Victoria Vilensky founded The Youth Podium in August 2025, the summer before she started high school. She had seen what speech and debate can do for a student's confidence, and how many students never get the chance to try it. She started the organization to address that in her own community, and built it so other students could do the same in theirs.

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Since then she has grown TYP into a registered 501(c)(3) with school chapters across Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., recruited a twenty-four-person student leadership team, and assembled an advisory board of professionals in law, technology, and finance. She independently established debate teams at two local middle schools and coached students weekly at a public library, and has conducted more than thirty interviews with speech and debate students nationwide.

 

At Our Lady of Good Counsel High School, Victoria is captain of the debate team, which she reestablished after it had gone defunct during the Covid pandemic, and president of the Philosophy Club. She competes in Public Forum at the varsity level in the Washington Area Speech and Debate League and is a varsity debater and brand ambassador at Potomac Debate Academy.

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Outside of school she enjoys painting, practicing yoga, learning languages, and traveling to new places.