Vinaya Sivakumar

Vinaya is 21, based in Berkeley, and works at Americans for Responsible Innovation after graduating from UC Berkeley. As a tween in 2017 she was squarely in social media's target demographic, and learned to communicate in likes and emojis before she learned much else. Two tech-free years at a boarding school in India reset that: her roommate Aadya, who'd never owned a smartphone, taught her to sit with silence instead of performing through it. While there, she also founded Girl Up CIRS, the school's first student-led group willing to talk openly about body image, harassment, and ambition, eventually reaching more than 500 students.

She's worked on digital wellbeing and early childhood development policy since 2021, but entirely from the outside, through advocacy rather than direct conversation with the young people affected. She's also willing to say when she's changed her mind: after hearing another advocate describe becoming an eager adopter of AI rather than a passive victim of it, Vinaya's hard line on the technology's harms to marginalized communities softened. She wants to spend the fellowship interviewing young people directly instead of speaking for them.