What is one of your earliest memories of the power of human connection?
My parents both immigrated to the U.S. from Morocco, and growing up in New York, I had a foot in both worlds. At school, I was the Moroccan student. Every summer in Casablanca, I was the American cousin. I loved it, and it felt completely normal.
I’m often reminded of a particular scene from my childhood. In many Moroccan homes, Friday is couscous day. At my grandmother’s house, we’d all sit around one giant dish, scooping up the grains and meat with our hands. I was probably in first or second grade, and I remember thinking, we don’t eat with our hands at home! But eating this way never felt wrong, undignified, or uncivilized. This was family time, and this was our tradition. My family helped me feel like I belonged in that tradition, even though it was so different from what I was used to. Neither way of eating — with our hands or with utensils — was right or wrong. It just was.
Experiencing different traditions and ways of life so young normalized the idea that you can be two things at once and belong in different places. For most of my childhood, being both Moroccan and American was just who I was. Then 9/11 happened. Living in New York at that time, I suddenly felt like I had to choose a team. That was confusing, because it felt incompatible with how complex humans actually are.
If not for those early experiences, I don’t know that I’d be doing what I’m doing today: helping lawmakers see each other as whole people, beyond their party labels. A whole person contains multiple identities. I think our country and our political system need to get much better at making room for that.
What values guide your personal life and your work?
Curiosity is a driving value in my work and my life. In our politics, there’s a tendency to think that if you know someone’s political party, you know everything important about them. I’ve met so many people who defy these assumptions, but you only get that chance if you’re curious enough to be surprised.
I got engaged during the height of the COVID pandemic, and my husband and I had to decide on a vaccine policy for our wedding. A close family member didn’t want to get vaccinated, and I couldn’t understand why.
It took six hard months, and years of trust between us, to get to the real question: Why are you so afraid? It turned out they had lived through several life-or-death situations where a doctor or pharmacist made a mistake, and my family member was the one who caught the error before it caused real harm. Suddenly, I understood that their position came from a place of love; they were trying to protect me from the kind of medical mistakes they had avoided before.
The other value that guides me is agency. People have an extraordinary capacity to change the world around them, especially when they have relationships, encouragement, and validation to act.
Even the big systemic challenges that feel wildly out of our control were built by people, and they can be reshaped by people. I like to say that people shape institutions, but relationships shape people. Remembering our connections to one another keeps us from feeling powerless when things aren’t going the way we want. I think about that now as a new mom, too. I want my daughter to grow up treating others with respect and feeling confident in who she is, without needing other people to be just like her.
When did a person or experience change your mind about an idea or belief?
Before Future Caucus, I worked at a think tank and believed that bringing people together across the political spectrum and arming them with facts and data was how you found common ground. One story from Future Caucus showed me that building trust across differences has to come first.
In 2017, we launched the Mississippi Future Caucus, a bipartisan group of young state legislators. At their first dinner, someone suggested working on the state flag, which still carried Confederate iconography. You could hear a pin drop.
Luckily, even after that tense first dinner, people continued to come back to the network. The caucus members got dinners, lunches, and happy hours and got to know each other as people. Over time, they took on a tax idea and an education bill together to deliver results on key policy issues that Mississippians cared about.
Then in 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, advocates brought up the state flag issue again. Three years earlier, this group couldn’t even argue about it. Now, they had enough trust to discuss it. In the end, they unanimously supported the legislation that changed Mississippi’s flag.
Data and evidence matter. But the relational pre-work has to happen first: building trust that lets people hear each other and wrestle with hard choices together in good faith.
What are you working on right now?
We are about to release a new strategic plan. Since 2013, Future Caucus has built a network of bipartisan young lawmakers who feel a real connection to each other, with programs that sharpen their leadership, policy knowledge, and communication. Over the next three years, we want to help that network move from individually well-equipped lawmakers to coalitions with the influence, and enough members, to shape the culture of how we govern.
Who we elect really matters, and lots of organizations focus on that. But I’m obsessed with what happens after Election Day. I’ve heard newly elected candidates describe their first day in office like getting dropped off for the first day of school, looking behind you, and watching the tires screech away. Well, now what?
That’s where Future Caucus comes in. We help young lawmakers learn to govern, find each other across the aisle, and build the influence to make change.
We also know Future Caucus can’t change how our institutions work on its own. It takes an ecosystem of organizations, funders, media, and others who support lawmakers. That’s why we’re convening those groups and sparking collaborations, so that together, we can shape the conditions that let elected leaders govern collaboratively and better serve their communities.
What is giving you hope? What positive visions do you have for our future?
I spend my days with young elected officials from across the political spectrum who are genuinely trying to do something meaningful. Many serve at the state level while juggling other jobs, families, and student loans. These are regular people doing the best they can to make a positive difference through governance and public policy.
Two numbers tell me their collaborative approach is working. The Center for Effective Lawmaking, a research initiative at the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt, evaluated our members against data going back to 1970 and found that Future Caucus members are 24% more effective than their peers. And our new On the Rise report shows that the share of Gen Z and Millennial candidates running for Congress has doubled since we started tracking it, from one in six to one in three in this cycle.
So, our political system may look broken, but young people who work together in office are delivering results. More of them are running toward the fire, saying, “Put me in, coach, I can help!” I know the headlines can be scary, but the reality is, there are more people in different levels of government trying to do good than there are people breaking things.
More Through the Prism Interviews
