Vivek Moorjani

Civic Tech Club President Krish Nachnani (10) asks speaker Sam Liccardo a question during a club event on Jan. 11. Liccardo touched upon topics of advocacy through talking about his past experiences.

Civic Tech Club organized a meeting with former San Jose mayor and civic tech specialist Sam Liccardo in upper school history teacher Karen Haley’s classroom at 3:30 p.m. on Jan. 11. 

Civic Tech Club president Krish Nachnani (10) introduced Liccardo and asked him questions about his background and experiences for the first 40 minutes. Afterwards, attendees engaged in a question and answer session. Liccardo started by discussing his own role in civic tech as mayor in 2015. At the time, the city had been recovering from the Great Recession, so Liccardo looked for ways to bring the community in to help support the cause regarding the poor economy. 

“We were so badly understaffed,” Liccardo said. “We had to start thinking about ways in which we could reach out in the community and leverage the creative and innovative ideas in our community to help us essentially scale our resources.”

Liccardo also touched upon his experiences helping students at San Jose State University find housing. When Liccardo noticed that some students at the university were struggling with their housing situations, he advocated for them by funding temporary Airbnb homes . 

“We actually saw that there are really scary rates of homelessness among San Jose State students, so we reached out to Airbnb with an idea around how they could use their own Airbnb hosts, in partnership with ourselves and a couple nonprofits,” Liccardo said. “We would have the funding to essentially enable students to lease rooms with Airbnb hosts for months at a time while they’re trying to get on their feet and find housing.”

Attendee Amishi Gupta (10) noted that she learned the importance of standing up for one’s beliefs  from the speaker event.“

Mr. Liccardo really emphasized the importance of community, especially in his own advocacy,” Amishi said. “When he was trying to solve problems, he was very amazed by the number of people that were able to come and willing to support, along with all the nonprofit organizations trying to solve problems in the community, which was also really inspiring.”

Civic Tech Club Secretary Ram Batchu (10) mentioned that he hopes to have more similar events in the future with speakers being able to visit in person. 

“One key takeaway that I got from Mr. Liccardo was how invested he was with the community, and how much he just loved helping them,” Ram said. “He seemed like a genuine guy, too.”

Ram also noted that the speaker event inspired him to engage more in the community himself. He hopes to attend more events similar to this in the future. 

“This event inspired me to be a lot more proactive,” Ram said. “Maybe I [will] attend a few of these panels and think about the problems that we have more than usual.”

Civic Tech Club’s faculty adviser Haley mentioned the club’s goal in organizing speaker events was to encourage community members to be engaged with current events. She hopes that through events like these, students will get to think about their surroundings and hear about the events occurring around them. 

“The approach was twofold,” Haley said. “We really wanted students to start to become engaged in their community. For instance, the speaker talked about so many issues involving youth. You wouldn’t necessarily have a conversation about youth homelessness, San Jose State College students not being able to find housing. But those are real issues that young adults are facing.”