Conrad
Gelber

I build things that make local government easier to watch, and I am learning the craft of diplomacy on the way to practicing it.

Conrad Gelber on the lawn in front of the U.S. Capitol, its dome rising behind him, wearing a teal sweater over a white collar.
Miami Beach, Florida Miami-Dade Commission Watch [email protected]

Most people never see a county commission meeting. The agendas run hundreds of pages, the votes happen on a Tuesday morning, and the decisions reach further into daily life than almost anything that happens in Tallahassee or Washington. In August 2026 I co-founded a nonprofit to fix that for Miami-Dade, and I have been building the coverage, the volunteer bench, and the software behind it ever since.

The Brechner Report, the University of Florida journalism school's freedom-of-information newsletter, has covered Miami-Dade Commission Watch and Florida County Commission Watch.

The rest of my work sits in the same territory: government transparency, international politics, and the question of how institutions earn the trust they ask for.

Work

2026 – present

Miami-Dade Commission Watch

Co-founder and executive director

Daniel Llobet and I spent 2025 decoding hundred-page Board of County Commissioners agendas by hand before any website existed. The site launched on August 1, 2026, and we incorporated in Florida on August 17, 2026; 501(c)(3) status pending. We publish plain-language summaries of every meeting, with each item linked back to its source document, in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. The site has a commissioner directory by district, an elections page, a guide to speaking at public comment, and a district lookup tool I built so residents can find their commissioner by address. The editorial policy is nonpartisan: no endorsements, no spin, and every claim sourced from public records. Six student editorials ran in the first month. Submissions are open to any Miami-Dade student, and the student keeps the byline.

2026 – present

Florida County Commission Watch

Founder

The same model for Florida's other 66 counties. I am recruiting student leads in each county, and each county gets a participant guide, a subdomain, and a local team.

2026 – present

Integrity Florida

Research intern

Researching dark money in Florida elections and the gaps in state disclosure requirements, using campaign finance filings and public records. Leading a full redesign and rebuild of the Integrity Florida website. I work directly with Ben Wilcox, the organization's policy director.

2026 – present

Beyond Partisan

Florida state development director

A nonprofit run by high school students that organizes for election reform through 15 state chapters: ranked choice voting, redistricting, and campaign finance. I handle direct outreach to state legislators and their staff, and I am organizing a debate event and coordinating statewide programming.

Summer 2026

Miami-Dade County Mayor's Office

Intern, Office of Intergovernmental Affairs

Produced a 31-country briefing book ahead of G20 Miami 2026 and audited county trade figures against U.S. Census Bureau data for the Miami Customs District. Briefed Mayor Daniella Levine Cava directly on the findings.

2023 – 2027

Miami Beach Senior High School

IB Diploma Programme candidate

Research and writing

Why Iran and the UAE joined BRICS, and why their reasons were not the same

An extended essay reading both accessions through Kuik Cheng-Chwee's framework of hedging behavior among smaller states.

The demolition of Königsberg Castle, 1967–1969

How the Soviet decision to level the castle and the failure of the building meant to replace it shaped the postwar identity of Kaliningrad.

The drone arms race in Myanmar's civil war

Cheap airframes, improvised munitions, and what happens to a long insurgency when both sides gain an air force.

Overdevelopment in South Florida against Everglades restoration mandates

An examination of where the county's growth pressure and its conservation commitments actually collide, including at the Urban Development Boundary.

Where this is going

I want to join the Foreign Service, most likely on the political or economic track, and I intend to spend a career in it. The work I do now is the same work at a smaller scale: read the documents nobody reads, figure out what a government is actually doing rather than what it says it is doing, and write it down clearly enough that it changes what someone else decides.

If that path closes, political and geopolitical risk analysis is the version of the job that exists in the private sector, and I am building the technical skills to do it well.

Off the clock

Conrad in a cap and sunglasses holding a snook across his chest on the deck of a boat, with calm water and a mangrove shoreline behind him under a clear sky.

I pitch for the varsity baseball team at Miami Beach Senior High. I shoot trap at Markham Park in Broward County, where my best round so far is 21 of 25. And I fish the Everglades backcountry and the Biscayne Bay flats for snook, tarpon, and redfish, all of which go back in the water.