SUNY Cortland sophomore Kaylee Evans is lobbying today at the New York State Capitol to get the New York HEAT Act passed. Next month, she will be interning there.
Evans is the first SUNY Cortland student to be selected for the Donald K. Ross Future Leaders Program in more than five years, said Marissa Pappas, project coordinator for New York Public Interest Research Group at SUNY Cortland.
The internship, which is offered by the New York Public Interest Research Group, has students work full-time in Albany on public policy issues.
For Evans, those are the environmental and higher education campaigns.
“Our generation has climate anxiety, and is starting to understand that this is not something that’s way down the road, it’s something that’s happening now, which has me super driven,” Evans said. “It’s an issue that literally everyone is involved with, and literally everyone can do something.
Evans, a political science major, became interested in government at Baker High School in Baldwinsville, when she was elected as student representative to the school board.
As soon as she went to college, a NYPIRG representative gave a talk on voter registration in her class, and she soon started attending meetings, she said.
In March, she lobbied with NYPIRG in Albany against tuition increases.
“The higher education campaign is huge, because every student is affected by the money that they have to pay to go to school, especially in SUNY and CUNY schools,” she said.
Two months later, she was elected to the campus’ NYPIRG’s board of directors, a group of students that decide what issues to work on.
For Pappas, it was a goal since the beginning of her time in the role to get a student into this program.
“It was the fact that she just kept showing up to things, because with a lot of college students, they are just so overwhelmed and have so many priorities,” Pappas said. “Kaylee just kept showing up and doing the work that our interns do, without being an intern. We don’t often get people who are so engaged in that way.”
Pappas helped Evans get permission to do that internship, as it is reserved for upperclassmen.
“It’ll still be very academic,” Evans said. “I’ll be handing in essays and reading textbooks, but I also get to go be in the capital with these other people, and get to see things happen as they happen.”
Being in NYPIRG helped her overcome social anxiety, she said. Staffing tables on campus for NYPIRG helped her learn to talk with people, ask and answer questions, and deal with the rejection that may come.
“A lot of what NYPIRG teaches is transferable skills, like how to get people to come to an event, or how to engage with other people and explain policy into a bite-sized thing that people understand,” Pappas said.
Evans and the NYPIRG group recently went to New York City for the March to End Fossil Fuels.
“When 75,000 people are together for one cause, it’s such a powerful feeling,” Evans said.
She is interning with both Homer Mayor Darren “Hal” McCabe of Homer and the Cannabis Association of New York, where she works with McCabe and others to understand state cannabis policy and the complications affecting the cannabis industry.
She leaves for Albany in January, and hopes to continue working with NYPIRG in graduate school, she said. Eventually, Evans hopes to become a state senator, assembly member or federal representative.
“The long-term goal would be to be working and living in Albany when I graduate,” she said.
