This website will follow the adventures of a family of budding political candidates. We also hope to encourage more young people to seek elected office.
We are a multi-ethnic family with the surname Yeung, which is pronounced “Young.” Mama Ahmie (pronounced AH-me) is a 4th generation Clevelander on her maternal line, with each generation of women marrying an immigrant or child of immigrants whose first language wasn’t English. She is a Sociologist by training and utilizes those skills extensively within the communities she’s active in as well as doing some consulting work. Dad Garvin (pronounced GAR-vin) is a naturalized U.S. citizen of Chinese heritage born in Toronto, and has been teaching high school in Cleveland since 2005. Ahmie and Garvin met at Case Western Reserve University as undergraduates and married soon after graduation in 1999. They moved to Northern Virginia with the intention of Ahmie earning a graduate degree at Gallaudet University, but the logistics for attending did not work out so the couple moved back to Cleveland with their newborn first child (William) in the summer of 2004. The rest of their five sons have been born in Lakewood, Ohio – two of them during Ahmie’s time working on her Master’s degree in Sociology from Cleveland State University (after completing three semesters at Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and determining the internship requirement was going to be an insurmountable obstical with her physical disabilities in the mix).
William has been becoming more and more politically active as he’s grown – starting with his being fascinated by the Democratic Primary Presidential debates in 2008 as a four-year-old. It was on William’s insistence that he wanted to go see Barack Obama in person that Ahmie made the arrangements for that to happen, and William attended several Obama/Biden rallies in the 2008 election season (and countless other rallies since). While Ahmie has been very politically aware and active since her own high school days (having met Bill Clinton on the campaign trail in 1993 and organized some demonstrations to try to sway her neighbors to pass school levies), William has consistently raised the bar in the family’s political engagement with his own enthusiasm.
All five of Ahmie & Garvin’s sons are named after former United States Presidents, a tradition inspired by Ahmie’s affection for her CWRU undergraduate professor, Dr. Grover Cleveland “Cleve” Gilmore, who had the kind of impact on Ahmie’s psychosocial development that Ahmie strives to have on others to this day.
Ahmie and William are both currently collecting petition signatures to be on Lakewood’s ballot in 2023, Ahmie for School Board and William for Mayor. We believe if he even qualifies for the ballot, William will make Ohio history as the youngest mayoral candidate at age 19 – if elected, he will be the youngest mayor ever elected in the state of Ohio.
William has been planning for this campaign since he was 12 years old, when he started college work at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) via Ohio’s College Credit Plus program. With Ahmie’s guidance (and “needle threading” to make sure high school graduation and college degree requirements were met as efficiently as possible), William completed his Associate of Arts at Tri-C in May 2020 summa cum laude and his Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Leadership from Cleveland State University magna cum laude in May 2022, then graduated from Lakewood High School two weeks later.
Ahmie is Parma Senior High class of 1995, Case Western Reserve University (B.A. in Psychology and Sociology with additional significant coursework in Communication Studies and Art Studio) class of 1999, and Cleveland State University (M.A. in Sociology) class of 2013. If they can make it work around their civic roles, Ahmie and William are planning to attend law school together. They will be finishing a Certificate in Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies from Tri-C together this August.
In addition, the whole family is collaborating with friends (more are welcome!) to start a non-profit to boost engagement & success in College Credit Plus for more families to participate alongside William’s younger brothers (two of whom are currently participating in CCP – as a virtual 7th grader at Lakewood’s Franklin School of Opportunity while doing Tri-C coursework towards being a grades 4-9 teacher and 10th grader at LHS with an Associate of Applied Business Accounting from Tri-C completed and working toward a B.S. in Forensic Accounting from Franklin University likely to be conferred May 2024 followed by LHS class of 2025).
The family enjoys engaging in medieval recreation within the Society for Creative Anachronism, volunteering around food insecurity issues, and building beloved community around their Unitarian Universalist faith anchored at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Akron. Ahmie is also a (currently unaffiliated) lay community minister member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Community Ministries endeavoring to build strong communities across all life paths and faiths – her work is entirely secular and focused on a belief in the core of goodness within every person that we all long to express in meaningful ways.