Leeya Chaudhuri is a senior at Enloe High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. During her time in high school, Leeya has sought to elevate the voices of underrepresented communities and engage new voices. As a junior, Leeya wrote an AP Research paper that found schools with the highest Black and Latino student populations lacked debate teams. She founded the Wake County Speech and Debate Initiative (WCSDI) in partnership with the Wake County Public School System's Office of Equity Affairs. Leeya pitched WCSDI to principals, donors and community foundations, raising more than $30,000 in grant funding to support teacher advisor stipends, student tournament fees and coaching. To date, WCSDI has established debate teams at eight Wake County public high schools with the highest Black and Latino student populations, and Leeya hopes WCSDI will expand speech and debate to every public school in Wake County. Leeya also produced a podcast episode for PBS's “On Our Minds” podcast that explored the impact of critical race theory (CRT) legislation on high school students, featuring interviews with Columbia professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term CRT, and a state legislator sponsoring legislation that bans CRT. She created a podcast for Wake County's first district-wide Black History Month event, “Dare to Dream,” and led the effort to rename her local flagship library after Oberlin Village, the longest surviving freedmen's colony in North Carolina. Her podcast on the rebirth of Oberlin Village was a finalist for the NPR student podcast competition and a winner of the New York Times student podcast contest.