Catching Up with Jeff DeGroot

by Hilary Brueck

Three years ago we asked budding college student Jeff DeGroot why he was involved in politics (read the article here. Jeff worked to campaign alongside many candidates who promoted equal rights for kids in LGBT-parented families like his own two-mom household. But Jeff was frustrated with the apathy and lack of vision his peers had for the political world.

Jeff definitely did not suffer from lack of vision. He was inducted as Oregon’s youngest delegate during Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign. He worked as a mock legislator in the Oregon State Senate while in high school. And when he moved on to college, he crafted a new and inventive get-out-the-vote effort with a group called the Bus Program.

Over the past few years, Jeff and the nation’s political landscape have both changed and grown drastically. Since we last sat down with Jeff, he’s graduated from college and worked with a few nonprofits. During his latest endeavor with COLAGE, he created a donor-insemination guide targeted toward answering some of the complex questions, worries, and frustrations of his donor-conceived peers. In the waning months before he embarks on law school this fall, we took the opportunity to sit down with the sagacious 24-year-old and ask how his political activism has evolved since we last spoke.

In 2007, Jeff was disappointed with the lack of political ambition that “the classic, apathetic” teens and 20-somethings harbored. But 2008 was a watershed year for get-out-the-vote efforts, especially among young people. CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, estimated that 23 million Americans under the age of 30 voted in the 2008 election. That’s an increase of 4–5 percent from the 2004 election, and at least 11 percent from 2000. Jeff was overjoyed to see so many new voters excited about politics:

“Obama pulled ahead, and did so by bringing new people into the electorate. That got me really excited. That’s so much of what I did in Oregon and so much of what I continue to hope to do in the future: let’s get more people engaged in politics! And that was his strategy. … I started to get excited about Obama when I started to hear peers of mine who were not generally politically engaged start talking about Obama in glowing terms. There was an ‘it’ factor to him that got young people excited. It was a gateway to being engaged in politics. If you can have a candidate that gets someone to look up from whatever they’re doing and pay attention to politics, then it’s a gateway to understanding more about the issues.”

Jeff hopes more people can become excited and emboldened by issues like education, the environment, health care, equal rights, and economic justice. The nitty-gritty work that surrounds these progressive themes is precisely what Jeff hopes to delve into in the future.

“So many of these little things, that I think a lot of people don’t think about, can be really huge for families. … Second-parent adoptions aren’t legal in some states. [We need to] make sure that the two actual parents can be on the child’s birth certificate.”

And while Jeff sees glimmers of hope in today’s political landscape, he’s still weary of the time progress takes in Washington.

“On marriage equality, it’s victories and defeat. It was great to be in Iowa and see a place where they had a victory, but then I was in California, where obviously they had a huge defeat. But I’m optimistic. These things aren’t linear; there have to be stops and starts. I like to see that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is starting to meet its end.”

So what’s to be done at home about the fight for these great-scale issues of human rights going on in Washington? How can people at home, who might not have the same political experience or drive as Jeff, still find a way to promote social change?

“There’s so many things you can do on a day-to-day level that are political acts. And I encourage people to do it! Don’t hear ‘activist’ and ‘leader’ and ‘politics’ and say ‘that’s not for me, I’m kind of shy, and that’s just not what I do.’ People can [take political action] in their everyday lives when they just talk to their friends: ask if something’s bothering them, or join their GSA. There are so many little things people can do; everyone can do something. People can [still] go volunteer, or write speeches and do crazy things like go to law school, but so many things are political. I would broaden the definition of a political act.”