We believe young people belong in civic spaces, from the library to the school board meeting to the editorial page, long before they can vote. Our work is to make those spaces easier to step into, and to give students what they need to take part with confidence.
The Young Citizens Project is a nonprofit building the resources, programs, and community that middle and high school students need to engage with government, policy, and politics.
We teach students how the system works, how to evaluate arguments, and how to make their own. That skill set travels with them, whether they end up running for office, organizing a neighborhood, reporting the news, or simply voting for the first time.
National surveys keep finding the same thing: fewer students can name the three branches of government, fewer can describe how a bill becomes a law, and even fewer feel any real sense of agency in public life.
That's a fixable problem. It just needs the right materials, the right rooms, and adults willing to treat young people like the full citizens they're about to become.
Three programs, launching through 2026 and 2027.
Our work sits at three levels. Events, with live policy debates and town halls hosted in public libraries, create the rooms young people step into. Media, in the form of a podcast series with prominent law professors, turns those rooms into ongoing conversations students can join from anywhere. Resources, including free policy handbooks and classroom guides, give teachers and curious students something durable to work from.
Each of these feeds the others. A handbook becomes the prep for a debate. A debate becomes a podcast episode. A podcast sends listeners back to the handbook. It's a small ecosystem, designed to compound.
