Welcome to another edition of Kid News Convost. I'm your host, Mark Curtis, also a member of the Kid News Board of Directors.

You know, one of the goals of our organization is to get young people more engaged in current events and news and then talk about those things with their moms and dads and their teachers at school and with their fellow classmates.

To that end, I want to introduce a young lady who

is doing something right on those goals, and that is Ella Dietz. She is a 15-year-old student in

Austin, Texas, and she founded the nonprofit organization Vote On. Ella, thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. You're a regular listener of Kid News and you reached out to us because

you thought, Nia, you might have a topic being your nonprofit that we want to talk about. And that's

absolutely what we're going to do today. In a nutshell, what is Votan? What's its purpose? What does it do?

So Vot On is a student-led nationwide nonprofit and it's focused on getting young people more engaged in democracy.

So, you know, giving them the tools to participate primarily by registering them to vote.

And we do this by starting vote.

Students can start their vote-on clubs at schools nationwide.

So, like, if you're a student around the nation in high school or college, you could start a vote-on-club at your school

to register your peers to vote and also just get them participated in democracy more.

Well, that's fascinating because, you know, again, those are some of the very goals we have here

at Kid News. And so we hope we can help each other. Why did you start it? You know, it's a fun

story. I've always been super involved in politics from a young

age. It's something I've been super interested in. And actually during last year, I've been on student

government for the past few years, and it was during last year's election. I was running as a candidate,

and I noticed that a lot of my friends didn't vote in the student government election. And it was

super surprising to me because,

you know, electing student government officials helps figure out, like, policies for your school.

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