Tom is the Executive Director of The Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia. Located in Charlottesville, VA, Tom and his team create and execute a variety of programs to teach ethics, bipartisanship, and public policy to young leaders in high school, college, and early on in their careers on the campaign trail.
Transcript
My name is Tom Walls, I am the Executive Director of the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership here at UVA. We have five programs that take people from all around Virginia who are somehow engaged in political life or government and we try to help them learn about public policy issues in Virginia, about the needs of different parts of Virginia but also about how to engage in politics and policy debate in a constructive and civil way. We have five staff and there's fundraising, there's recruiting, there's just all the logistical arrangements for all these hotels and meals and so forth. And then it's just being a kind of a spokesperson who talks about what we do, who handles the relationships with the political figures, with the university, with the media, all of that. I'll just talk about a typical part of what we do, our political leaders program, to set up a weekend. We will have to decide where it's going to be and we'll sit down and look at the various options around Virginia. Then when we pick a location now we have to recruit speakers to come from that area, maybe also from other areas, and that's, involves a lot of relationship building that just goes on constantly for our organization. And we have to book the hotels, we have to arrange the restaurants and all of that and then we put together the substantive curriculum for the weekend. In a typical week I might be going on one of these weekends that we do. So if I'm at the candidate training program, that's our other program that I hadn't mentioned, I'll be there for three days with them in a conference center and sort of overseeing things but also participating and I will be maybe one of the instructors for some of the sessions they have which range from get out the vote, to fundraising to all the practical aspects of running a campaign but also something we emphasize is ethical campaigning. I'm very much involved in that discussion. In our high school program, that's a two week intensive program here at UVA for which the high school students actually get UVA credit. I'm one of the teachers in that one so in that week I'll be in the classroom nearly every day teaching about government and politics and how it all works.
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