By Debra Fitzgerald, Peninsula Pulse – January 4th, 2024

Teens Making a Difference

Yana Zenefski is a board member for the Door County Democrats and her youthful presence on a political board seemed a good reason to reach out to the 17-year-old senior at Southern Door High School.

I assumed before our discussion that her stint with the Door Dems was the start of the teen’s political involvement and something good to list on college applications. I underestimated Zenefski.

“Door Dems is slightly later in my political journey,” Zenefski said when I landed a spot on her color-coded calendar (I was purple).

After our conversation, Zenefski was scheduled to spend her school-night evening at virtual meetings, first with the YMCA Youth in Government, then a board meeting with Lex Societas – a Global High School Pre-Law Honor Society, for which she serves as publications director.

She’s also a member of the High School Democrats of America, for which she serves as Wisconsin’s Vice Chair, Midwest Regional Director, and the National Disability Caucus Vice Chair; and she was selected this year to serve on the inaugural Youth Advisory Council with YMCA of the USA (Y-USA).

She’s been involved with the Door County YMCA Youth in Government program her entire high-school career – “it’s a hands-on process for young people to learn about civics and government structure,” she said – and has traveled to Washington, D.C. with the YMCA Youth Advocate program, sharpening her considerable civic intelligence on Congressional members while advocating policy solutions for issues like youth development, healthy living and social responsibility.

“Football to others is like government to me,” she said. “I’m generally happy to be there.”

In her bio for Lex Societas, Zenefski said she joined the organization to broadcast her passion not only for the environment, but issues like disability legislation, equal rights and the general freedoms of Americans. She does not take those freedoms lightly. Russian by birth, she immigrated to the United States when her mom married a Door County man. Zenefski was three years old at the time.

“My generation is on the rise and it is our future.” —Yana Zenefski

“I feel like it’s been a long road of being silenced,” she said. “As you know, Door County is majorly rural. From a young person’s perspective it’s a retirement community. People come here to live when they retire because it’s beautiful. Living and growing up in this area, when you’re not a millionaire who just retired or you haven’t been here that long, you get pushed to the side. I called it “the silence” in my life because I didn’t know how to communicate or have my voice heard.

“A lot of people my age just don’t know they have the voice they could have,” she continued. “They don’t know they could go speak and lobby and make these changes in government, which ultimately presides over us – and strikes a chord in my heart.”

Zenefski said youths need to be taught how to participate responsibly within a representative democracy that is the birthright of all U.S. citizens, and she’s not finding this level of preparation in her high school curriculum.

“Their political ideologies are their parents,” she said about her high-school peers. “They don’t research on their own, and school doesn’t teach you how to register, how to vote, how to research candidates.”

Zenefski is not just leading the way for people her own age. A couple months ago, she developed a rock project for the Door Dems where they painted rocks that had been collected on private beaches, and then placed the rocks around the county for passersby to discover, primarily in municipal parks. The rocks contained messages about gun control –  “books not bullets,” and “protect kids, not guns,” for example.

“It’s Rocks against Gun Violence,” she said. “It’s not saying ban guns, or they’re [guns] bad, it’s kids are being killed in schools – a place we should feel safe.”

The messaging wasn’t the primary point of her project, however.

“It was a creative way to get the community involved,” Zenefski said. “Since becoming engaged with the Door Dems, I notice they sit down at a dinner, listen to someone speak, maybe talk with their [dinner] neighbors and then go home with a message. Rock painting was just a way to get people involved with a hands-on approach. It’s getting people out to know that activism isn’t just sitting in a room listening to someone. You can stand in resistance to something in a different way.”

As she nears the May 2024 end of her high-school career, she said college is in her future, as is some kind of career in government or the nonprofit world (she’s been involved with the YMCA since she was three-years-old and was appointed to the Door County YMCA’s board this year).

But it would not be surprising to find her name on a not-so-distant ballot.

“Somewhere in the future, I  could see myself running for office just because I am so involved in politics, and if I do that within the next 10 years, it can show that kids my age can do it,” she said. “My generation is on the rise and it is our future.”

(It is with a great deal of pride that Door County Democrats have found our own Youth Representative the well deserved subject of an article in the January 5th edition of The Peninsula Pulse. The article is republished above in its entirety.)