SEATTLE’S HOTTEST
UNPAID INTERNSHIP
KATIE WILSON APPOINTED SIX YOUNG PEOPLE TO SERVE ON HER MAYORAL TRANSITION TEAM. WHO ARE THEY, AND WHAT’S THEIR AGENDA?
WRITTEN BY ADAM WILLEMS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY XANDRA YUGTO
[January 31, 2026] | ON NOVEMBER 26, 2025, two weeks after securing her election to the Seattle mayoralty by a razor-thin margin of 2,011 votes, Katie Wilson announced her 60-person transition team: a cohort of policy wonks, activists, and civil-society bigwigs tasked with diagnosing Seattleites’ most urgent needs, and, among other responsibilities, transmuting constituents’ priorities into policy proposals for the new mayor.
Some figures named to the transition team — given Wilson’s background as a progressive organizer who’d helped lead campaigns to fund social housing, raise the minimum wage, and launch the Jumpstart payroll tax — were somewhat predictable: representatives of leading advocacy groups like House Our Neighbors and MLK Labor.
But a bit further out of left field was Wilson’s appointment of six young people to her transition council — one as young as 16, not yet of voting age — and her standing up of a standalone committee focused solely on young Seattleites and students.
Following that announcement, we at CHUM News had some questions:
Was this just an olive branch extended to Seattle’s young residents, a symbolic gesture designed to placate constituents who’d helped bring Katie Wilson to power — or was this transition committee indicative of a more substantive shift in city politics?
What did the transition committee’s youthful cadre plan do with the power bestowed unto them?
And, lastly, who are these young people, and how’d they land Seattle’s hottest unpaid internship?
At coffee shops across the city, at listening sessions, and via email, we turned to these young members of Wilson’s transition team, experts on youth political empowerment, and members of Mayor Wilson’s administration to learn more. In the process, we learned that the young activists Wilson appointed see an opportunity for students and others to secure major gains under the city’s new mayor — and plan to formally entrench young people’s political power in the city beyond Katie Wilson’s tenure in office.
The activists plan to formally entrench young people's political power beyond Katie Wilson's tenure in office.
Spend enough time watching TVW, Washington State’s version of C-SPAN, and you’re likely to catch a glimpse of Bailey Medilo, a fixture in Washington youth politics. Medilo is a digital and communications organizer for the Washington Bus, the state’s largest political advocacy group run by and for young people. Equal parts affable and composed, they can regularly be seen speaking at the State Capitol in Olympia — testifying last week, for instance, in favor of state Senate Bill 5906, which attempts to protect public spaces like schools from federal immigration enforcement — and rallying for local causes in Seattle, including as a member of the Transit Riders Union, the political group co-founded by Katie Wilson in 2011. Now, Medilo is helping lead the Youth & Students Committee as part of the mayoral transition.
Medilo, like other members of the committee interviewed by CHUM News, learned of their appointment shortly before the public announcement; they were notified by Alex Gallo-Brown, a union organizer (and published poet) who now serves as Director of Community Relations for Mayor Wilson.
“What I had been aware of is that a transition team was being put together,” Medilo said. “What I didn't know was that there were going to be so many young voices on it.”
In an email interview with CHUM News, Gallo-Brown said Wilson’s team “tried to have a range of different educational institutions and geographical areas represented” on the Youth & Students Committee, including representatives from the University of Washington (Sonal Virk), Seattle Central College (Simon Kreft), South Seattle College (Russell McQuarrie-Means), and the Seattle Student Union (Leo Falit-Baiamonte), which represents high schoolers. The transition team’s core organizers complemented campus-level representatives with figures like Medilo, “who has relationships with politically minded young folks throughout the city,” as well as Rayne Thompson, an active member of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. With a team stacked for breadth and depth, the Youth & Students Committee was tasked with “fact-finding and perspective-gathering from communities throughout the city,” Gallo-Brown said.
“It was also not lost on us that the youth vote may very well have been what propelled Katie to the Mayor's Office”
Leading the committee has involved “a lot of operational work,” according to Medilo. Over January, they organized four listening sessions across Seattle — on UW’s campus, on Capitol Hill, in South Seattle, and in West Seattle. The committee’s members are now in the process of turning in their homework, so to speak, which is due mid-February: a report that will relay what they learned from those sessions, and will outline concrete steps that can help the Wilson administration meaningfully improve young people’s lives — and maybe keep young people politically engaged.
“It was also not lost on us that the youth vote may very well have been what propelled Katie to the Mayor's Office,” Alex Gallo-Brown said. “We're going to need to keep that energy up, and those young people involved, if we're going to deliver on the affordability agenda that was the foundation of our campaign.”
Some mayors establish youth advisory committees once they’re in office. But Mayor Wilson’s strategy of appointing youth leaders to her transition is unusual. Such broad-tent electoral pragmatism is not “standard practice,” according to Alberto Medina of CIRCLE, a Massachusetts-based research center focused on youth civic engagement. “But it seems like a potentially great way to involve young people in decision-making from the very first days of a new municipal administration,” he said.
That’s a departure from the way the Harrell administration interacted with young people, said Leo Falit-Baiamonte, a student at Nathan Hale High School, the president of the Seattle Student Union, and a member of Mayor Wilson’s transition team. I met him in early January at Café Allegro, a sun-adorned coffee shop nestled in an alleyway between Magus Books and MOD Pizza in the U District.
As I picked my way through an almond pastry, Falit-Baiamonte recounted his path to political engagement: In May 2023, as a freshman, Falit-Baiamonte ran unopposed for the student representative seat on Nathan Hale’s building leadership team, which helps allocate some of the school’s budget, and sets some school-level policies. He saw firsthand how budget cuts were compromising the quality of his education.
“I saw teachers literally crying about their being fired,” he said. “And we saw [Seattle Public Schools] cutting social workers because of our budget cuts. And because of that, I looked for a place to organize.”
He then joined the Seattle Student Union (SSU), which was founded after the 2022 fatal on-campus shooting of Ebenezer Haile, a 17-year-old student at Ingraham High School. Falit-Baiamonte said some students were frustrated at the existing ecosystem of student groups, which either served a political party — like the Washington High School Democrats — or were appointed by the Seattle Public Schools Board or the state’s Lieutenant-Governor, and therefore failed to fully understand and tackle students’ needs. The SSU helped “unite” schools on the north and south ends of Seattle through its early work, he said, and, since its founding, has helped pass three statewide gun violence prevention measures, and helped secure $20 million for mental health-focused staff in Seattle Public Schools. “We mobilize students to fight for the things students need,” he said.
But the SSU’s gains butted up against city-level austerity measures and the priorities of Seattle politicians at the time. In 2024, the $20 million budget for mental health staffing in Seattle Public Schools that the SSU secured was soon whittled down by the City Council (in an amendment proposed by Councilmember Dan Strauss) to just $12.25 million, despite protests from then-Councilmember Tammy Morales that such a cut went “back on the promised funding to the students.” Falit-Baiamonte said former Mayor Bruce Harrell failed to meet student needs in other ways over the course of his four-year term, which ended on January 1.
The effects of such austerity have only been made worse in the wake of Trump-induced interruptions to federal funding; and funding from Olympia might not make up for those cuts, as Governor Bob Ferguson has proposed slashing the state’s education budget in the face of a deficit. The state’s schools superintendent, Chris Reykdal, has dismissed Ferguson’s proposal as an effort to “[close] the holes in Washington’s budget on the backs of public services.”
“We’re hoping to get some of that money back into our schools,” Falit-Baiamonte said.
At a January 10 listening session near the Othello light rail station in South Seattle — led by the Youth & Students Committee, with assistance from the Washington Bus — young Seattleites showed how all-encompassing their concerns are as Mayor Wilson gets her administration going.
They expressed interest in being taught practical skills in classrooms, including learning more about their labor and tenants’ rights in Seattle. They called for staffing more counselors at schools, as some felt unmoored during the college-application process, and wanted greater investment in non-college professional pathways. And they debated the place of police on their campuses: recounting stories of feeling unsafe or attacked near schools, but also expressing skepticism at the notion that people with guns are the solution to on-campus violence.
Matt McIntosh, who helped run Katie Wilson’s mayoral campaign, and who now reports to Alex Gallo-Brown as a Community Relations Manager, attended the listening session near Othello. In an interview with CHUM News, McIntosh said that, once the Youth & Students Committee submits its findings to the Mayor’s Office, he looked forward to crafting “a plan for regular engagement moving forward” — suggesting Wilson’s administration saw this transition team as at the start of its work, not the tail end.
“It’s clear that Seattle’s youth have a great deal to contribute to our affordability agenda and the broad wellbeing of our city,” he said. “I’m excited to continue working with them.”
The young activists find hope in that kind of rhetoric. Despite their bullish outlook, though, they know better than to take politicians’ overtures at face value. At the listening session, Medilo told attendees that the (anonymized) information they shared was a way to gather “receipts,” and to potentially hold Wilson’s feet to the fire when warranted.
To a skeptic, establishing an elected youth council might sound like student-government ambitions converging with the antics of City Hall.
“All of this information is going to be Katie's linchpin for success when it comes to youth engagement and youth[-focused] policymaking,” Medilo said. “They’re also our receipts to tell Katie, We told you this. We told you that we have to skip class in order to go to City Hall. We told you that we feel unsafe on transit, and we told you that we would love more funding for arts and for community programs. I think at the end of the day, our role as transition members is not really to be ambassadors for the Mayor, but to be your ambassadors to her. So I want you to keep that in mind, and I want to stay connected.”
To that end, the report the Youth & Students Committee will submit mid-February will propose establishing an elected youth advisory board that would answer directly to the Mayor. Not all the details are ironed out — it could, perhaps, involve repurposing the Student Youth Commission: a group appointed by the Mayor and City Council, which currently reports to the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods — but the board would see students across campuses vote for their representatives themselves, interrupting the practice of adults getting to appoint young people’s representation in halls of power.
Through a system of student elections, “it’s not who the Mayor selects to advise them, it’s who the students want,” said Leo Falit-Baiamonte, the student activist from Nathan Hale High School. “We trust that Katie would be able to pick students with a wide [set of] ideas, but this would just be the safest way to do it,” he added, suggesting that the system would also help with youth engagement in politics, and improve the quality of information local politicians get from their school-based constituents.
To a skeptic, the youth advisors’ idea might sound like student-government ambitions converging with the antics of City Hall. But advisory councils like the one they’re proposing have been set up in other cities, and have delivered substantial results, according to Alberto Medina of CIRCLE. Medina pointed to Colorado, where a municipal teen council, with amplification from the state’s youth advisory council, successfully expanded access to naloxone (a drug used to reverse opioid overdoses) across the state. Political partnerships between youth and adults can also improve voter turnout, he noted.
The Wilson administration is likely to take the proposal under serious consideration. Cinthia Illan Vazquez, the founder and executive director of the Washington Bus, told CHUM News that Wilson seems interested in “co-governance,” rather than something more top-down. Such an ethos helped land her in office, and is a logic that makes regular advisory roles for Seattle youth something of a no-brainer. To boot: Many of the youth advisors and the students voting for them can’t cast their ballots in city, state, or federal elections — but might look kindly upon a mayor who gives them more power, including after they turn 18 and get to vote in future elections.
Setting up a youth advisory committee, and really giving it legs to act as a funnel for youth political power on the city level, will require a budget. Medina of CIRCLE emphasized that adequately compensating members of councils was “critical” to any effort to attract a “wide range of young people” to throw their hat in the ring as candidates. Elected leaders should also do something with the advisors’ recommendations and take them seriously, Medina added, not “tokenize them as youth whose work or opinions can be ignored.” Those base conditions are far from guaranteed.
What might be the long-term ripple effects of Wilson’s mayoral transition? And what might young people make of it? I turned to Russell McQuarrie-Means, Vice-President of the College Democrats of Washington and a member of Wilson’s Youth & Students Committee, to answer that question. We met in late December at C&P Coffee in West Seattle on a Saturday morning, making enough time to wrap up our conversation before the coffee shop’s weekly (and lovely) 10:30am performance by Brazilian guitarist Marco de Carvalho.
I asked McQuarrie-Means, a fifth-generation Seattleite and a student at South Seattle College, when he thought we’d start to see results from the Wilson administration. He doesn’t expect real city-level change until the new mayor passes her first budget in November 2026. Wilson’s leadership style will have some impact in the interim, he hedged.
“It's still a centrist City Council, and we need one more vote to change that; let's see what happens in [Council District] 5 next year,” he said. “I'm not expecting a big change between Harrell and Katie at first. I'm expecting a change in management. I'm expecting a change in how the city is run, and how City Hall is run. I'm expecting it to be a less toxic work environment that won't cause elected officials to quit.”
While those other pieces come into play, McQuarrie-Means is using the momentum and title of his role on the transition team to open more doors, and is getting to work with a cohort of public leaders — including other new faces in city government, like City Attorney Erika Evans. McQuarrie-Means sees grassroots organizing and lobbying as complementary tools. Through their role in the transition council, shuttling between elected officials and grassroots community groups, youth activists have both tools at their disposal.
“Political power is what the individual makes of it,” he said, “and who is willing to listen.”