When he was 13, Elon freshman Micah Ash McFadden found himself in front of the Green Level’s town council delivering a speech on “stayers” and “leavers.” Ash McFadden defines “stayers” as people who grew up in a town such as Green Level — 10 miles from Elon University — and decide to, well, stay. They stay to build their families, their lives, their careers. Their hometown is still home. “Leavers,” Ash McFadden said, are fixated on the idea of “getting out.”
“For me then, it was important to bring to their attention,” Ash McFadden said. “If they don't give young people — young voters — the attention that they deserve, we might end up with a community filled with leavers.”
Ash McFadden said he sees this throughout Alamance County. He said he believes if more politicians listened and responded to the needs of young people, more people would want to stay.
“There's a perception amongst young people that you can't thrive and can't be yourself in rural communities like here,” Ash McFadden said. “Over the past couple of decades, the county’s experienced a lot of change and a lot of evolution, and maybe where that may have been the case before, it doesn't necessarily have to be in the future.”
The speech was only the beginning of Ash McFadden’s political engagement. In 2021, he interned with the town of Green Level. Next, he managed Patricia Jones’ 2021 Green Level town council campaign. Then he was a community organizer for Ricky Hurtado’s North Carolina state house reelection campaign in 2022. Ash McFadden said he’s spent hundreds of hours canvassing across different corners of the county.
“We cared so much about our community,” Ash McFadden said. “It was really hard for a lot of people, especially for people like me that had been out in the sun and cold working for him over that year, so it was very sad to see him lose his reelection.”
This election season, Ash McFadden’s been running Bryan Norris’ campaign for Alamance County District Court judge. Ash McFadden also serves as third vice-chair of the Alamance County Democratic Party. He said he got the offer on his 18th birthday after Seneca Rogers, the previous third vice-chair, began to focus on his Board of Education campaign.
“The underlying drive for the activism that I've done has been making the world more habitable for people who have less than me,” Ash McFadden said. “What can I do to use my privilege and my skills to make the world a better place for everyone else to live? Local politics is really where a lot of that happens. Totally matters who the president is. Totally matters who is in state government. But, people who decide which schools get funded or which roads get paved, that’s your local government.”
In high school, Ash McFadden participated in Elon University’s Freedom Scholars, a civic-engagement initiative for seniors in the Alamance-Burlington School System. Ash McFadden, a “stayer” himself, now attends Elon with plans to study political science.
Entering the Elon “bubble” from the wider community, Ash McFadden said he was met with political apathy from many students.
“The students here, they don't come from the same backgrounds of the people that live here,” Ash McFadden said.
Out-of-state students make up 79% of Ash McFadden’s peers in the class of 2028. Elon is also ranked 345th out of 433 in social mobility — how well schools graduate economically disadvantaged students — by the U.S. News and World Report.
Ash McFadden, who is originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia, said he wasn’t particularly engaged with politics before he moved to Alamance County either.
When he first moved here, Ash McFadden said it was staggering to see how “blatant” economic and racial inequality was in the county. The shock served as the call-to-action that led him to speak to the Green Level town council when he was 13.
“The things that we do really can make an impact on the world that we live in, and it can be made better,” Ash McFadden said.