Justus Aryani

Competitor

Justus has competed for eight years across NCFCA, Stoa, IPDA, Coolidge, and Reagan, winning tournament championships in three different formats: Team Policy, Moot Court, and Coolidge debate. He is the inaugural Coolidge President's Cup Champion, a National Open Champion in Moot Court, and a two-time Team Policy National Quarterfinalist. He began debating at collegiate meets with SMU at sixteen, convinced even then that something was missing in the resources available to his circuit.

Builder

That conviction made him a builder. Before he had even graduated, Justus kept a waitlist of students he coached as a volunteer, from beginners to competitors stalled at a plateau. He co-created and maintained the Openness Project and the National Caselist, a student-led push for debate transparency that brought hundreds of teams across 12 regions and 50 states into the open. He went further and launched the National Prep Group, a free, nationwide research ring built to make skill-sharing and access to competitive briefs a standard rather than a privilege. His debate guides and research have been published through Monument Publishing and Rhetoric LLC.

In 2024 Justus became Assistant Director and Tech Lead at Ziggy Online Debate, an online tournament host and sponsor organization serving more than 2,000 students with over a million dollars in scholarships offered. He has helped Ziggy reach record registrations, launch new tournament formats, start a student guidebook, sign new sponsors, and draw international students from five countries and their leagues. The next and largest step is software solutions at scale for civic educators, emerging debate nonprofits, clubs, tournaments, and leagues, arriving in 2026.

Mission

After being crowned a Coolidge Champion, Justus joined the Coolidge Presidential Foundation, first helping out as an 1890 Society member and event staffer before accepting an offer to intern for the Foundation and help build their debate program from the inside. Even after moving to Germany, he still commutes to serve one of the fastest-growing debate initiatives in the country, one committed to dialogue over division. Coolidge is building intentional, respectful debate spaces, one of the most serious tools there is against polarization and populism. He is proud to be part of it.

At seventeen, Justus was gifted a copy of "Debate as a Global Pedagogy: Rwanda Rising." It became the work that defined what he believes debate is for. It was also the catalyst for Meridian's global civic-education conviction. Through Meridian, Justus is beginning to work with international partners to remove the financial, logistical, and educational barriers to civic education programs, turning years of informal system-building into one organized effort.