually just Google secretary of state who represents me. And the best way to influence these people in a lot of cases is to log in them. Anyone can do it. Anyone can email, make a call. As Janice was saying, sometimes it's as easy as going on Facebook, going on Twitter, research your legislator, know what their voting record is and then prepare a message. Why do these policies impact you? Why does it matter that you want something? When I'm talking about gun violence prevention, I often will talk about the students that I work with. They tell me how they're afraid in school. They'll tell me about how they feel when they have to go through things like active shooter scenarios in school. And I think when you have a perspective like that, legislators want to listen. So this is an image of the Brown-Iron Coalition against gun violence at the State House last year. It really speaks to the math of volunteers that we have and the math of people that we have engaged and want to do this work in Rhode Island. And then with youth organizing, we've been really lucky to work with a few organizations. One, Gun Gone, Providence Student Union, Young Voices. And I think that when you're doing organizing work, it's really impactful to include youth organizers. I think now more than ever, this is the case. You know, we have organizations that work with us, like Providence Student Union, that really led entire student-led campaigns. And so what this means is the Providence Student Union youth right now are working on a counselor's knock-offs initiative. And this is an initiative that they've been researching fully, that they've been driving. And it would basically just call for the city council to divest and arm school resource officers, so police officers that are in schools and invest in turn in social and emotional support. And what happened during this campaign was we were talking to youth about the issues that the Coalition Against Gun Violence was working on. We were talking about the span on guns in schools. We were talking about this all weapon man. And a lot of the youth that worked with us said things that we hear a lot from the community. They said that school shootings aren't always an issue to us that we're thinking about all the time, but we do think about every day and every moment is how we feel when there's a police officer in our school and how we feel about the school-to-prison pipeline and how when police officers are used instead of teachers to be the disciplinary voice, they feel like they're being criminalized. And so I think for reasons like that, you can't know what it's like to be in a space like an urban school unless you're there. So I think it's important to listen to the youth organizer. And a lot of times take the policy ideas from them because they're living it. So putting youth at, especially youth at most at risk of being impacted by violence at the forefront. And as I said earlier, I think that a lot of the youth organizing that has come out of Rhode Island the last year or so has been thanks to the work of national youth organizers like Emma Gonzalez. These youth did a really good job at taking a bus across the country all last summer and basically recruiting other youths from different cities from Milwaukee, from St. Louis from across the country to jump on the bus with them and tell their stories so that the conversation was not just about mass shootings and school shootings, but it was also about the urban violence. So last year, I'm going to show you a picture. We had a protest at the state house called the student on the target protest. This was one of the most successful actions that we've planned in the last few years. And I think when you're talking about building power and you're talking about ways to get people engaged and lead a campaign forward a lot of times events. And like I said earlier, driving headlines are a really great way to do that. Last May, what we did is we had a group of youth who were really engaged with us and have been wanting to work on this issue plan a protest that they wanted to see. And you know, at first the youth had talked a lot about doing some sort of a sit in or something a little bit more radical. And a lot of youth were scared about what the impacts might be in terms of getting arrested or something like that. And they decided that it might be more powerful if they did a silent protest. And so what they did, you can't see but below is the state legislature and it's the House floor. And they had a silent protest after the legislature was in session and they had targets on the back of their t-shirts. And so from the House floor what you could just see is targets and they were just students silently up there and then afterwards there was a speech by a student who was asking for a vote of a fan on guns in schools. So this was an initiative that got a lot of people talking. It was powerful because it was silent. You know, the adults in the room were kind of taken aback. This was the youth speaking and it had been a youth-led event. And I think that a lot of times when you're doing events like this it's powerful to let the youth leave because they know what they want to see. They know what the impact is going to be and they're creative, you know. And so this was a really exciting moment and what we didn't see is a vote unfortunately. So it's kind of, again, this culture in Rhode Island of the leadership having all the power and although we do have the majority of both representatives and senators in the Rhode Island legislature who have supported our bills and have noted that they would support our bills we still haven't seen a vote. So this was more pictures of the protests. And then again, what makes an action powerful? Just because you don't get what you want we didn't get what we wanted last year after that protest doesn't mean it's not a successful action. Successful organizing is defined by our media. It's defined by the press taking notice in your organization getting gaining collective power from news stories and from the power bill and from volunteers who are reading these news stories and then click on your website and you get their email. It's defined by potential candidates becoming part of the action and then deciding to run for office against someone that didn't call for a vote. I think that that's really kind of at the heart of a lot of organizing and trying to go towards the power and just because you don't see something get done as successful as you had to see campaign really can just be about driving the action with the goal of building power. So now what? No one who represents you gets involved with an issue that makes you excited. You know, right now there are so many amazing groups in Rhode Island doing so much work around climate change, around social justice issues, around supporting the undocumented community, around violence prevention and there's really, you can build your own adventure with so many issues and you know, Rhode Island has a lot of non-profit so if you want to do something and it's not already out there I'm sure someone would be happy to make sure you can start somewhere, something new. And then just show up. I think the best way I've learned how to do a lot of the things that I've been working on is by doing them. Being a politician running a grassroots campaign is a form of education and you get to learn things that you wouldn't learn otherwise but you have to show up, you have to go to the meetings and learn who's doing the work and become a part of the conversations. Okay, so this is my email and my phone number if you want to reach me. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Irwin, that was really a nice tie in with everything we've done today, particularly the MPA student panel. I must say however that I've been involved with the Oklahoma Texas game since 1972 and it's usually played on the Saturday before Columbus Day and there are probably or 92,000 people in the stadium and another 200,000 or so thousand outside going on the rides and drinking beer some of them come armed. I remember actually seeing it but you can carry a gun into the into the stadium. Fortunately the only assaults I've had were beer, Pepsi and get out of my state. During all those years I never saw them put that other item on them anywhere. The one that Ms. Curwin referred to on the backpack. I've never seen that in this, no. I think I'm kind of happy about that but are there questions for Ms. Curwin? Did you face the issue of age bias since you're so young in terms of like creating policy and then how did you overcome that bias if you didn't face it? I faced it less or I do face it less in the creating policy spaces than I did in the campaign spaces. I think that a lot of times you're legitimized when you win and people are kind of forced to listen to you. But there definitely is an age bias. You know, I feel it almost every day in a lot of cases. You know, I think that there's kind of there's power in not showing all of your cards. So a lot of times people just like assume that I won't know something or won't know what something means or how to do something. And I think there is power in kind of keeping yourself what you know and then when you do good work people are surprised and because of your age you can get more credit for it which is funny, but it's good to keep your cards close. And I also think it's good to have especially win campaigning and I hope you do run for office to have people around you that are really established, yes but also to have fellow young people around you I think that a lot of times young people running for office will compensate because they feel insecure about running at a younger age by trying to put a lot of older established people around you, which in some cases is good but I think it's also really powerful to have an organization that's built with people that you trust and people that don't do things the way that they've always been done. You know, the way that my campaign was built was really non-traditional because it was me and 10 kids from the neighborhood that were either students at Providence College or friends of mine that had grown up in our community and so I think that's a really powerful way to campaign and build power because people see the kind of collective chance for change with that and I think if you're running as a change candidate it's powerful to have those voices around you. Thank you. My question is given the fact defeated an entrenched incumbent who as you say yourself was first elected when you learned the work that you're doing in the General Assembly trying to get those passed and trying to work with again entrenched incumbents who were the leadership who've been there for years and all that what are your thoughts on term limits? So something that the city council does have term limits and they go into effect four years from now so people will be term limited after three terms of four years and you know what I think about term limits is that there is a really steep learning curve to being an elected official I think specifically when we're talking about say the mayor of Providence who is a two term limit I think that it's not totally effective because I think that I think that it takes at least eight years to build a staff that has the power to do a lot of the work that our city needs to do things like fix the school budget to do things like pass really impactful municipal policy so I think that there is a balance what we see in the state house is that there aren't term limits but things are still run similarly so I'm not confident that that term limits are always successful but what I think I prefer to term limits is really strong organizing tactics and making sure that we have a culture of government where people aren't afraid to challenge incumbents and where politicians see challenges to themselves as healthy to the democratic process yeah that's a good question I think not just gun violence but a lot of the other issues that people are really passionate about advocating for right now like passing the reproductive health care act and codifying where we wait and you know climate change a lot of these issues or you either are for it or you're against it and there's really no middle ground so I think politics like that is dangerous it's dangerous to not be able to hear the other side and what they have to say but at the same time we've kind of got into a culture where some of the people that disagree with you have really harmful and sometimes dangerous beliefs you know like when you're talking about someone that believes in the Muslim ban that people should be deported and not be in our country just because the color of our skin it's really tough to have a conversation have a dialogue with people like that and I think the best way to prevent that sort of isolation and prevent that sort of further polarization is to try to have conversations and try to build community but also be honest about what shouldn't be tolerated you know like from the coalition against gun violence standpoint the issue of the second amendment for example you know like I think a lot of us can agree with second amendment supporters they don't want to see children die they don't want to see our youth die they don't want to see people being murdered and it's just a disagreement on what the second amendment represents and so having a conversation and getting to the root of like humanity right like people should not be innocent people should not be dying and I think there is problems when there is kind of a fundamental difference but trying to get to the humanity of a lot of these issues is the best way to have a productive dialogue I think you so rarely see professional this comes up or not but I don't know as you had to recuse yourself from legislative discussion on legislation because of your professional work and how you navigate those issues where they are obviously very important to you but you may have to sit on the sideline as a legislator how you navigated that yeah so on the city council I recused myself from from any votes on resolutions that relate specifically to gun violence prevention I should say there are a lot of preemption laws in Rhode Island so in most cases the city council doesn't have power to really have any say in things like concealed carry holding or guns in schools just because the state is in charge of all of those sorts of policies so it doesn't happen super often but I do think that you're right like it's not super common to see people like organizers that are in these spaces and I think it's really important for organizers to be running for office I think that you know when people are doing ground work with these organizers when people are trying to run campaigns that are built on power they kind of know more about the policy and why it's important you know like legislators always go to Planned Parenthood for statistics about reproductive health care climate action for statistics about climate change and like the people that know about these issues the most in a lot of cases I think it's powerful for them to be empowered thank you Ms. Carbone thank you we're not we're not on profit but we're not on great thank you we never let our destiny without what we're doing thank you thanks to all of you for coming it's 2pm and it's wrap up time before we go I didn't recognize Joe Lager Joe has been videoing us since almost the last century we've got archive footage that I know he's put together so he's really good at his craft and our own Mr. Pierce has been offering his own version of our photos too so thank you Christopher thanks to our friends from National ESPA we wish you safe travels in your returns and as Mr. Shields pointed out there are lots of chapters that have lots of things going on to which they're all invited they've made time for us and I think that's worthwhile thank you very much gentlemen so I hope we have an 11th annual public service and leadership conference and that's all we'll see you next year


How do you know the chemicals in the stuff you use and eat are safe? Manufacturers and regulators work hard to ensure that what ends up in the things you buy isn't harmful. But it isn't easy. You can't really work out how safe something is by feeding it to people and seeing what happens next. Apart from the fact that it sometimes takes years for health problems to develop if you're exposed to a hazardous substance, experimenting on people isn't exactly ethical. This is why toxicologists use animals and cell cultures and other tests that don't involve people. They use these to explore what's likely to happen in humans, but testing a substance thoroughly still takes a long time, sometimes several years even. Partly because of this, only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of chemicals we use today have been fully evaluated. Many of the highest priority ones have been tested, but there are still an awful lot of chemicals in use today that we don't know that much about. Of course, responsible manufacturers do their best to ensure their products are as safe as possible. But the slow speed and the cost of many established toxicology tests mean that companies and regulators alike simply cannot keep up with evaluating everything they would like to. They need something better, something faster, something cheaper and ideally something that doesn't involve using so many animals. Most importantly, they need some way of triaging the waiting list of untested chemicals to see which ones are in most urgent need of attention. A few years ago, a group of really smart people at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences took this problem head on. The result was a weighty report with the promising title of Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century. At the heart of the report was a new idea that would speed up toxicity testing enormously while reducing the time and resources needed as well as the number of animals used. The idea was quite brilliant. If we can understand the underlying biological processes that govern how our bodies work, what the National Academies called Toxicity Pathways, we should be able to come up with simple tests that show how much of a given substance interferes with these processes. And if we could run hundreds of these tests really fast, we should be able to quickly get an idea of how safe or how harmful a substance is likely to be. The report was a success, so much so that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration all got together and formed a massive new initiative to transform toxicity testing in the United States. The initiative's called Tox21, short for Toxicology in the 21st Century, and it's now in full swing. It was launched in 2008 with four aims. First, to better understand the processes or the pathways that govern how our bodies operate. Secondly, to develop tests to see how chemicals interfere with these pathways. Thirdly, to develop ways of predicting how hazardous substances might be. And fourthly, to identify those substances that are most in need of more detailed safety research. At the heart of Tox21 are two really cool emerging technologies, high throughput screening and computational biology. High throughput screening runs chemicals through tests really fast. In fact, robots are used to automatically place these substances in tiny test wells and observe what happens next. These tests are designed to indicate how increasing amounts of chemicals interfere with different toxicity pathways. However, high throughput screening alone is pretty useless. It generates a ton of data, but on their own, these tests it uses can't tell us whether a chemical will in fact cause harm. For this we need to integrate high throughput screening with some advanced science and some powerful computational techniques. And this is where things get interesting. By combining high throughput screening with advanced data processing and computer modeling, Tox21 is developing tools that are enabling thousands of substances to be rapidly screened for potential toxicity. Of course, Tox21 is just the beginning of transforming how we ensure the safety of the chemicals we use. Ironically, despite the name, it doesn't actually provide information on how toxic a substance is, just how it may behave in a complex biological system like the human body. And we're not yet sure how comprehensively it can represent the full, glorious, three-dimensional messiness of human biology. But the process is both highly innovative and incredibly important for identifying chemicals that might be harmful. For these chemicals, we still need to use animals to better understand the actual diseases they're likely to cause. And as always, we also need to understand how much of something causes harm, not just its potential to cause harm. But the more research we do on predicting what happens in animals and humans from high throughput screening and computational biology, the more we can refine, reduce and ultimately replace the use of animals in toxicity testing. In the meantime, Tox21 and similar programs around the world are transforming how we identify chemicals that have the potential to be harmful and how to do the research that's necessary to ensure they are used safely. For more information on Tox21, please do check out the links in the blurb below. And as always, stay safe.