Building young people's public lives: one foundation's strategy

National Civic Review, 2006

Community Development Journal, 2003

Young people are competent citizens who can create community change, but the media often emphasize troubled youth and the services they require. This paper reports on a national effort to increase youth participation in community-based organizations in the United States. It provides cross-site analysis of their issues and strategies, the impacts of participation and the factors that facilitate and limit the process. It concludes with observations about the changing context of youth participation and the participatory community-based research methods needed to increase its understanding. Young people as competent citizens 299

Forum for Youth Investment, 2007

Engaging young people as partners in community change is a compelling idea, but translating that idea into effective practice requires focused attention to a range of issues. The principles described in this paper emerged from the commingling of research and practice that ...

Youth & Society, 2019

Youth civic engagement is relatively low in the United States. However, when students are involved in an action civics class (like Generation Citizen), they enthusiastically take action on a wide variety of topics. To systematically assess what issues youth are interested in, we analyzed administrative data from 1,651 action projects conducted by students in Generation Citizen classes across the United States from fall 2012 through fall 2017. We found that the most common issues of interest were related to safety and violence or schooling. Over one quarter of projects tackled issues of trauma, and a similar proportion tackled issues of equity. This exploratory study helps reveal what urban youth in Generation Citizen classes around the county view as of civic interest and important to them. We encourage future researchers and practitioners to further document youth voice regarding civic action as we seek to understand and lift up young people's unique insights.

The Good Society, 2005

Language Arts, 2015

In this article, we describe a youth leadership program we designed with a nonprofit organization aimed at revitalizing low-income neighborhoods. The partnership that we describe stresses the value of understanding youth perspectives on a dearth of affordable housing in their neighborhoods, the threat of the loss of vital goods and services through increased tax cuts, and the need to provide safe spaces for kids to be kids. By including kids as researchers, we have faith that they will become leaders in and beyond their neighborhoods and work to protect the interests of all who live in these communities. We argue that programs like the one we discuss provide a logical starting place for reinvesting time and energy in opportunities for relationship building with children. Understanding youth’s perspectives on what it means to flourish is especially important at a time when neighborhood schools are disappearing and policies have eroded public spaces where youth can build relationships and a sustaining sense of community. Without schools as anchors in neighborhoods, it is more essential than ever to understand how to create and maintain vibrant communities that support youths’ sense of identity, agency, and development.

2006

2016

America's schools were founded on the principle that a democratic nation needed informed, active, and knowledgeable citizens in order to realize the promise of democracy. Over the last 400 years, we have lost our way. Today's schools do a poor job of preparing our students to be engaged, open-minded, and purposeful participants in a system of government that cannot thrive without their meaningful involvement. The costs of our neglect are significant and evidenced by growing economic, social, and political disparities that threaten our core values and ideals. Fortunately, all hope is not lost. We know that quality civic education programming can be a powerful tool in shaping youth into the citizens we need. We also know that effective civic education programming can lead to a host of desired outcomes at the individual, school, and community levels. Unfortunately, we also know that this type of programming rarely finds its way into schools. My strategic project with Community Law in Action, a Baltimore nonprofit organization, first focuses on how I designed and implemented one particularly promising type of civic education programming, youth organizing. Youth organizing empowers and values youth by offering them the opportunity to authentically engage in the process of bringing change to their communities. I discuss the best practices in youth organizing programming and reflect on the challenges and successes I encountered in introducing youth organizing into a classroom of juniors at a large, urban high school. The second stage of my project addresses the thorny issue of how to scale a successful program within the broader civic education sector. I begin by describing the obstacles that can impair any effort to scale within the civic education sector and make recommendations for sector-level solutions with a focus on establishing a more compelling value proposition for civic education generally. I then draw upon scaling research and theory to outline how a small nonprofit can develop a robust youth organizing model capable of successfully scaling within the sector.