Youth Organizing and the Civic Education Sector: Lessons From Theory and Practice to Organize a Way Forward

Abstract

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.