Casey Given and the business of getting heard

Casey Given helped throw a party for data centers. On September 26, 2026, hundreds of people turned up at PubKey in Washington, DC, for Data After Dark, a celebration of the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence. There were themed cocktails, a DJ, a jazz trio, journalists, and protesters. A policy argument had acquired a drinks menu. For the chief executive of Young Voices, this was a fairly literal demonstration of a longstanding interest: getting an idea out of its usual room.

Given organized the event with Pirate Wires reporter Jonas Du and R Street Institute technology fellow Ed Tarnowski. The menu included a “Closed Loop Spritz” and an “SMR-tini,” references to cooling systems and small modular nuclear reactors. Washington has plenty of people who can explain an acronym. Fewer put one on a cocktail list and persuade people to queue around the block.

The party also attracted objections. Protesters interrupted the remarks, and Given acknowledged that local concerns about water, electricity, and zoning were reasonable. He argued that democratic processes could address them. The evening offered a useful view of his work: taking a position, putting people around it, and accepting that an audience may arrive with arguments of its own.

A student club, a very small budget

Long before the bar and the microphone, there was Berkeley. In fall 2009, Given and Ashok Krishna founded a Students for Liberty club at the University of California, Berkeley. Its early account describes a first year with more than twenty meetings, seven speaker events, two debates, and a rally, all on a budget of $150. The arithmetic suggests an organization that could afford considerably more opinions than refreshments.

The club promoted limited government, free markets, and individual liberty, while allowing disagreement within its membership. Given explained that its members did not share a collective position on every issue. That detail matters. A club can gather people around an outlook without requiring them to produce identical answers. It gives the organizer a more interesting job, and occasionally a longer meeting.

He became a political columnist for The Daily Californian during his senior year. His concern with speech had practical consequences: after a fellow club member faced disciplinary charges for swearing at a campus police officer in 2010, Given wrote about the case and alerted FIRE. The charges were dropped. FIRE later recognized him as the second-place winner in its 2011-2012 Campus Freedom Network incentive program.

Berkeley gave him opportunities to practice two related skills: forming a group and explaining its concerns to people outside it. The campus newspaper had readers who had never attended his meetings. Writing required him to take a discussion out of the club and make it intelligible elsewhere. The distance between those two audiences would become a recurring subject of his professional life.

The argument has to leave the seminar

After graduating in 2012, Given moved to Washington. He worked as a state policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity Foundation and served as communications director at Students For Liberty. His education spans a Berkeley bachelor's degree in rhetoric and a Master of Public Policy from George Washington University. Those subjects meet at a useful junction: understanding an argument and understanding how to present it.

His own writing shows an early impatience with ideas that never reach beyond their admirers. In a 2014 essay about millennials' political attitudes, he questioned the ease with which commentators assigned a single political identity to an entire generation. Surveys could look contradictory because respondents did not fit neatly into the categories being offered. The reader, in this account, deserved more care than a convenient label.

In another essay, “Voting Advances Liberty,” he argued for participation in electoral politics. He challenged libertarians who dismissed voting, organizing, and campaigning while concentrating on intellectual work. The essay concerned a specific political dispute, but its underlying question would travel well: what does someone actually do with a belief? Agreement among a small circle is a comfortable stopping point. Given wanted action beyond it.

He joined Young Voices in 2014, when it was a project of Students For Liberty. In 2016, he helped guide its transition to an independent nonprofit. The decision put organizational responsibilities around his interest in communication. A project could become an employer, a fundraising commitment, and an institution expected to keep delivering when the initial enthusiasm had worn off.

Learning to ask

Given has described the separation as a frightening decision. A stable job was giving way to responsibility for something of his own. Fundraising brought another discomfort: asking people for money, and hearing them decline. In his telling, experience and advice helped him see rejection as evidence that he was seeking opportunities. The work required more attempts than assurances.

“One yes can make all the previous no’s worth the effort.”

Casey Given, 2020

There is an instructive companion to that story in his experience as a member of the inaugural Frédéric Bastiat Fellowship class in 2014. At Mercatus, policy discussions widened his interests beyond technology and education. A session on the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs sparked a continuing interest in how the federal government works. Even an office with an uninviting name could reward curiosity.

The fellowship also gave him friendships. He remembers Friday dinners as part of how the small cohort got to know one another. Participants later moved between Mercatus and Young Voices as fellows, contributors, and employees. Given has called himself a “social butterfly” in describing those early years. The contrast with his account of networking nerves is revealing: social confidence and apprehension about an important request can occupy the same person.

In 2020, America's Future gave him a Buckley Award for his media initiative. Recognition is one way to mark the transition from a small project to an established responsibility. Another is the continued need to find people, support their work, and persuade someone to pay for the effort. The award did not eliminate those chores. It acknowledged what he had built through them.

A byline needs a route to the editor

Today, Given is based in New York and leads Young Voices' strategy, fundraising, and growth. The organization's work puts structure around the stretch between having something to say and persuading an editor or producer to use it. In a March 2026 interview, he described editing and pitching op-eds, arranging broadcast appearances, developing fellowships, and cultivating relationships through regular contact, coffees, and salon dinners.

That description gives the job a pleasingly ordinary texture. Public influence can involve a published argument or a television appearance. Getting there involves drafts, schedules, introductions, and follow-up. The person with the idea may need help recognizing which part of it belongs in the opening paragraph. The editor may need a reason to trust an unfamiliar writer. Neither problem disappears because the subject is important.

The results include careers as well as placements. Young Voices' 2025 review highlighted Kate Farmer's Joseph Rago Memorial Fellowship and work at The Wall Street Journal, Iulia Lupse's Washington Post op-ed, and Daniel Idefresne's video collaboration with The Free Press. Given and fellow Sam Raus also co-wrote a Washington Examiner piece arguing that the center-right needed a persuasive alternative to far-right media personalities.

For 2025, the organization reported 2,234 media hits and an estimated audience exceeding 200 million. Those are measures of distribution, rather than a count of people persuaded. Their value is more concrete: they indicate how often contributors' work found its way into public circulation. For a young writer, one placement can supply the next pitch with something it previously lacked: an example.

More screens, and more rooms

The current Contributor Program serves classical liberal communicators aged eighteen to thirty-five. Its initial four months combine training with publication and media opportunities, with selected participants continuing as Senior Contributors. The Dissident Project develops speakers who left authoritarian regimes, bringing their experiences to high-school and college audiences. Liberty Comms Lab offers communications training and consulting to organizations. Each addresses a different point where expertise needs help finding listeners.

Young Voices has also set a 2030 ambition: a network including authors, newsroom editors, communications professionals, online personalities, and policy thinkers with substantial digital audiences. The emphasis on creators reflects a change in where political conversations happen. A short video has different demands from a newspaper column. A writer can be accomplished in one format and still need coaching in another.

Given has kept working across those formats himself. In October 2024, he was scheduled to interview colleague Caleb Franz about Franz's book on abolitionist John Rankin. That month, Young Voices also helped host a New York debate between Joshua Eakle and Sean Fitzgerald about the libertarian vote in the presidential election. An author conversation and a contested election discussion offered different reasons for an audience to gather.

Data After Dark extended that instinct into September 2026. Its co-organizers Du and Tarnowski are Young Voices alumni. People who had moved through the network were now helping Given create a public event around another argument. The scene was louder than an editorial meeting, and its reception was more unruly. A jazz trio is unlikely to settle a zoning dispute. It can, however, get people into a room where the dispute becomes a conversation.

That is the through-line from Berkeley's $150 club to the Washington bar: Given keeps organizing occasions for ideas to meet people. The work offers no guarantee of agreement. It offers something more practical for a communicator: a reader, an editor, a room, a microphone, and another chance to make the case.