Lawrence Norden Devotes His Life to Civic Engagement

Lawrence Norden is Deputy Director of the Brennan Center's Democracy Program. He works on a variety of issues including money in politics, voting and government dysfunction. He is a guest on the upcoming episode Big Money vs. Us in which he discussed Brennan Center's work on campaign finance reform and public financing of elections. In this video, Lawrence shares what inspired him to make civic engagement the core of his life's work.[accordions id="" multiple_open="" close_all="on"][accordion title="Video Transcript"]

Video Transcript:

My name is Larry Norton. I'm Deputy Director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School. I have to admit, I actually don't remember my first civic action. I would say growing up I could remember being somebody that was politically engaged and interested in engagement, in like, political engagement in my community, but I would say actually I always thought of it as kind of just a luxury almost something that was an extracurricular activity, but I didn't really think about devoting my life to and there was a critical moment in my life. The 2000 election where I kind of saw how how much engagement mattered how much the rules of the games of the way that we run elections could have a massive impact on everybody and how even keeping just a small number of people from voting could essentially change history and change how people lived for several years after that had a big impact on me. Then soon after that election actually, I went to South Africa to to write about the drafting of the new South African post-apartheid South African Constitution, and I saw what an impact people who engaged in that work had on a massive number of additional people and the lives that they lived. After getting back from South Africa and doing that work there was actually a change in how I thought about civic engagement. I realized that it wasn't necessarily something for me that I did only when I could kind of find the spare top spare time and that I really couldn't afford to do I wanted to actually make a change in the way I live my life and make civic engagement kind of the core of what I did and so it was soon after that that actually I came here to the Brennan Center. I started volunteering at the Brennan Center and giving a lot more of my time and then fell in love with the work that I do here and I've been here now for 15 years.[/accordion][/accordions]