Great Communicator Alumni

Ben Rankin

Ben Rankin

2016 National Quarter-Finalist

Ben is a sophomore and Trustees’ Scholarship recipient at the University of Missouri - Kansas City, where he is majoring in Political Science. After completing his run at the Great Communicator Debate Series in 2016 as a national quarter-finalist, he channeled his passion for civic engagement by organizing student involvement in political campaigns in the Kansas City area as a member of the UMKC College Democrats. Today, Ben continues to dedicate himself to empowering the voices of college students as the organization’s new President.

In 2017, Ben had the opportunity work once again with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Through the Leadership and the American Presidency program, he spent a summer in Washington, D.C. interning with the North American Association for Environmental Education and studying United States foreign policy. He also served as Research and Advocacy Associate at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, where he continues to research and report on human rights issues in Congress from Kansas City.

Ben worked as an intern in the office of U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill. His studies continued to be guided by his love for U.S. foreign policy and global human rights, and he hopes to pursue a dual degree in law and international affairs after graduating.

barrett young

2015 National champion

Barrett Young is a Reformed Baptist, libertarian, and conservative from Nixa, Missouri (the home of Jason Bourne). Barrett is the Executive Director of Make Liberty Win, a top 15 Carey Committee in terms of fundraising, and an instructor at the Foundation for Applied Conservative Leadership.

Prior to his involvement in confrontational politics, Barrett was named “The Next Great Communicator” by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, participated as a Normandy Scholar at the Albert H. Small Normandy Institute, and served as a “Young Ambassador” through the Lafayette Debates program.

Starting as a member of Young Americans for Liberty’s (YAL) George Washington University chapter, Barrett would go on to serve as Chapter President and intern for Congressman Dave Brat on the Hill. Through the Koch Internship Program, Barrett interned at YAL before dropping out of college to work as a Regional Director.

Barrett worked at YAL for four-and-a-half years before ending his time there as the Vice President of Grassroots, overseeing YAL’s Operation Win at the Door Program and YAL’s Hazlitt Action Program. By electing champions in the election season and conducting robust outside operations in the legislative season, Barrett has seen the FACL model succeed first-hand.

During Barrett’s time at YAL, he helped elect over 170 legislators to join YAL’s Hazlitt Coalition and helped pass Liberty legislation across the country, ranging from Constitutional Carry in Texas to School Choice in Missouri.

Barrett currently serves as the Executive Director of Make Liberty Win, a Liberty Carey Committee dedicated to electing Liberty legislators at the state legislative level. To date, Barrett has been directly involved in over 1,000 grassroots lobbying programs, independent expenditure programs, and political campaigns.

Télyse masaoay

2015 National Runner-Up

Télyse graduated from Vanderbilt University, double majoring in Medicine, Health, & Society and Sociology. Since her experience as a national finalist in the Great Communicator Debate series, she has solidified her passion for public health policy. She has interned as a policy associate with the Navajo Nation Washington Office in D.C through the Reagan Foundation's Leadership and the American Presidency program. In the summer of 2017, she worked as a fellow in the MPact Medicine program at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, researching health disparities and tutoring underrepresented groups in a nurse assistant program.

At Vanderbilt, she is the Head Resident Adviser for an upperclassmen dorm, an executive board member of Vanderbilt Tour Guides, secretary of Vanderbilt American Indian Science and Engineering Society, a part Vanderbilt International Relations Association, a member of the Programming Board's Speakers Committee, and a member of the Vanderbilt Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Committee.

She loves returning to the Reagan library, and has visited Simi Valley twice since the 2015 debates: once as a speaker at the Young Women's Leadership Summit in 2016 and again as a judge for the Great Communicator competition in 2017. She hopes to go on to a dual degree program in law and public health, with the goal of working in federal health policy.

Nancy Fairbank

2012 National Runner-Up

After placing 2nd in the inaugural Reagan Great Communicator debate, Nancy continued her education as a McDermott Scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her field of interest was primarily in understanding and alleviating youth homelessness, which she first learned about in my hometown of Springfield, Missouri. At UT Dallas, she was part of a sociology research group that helped design a drug prevention and intervention program targeted towards homeless teens, which has now been implemented in five Dallas schools. The McDermott program enabled her to travel all over the world and research poverty and homelessness policies in nine countries. In order to create more awareness about youth homelessness, she published a book through Missouri State University in spring of 2016 that shares the life stories of five homeless teens.

Nancy kept up a love of public speaking in college and participated in Moot Court, Model United Nations, and Student Government, where she served as the Vice President her sophomore year. Nancy and her partner placed in the top 16 undergraduate Moot Court teams in the nation in 2017. She was also selected as an Archer Fellow in fall of 2015 and worked for the judicial liaison at the State Department in Washington, D.C.

Nancy graduated from UT Dallas in 2017 with a B.A. in Political Science and was selected as a 2017 Marshall Scholar, allowing her to study in England for the next two years. She currently at the University of Birmingham pursuing an MSc in International Development with a focus on poverty and inequality. After completing her Marshall scholarship, she attended Harvard Law School. Nancy hopes to be able to use the educational opportunities she have been given to create better poverty policies within the U.S. and the world. President Reagan once said, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won." It is Nancy's deepest hope that we can change that for future gene