“When I first started, I was 14. It can seem so intimidating. You think, ‘I’m so dumb. What difference can I make?’ But it makes such a huge difference, and you can do so much as a 14-, 15-, 16- or 17-year-old. Youth is the driving force behind a lot of campaigns. Young people can do a lot of things that people who are older can’t, just by working hard.” – Beth Foster, Charlottesville, VA
“This is such a historical election on so many different levels. The participation we’re getting with young people, the amount of new voters that have come into play, I mean, it’s all so big. For a very long time…politicians and ca
mpaigns just kind of disregarded the [youth] vote ‘cause it wasn’t something they could count on. I think what has changed was that students acknowledged that problem and said, ‘We need students leading other students, and we need this to be truly student-run and that’s how we’ll make it successful.” – Molly Kawahata, 17, Palo Alto, CA
“Youth in general see politics as something beyond their grasp because they say, ‘Oh, its just in Washington, DC.’ But really, it’s everywhere ‘cause that’s part of a divided government. It’s at every level and it’s on the local level as much as it’s on the national level. And it’s easy to get involved in local government.” – Pryce Hadley, 18, Marquette MI
Click here to read twenty-one profiles of young political activists like these, for links to youtube.org videos and top websites encouraging political participation by youth, and for a collection of recent articles about the youth vote in Election 2008.New on our front page...
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Powerful Learning with Public Purpose |
| WKCD made its online debut in ‘02 with one goal: to champion “powerful learning with public purpose” by our nation’s adolescents. In the years since, we’ve produced close to 200 stories that show young people—and their adult allies—combining deep engagement and high achievement. Here are some of the best of these stories, drawn from our WKCD archives. | |
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Project Einstein: A Photo Essay by Young Burmese Refugees |
| Rarely do those living in refugee camps get to tell firsthand their stories of hardship. Least heard are the perspectives of children, for whom a refugee camp may be the only home they know. In winter 2008, WKCD sponsored two young American media makers who traveled to Bangladesh to capture the lives of youth in a Burmese refugee camp there. At the Kutupalong Camp, Mark Belinsky and Emily Jacobi helped eleven Rohingya (Burmese) children share their world through their own photographs and words. |  |
Beijing Youth Voices: From Friendships to the Olympics |
| “We Chinese have dreamed of this event for hundreds of years. It has united us.” What does a group of six Beijing high school students have to say about the Beijing Olympics? And what’s their life like as teenagers in new China, where east and west, old and new live side by side? Read their blogs and watch their slideshows. | |
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Youth in Action: Teens Informing Teens |
| In a storefront on Providence’s south side, ten high school students sit down to a curriculum they won’t find in school: how to promote nonviolent social change. For the next two months, they will learn everything they can about violence prevention and workshop facilitation—and then pass on that knowledge to younger teens. It may seem a titanic task—but that’s just right for these new members of TITAN, one of several peer education programs at Youth In Action. | |
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Practice: What It Takes to Get Good at Something |
| What does it take to get really good at something? “You need a hater, and you need a motivator,” says Sharese, 16. “A hater, that’s the person that puts you down, assuming you can’t do it, and you try to prove them wrong. And your motivator, that’s who supports you, and so you do your best to try to make them proud.” See what three classes of Chicago public high school students found when they explored the question, “What does it take to get really good at something?” |
