Casey Rodriguez: We’ve been showcasing powerful stories of pluralism in action, and today I am joined by someone doing just that. Sara Roberts McCarley is the founder of the Randy Roberts Foundation, City Commissioner in Lakeland, Florida, and 2023 Presidential Leadership Scholar. Thank you so much for joining us, Sara.
Sara Roberts McCarley: Thanks for having me, Casey. It’s always a pleasure.
Casey Rodriguez: Can you please tell us about yourself and your organization to start out with?
Sara Roberts McCarley: Absolutely. So, the Randy Roberts Foundation was founded in 2009, and we work to cultivate Florida’s future leaders through some high school programming called the Civic Scholar Program.
And I am a 2023 PLS alum, a wonderful opportunity that I had to be in that cohort and get to know so many amazing people from around the country. And I serve currently as a city commissioner for Lakeland, Florida since 2019. I also am married and I have two kids, and I love living in central Florida. I’m a native of Florida.
Casey Rodriguez: You had this idea, you started this foundation. Can you tell me about what you did next and how you got it started?
Sara Roberts McCarley: Absolutely. So, we worked with our local high school. We just started with our local public high school. I had two friends that served as guidance counselors at the school, and I reached out to them and said, “we would like to have a partnership with you and help students get engaged with their civic and community at large.” And they really helped me shape and frame out how we started that process.
Casey Rodriguez: So, can you tell us a little bit about the Randy Roberts Foundation and what you do there with the high school students?
Sara Roberts McCarley: Absolutely. So, in 2009, my late husband passed away really suddenly. He had worked in and around government for his career, and I had been in the nonprofit sector, but we always had a passion for high school students being engaged in the community.
So, with his passing, we had an outpouring of support and a lot of us, our friends, decided to stay engaged with the community at large. We would build programming that helped serve local students here in Polk County, Florida. And what we did was design a civic scholar program, which is hard to say really fast. And we have a three-step process where we bring in high school juniors, we teach them about local government in our community classroom program. Two-thirds of that group gets selected to go to our capital classroom program in Tallahassee, Florida during legislative session. A third of the group then gets selected to go to Washington, DC the fall of their senior year of high school to learn about the federal government and the inner workings. And what we do a lot of is really encouraging students to look at pathways into public service.
Also, we encourage them just to know how things work. You know, how does your community work? Who picks up your garbage? Who makes sure you have lights on and good clean running water in your community, but also how other decisions are made up the food chain and government.
Casey Rodriguez: That’s fantastic. I think those are important lessons to do and teach for these younger generations so that they get involved. So, as you know, we’re getting a focus on pluralism today. So, what does pluralism mean to you and your organization?
Sara Roberts McCarley: Our organization has really focused organically on making sure we have a cross selection of students that participate. So, being in Polk County, Florida, we have a pretty low AMI. We have some rural areas and support areas. We have 17 municipalities. So, through all of those high schools, we invite public, private, and charter high school students to be involved with our program. And that brings with it pluralism, because we have students from all different backgrounds who participate and want to be a part of what we do. So, that integration of ideas and experiences, especially life experiences, even as early as being a junior in high school, is critical to our program success.
We want students who maybe have never even thought about government before, and how it impacts them. They may have never interviewed for a leadership position. We give them that opportunity and we coach them through it. Really, we also have students who might be in a collegiate program. They’re dually enrolled, so they have been academically really pushing themselves and being leaders, but they may not know students who think differently than they do. So, we put all those kids in a room, and we see how they interact with one another and how they would solve problems together.
Casey Rodriguez: You also touched a little bit on this already, but kind of want to go a little deeper about what you teach the students to be good citizens. So, how important is pluralism when it relates to good citizenry?
Sara Roberts McCarley: One of the challenges when our students first apply and we interview with them, or when we’re speaking to them in a large group, we talk about being good neighbors. So, really any neighborhood you live in, whether you’re in an apartment building or you’re in a historic neighborhood with lots of sidewalks and connectivity to one another, and people are out walking their dogs, a lot of times in this day and age, our students don’t necessarily know their neighbors.
We try to challenge them to meet at least two of their neighbors that they haven’t met while they’re in our program, and then report back to us like, “hey, who are my neighbors?” They may not vote the same way. We may not go to the same churches. We may not have the same value systems. But, integrating and understanding that we’re all humans and we all want to take care of the things in and around us, and we want to make those human connections with one another to be good citizens. And you can be a good citizen by bringing in your neighbor’s trash cans. Maybe you have an elderly neighbor, and that’s a good way to be a good citizen. A good citizen also could be someone who picks up a piece of trash in the hallway at school.
So, it doesn’t have to be grandiose, Instagram-worthy, citizen actions. It can be those daily tools to take care of people that you may or may not know and to connect with individuals who are different than you.
Casey Rodriguez: Can you go a little bit into how you started the Randy Roberts Foundation, and why you were targeting the high school students, and what advice you would give to people that are wanting to replicate it where they live, or concrete steps that they can take by seeing the work that you are doing here?
Sara Roberts McCarley: So, we had a very sudden, tragic event happen in our family. And my late husband, Randy Roberts, who was the lobbyist for Publix at the time, which is why we live in Lakeland, and he passed away just very suddenly on a Friday morning. And so, we had an outpouring of support because of his connectivity to the State of Florida. He sat on multiple boards. He had a lot of engagement at a really early age, and we had all of this support around my children and I that we wanted to channel into something that would serve the community at large. How could we keep his legacy and his memory alive and his passion?
Randy was the first elected school board student advisor in Broward County, Florida, in Fort Lauderdale. So, he always had a passion for being involved, even as a high school kid. And he and I served Best Buddies International. I was a state director. He was an advisory board member. So, we always had a passion for high school students knowing that they have a lot to offer. They have a lot of energy, they have a lot of great ideas, and sometimes they get overlooked.
So, with the outpouring of his sudden death, a group of friends, and I really channeled this into: “we should do something to give back and we’re going to target specifically students that are at the high school level.” And they may not be the academic all-stars, and they may not be the athletic all-stars. How do we have and showcase what students are doing on a day-to-day basis and really tethering them to something bigger than themselves and learning about how to be good citizens in the community.
So, I was fortunate to have some friends that came alongside me and said- I think at first, they thought it was crazy that we wanted to start a nonprofit. And honestly, we started with scholarships. So, we gave a scholarship in the first year to a student who started an environmental program at our high school. We wanted students to say, “this is how I serve my high school community.” And we followed them to say “how are you going to serve your college community? And what does that look like?”
Casey Rodriguez: Yeah. That’s fantastic. Such a powerful story and such powerful things happening because of you. So really, really important things being done. So, my last question would just be what work still needs to be done in your own words?
Sara Roberts McCarley: I think the divisiveness that we see right now politically across the country and even the world. We need to simplify and get back to grassroots.
So, for me, that means working in this community classroom program, touching as many students as we can to show them how they can be involved, that it can look a lot of different ways. And being good neighbors is really, really important. And sharing ideas in a safe place.
One of the biggest takeaways of mine for being in PLS, the class of 2023, was the environment; that we all think differently and have different values and different ideas, but we can come together and really [00:09:00] talk about those things honestly and openly. And that’s something that in reflecting, when we started this foundation, we didn’t mean to do that, but organically it happened that way that we were bringing students together who were different.
And I think taking the very – I don’t want to say threatening – but simplifying what we do as communities is really, really important. I tell my students all the time, the President doesn’t really care where your garbage is, whether it gets picked up or not. Like that’s really important. So being involved locally is really, really important. And to turn off the news. I think if we all could turn off the news, we might be better for it.
Casey Rodriguez: Yeah, I think that’s some great advice. So, thank you so much for joining us but also sharing your story and giving some great advice of how people can really give back in their communities.
Sara Roberts McCarley: Well, thanks for having me. I’m happy to always share too with people, you know, a tactical bullet point list. I know that I am very effusive with my words, so I would just encourage people to engage with their local high school.
