Advocacy/Policy
Youth Will’s mission is to fight for every young person to have everything they need to be happy, healthy, and prepared to reach their full potential.
YU LEAD (Leadership Excellence and Development) is a one-year leadership program that prepares a team of YU members who have overcome significant challenges to become community leaders by turning their passion for community advocacy into a career. By combining intensive leadership trainings and community enhancing group projects, YU LEAD prepares youth to be change agents, while ensuring that they are fully prepared for college or full-time work.
YU LEAD represents the youth perspectives in program development and facilitation, opportunities to organize youth events, and community engagement strategies. Participants also receive extensive training to carry the voice of youth in public policy and planning processes.
Our mission is to build youth power in marginalized communities throughout the nation and encourage legislative advocacy to prevent gun violence, while shifting public discourse towards an evidentiary approach to keeping schools and communities safe.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) engages audiences in a community education program, Learning for Justice. This resource provides educators with free resources to encourage youth civic participation as well as to learn honest history, promote servant leadership, and move toward a racially and socially just society.
This collection of resources has been curated by SPLC to offer lessons for elementary and middle school classrooms that focus on elections and voting.
Digital civic engagement by young people
Rapid analysis | An overview of the latest research with a critical focus on the enablers, constraints and nature of youth civic engagement in the digital space.
This analysis presents an overview of relevant research across the topic of digital civic engagement by young people by asking about the nature and dimensions of engagement, enablers and constraints of digital civic engagement, as well examining some key considerations when supporting young people’s engagement.
The Trauma and Learning Policy Initiative’s (TLPI) mission is to ensure that children traumatized by exposure to family violence and other adverse childhood experiences succeed in school. To accomplish this mission, TLPI engages in a host of advocacy strategies including: providing support to schools to become trauma-sensitive environments; research and report writing; legislative and administrative advocacy for laws, regulations, and policies that support schools to develop trauma-sensitive environments; coalition building; outreach and education; and limited individual case representation in special education where a child’s traumatic experiences are interfacing with his or her disabilities.
PFLAG has curated resources for those new to the conversation surrounding gender identity. These resources include national publications, online academies, books, films, and special topics.
To prepare and support communities as they participate in Trans Awareness Month (November), Advocates for Youth has prepared a toolkit with resources for immediate implementation. Resources include book lists, infographics, and video clips.
The Teachers Guild is a professional community that activates teachers’ creativity to solve the biggest challenges in education today. In their collaborative learning programs we use Design Thinking, a learner-centered approach to problem solving.
The main project of The Forum for Youth Investment is “Ready by 21”, a program which seeks to ensure that youth are healthy, connected and ready for college, work, and life by age 21. They accomplish this through individual effort as well as with the collaboration of leaders in education, business, government, and community-based organizations.
The Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (Ed Fund) is a 501(c)(3) affiliate organization of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. We use a public health and equity lens to identify and implement evidence-based policy solutions and programs to reduce gun violence in all its forms. We seek to make gun violence rare and abnormal. The Ed Fund makes communities safer by translating research into policy. We achieve this by engaging in policy development, advocacy, community and stakeholder engagement, and technical assistance.
Understanding the issues and supporting common-sense solutions is the only way to fight America’s gun violence epidemic. Everything you need to know from the latest legislation and Brady reports to key statistics and personal stories can be found here. Share it with your friends as well. There is a lot of misinformation out there that needs to be corrected – be an educated activist.