Ryo
MITSUHASHI

Before Voting Initiative,
Founder

Japan

Ryo Mitsuhashi is the Founder of Before Voting Initaitive, and he is from Tokyo, Japan. He is most recently a co-host and speaker at Better Together World Congress at Global Goals Week 2022.

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When he was in elementary school,  he wrote two letters to the Diet members and visited the national Diet. He didn’t realize then how precious these experiences were but these experiences naturally made me interested in politics.

Ryo has always felt uneasy about the indifference to politics of Japanese citizens. He believes that eligible voters should be active in their decision. This is why, with the support of his peers, he started Before Voting, a project to spread awareness to the youth that politics affect everyone's lives and that we must take action.

He is also currently working in NPO that attempts to make politics accessible to all people. However, he realized that although many people advocate that the youth should vote, they don’t teach or tell how they should engage with politics and how they should choose who to vote for. His project solves this problem. As well as increasing the quantity of votes, we have to increase the quality of votes.

In the future, he wants to keep tackling the problem of political indifference among the youth.  He wishes to study political science as well as economics, data science, philosophy (maybe psychology).

In the long run, he wants to become an entrepreneur who tackles the problem of political engagement. He believes that the world needs a better educational system to make the youth interested in politics.