CIRCLE Shares and Learns Key Insights on Supporting Civic Engagement for All Youth

Throughout this summer CIRCLE has traveled across the country, attending and presenting at various convenings, panels, and conferences focused on youth civic learning and engagement. We've shared our latest research, connected with practitioners, and learned from diverse voices dedicated to empowering the next generation of young leaders.

These opportunities to share our work and to learn from others are central to CIRCLE’s mission and impact. Being present in these spaces allows us to engage with youth and communities directly, understand their needs, and ensure our research is aligned with those needs as effectively as possible.

This summer we focused on expanding our efforts to connect with stakeholders working to grow voters, especially in communities that are often underserved by outreach efforts. We can and must embed recommendations and best practices into already existing efforts that sustain those doing the work and the youth they are trying to reach.

CIRCLE researcher Katie Hilton attended the National High School Voting Summit at the University of Maryland, which was hosted by the New Voters Collaborative and the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at UMD. The summit focused on research about high school and civic engagement work. CIRCLE attended to learn about the high school voter registration space and see where we can help fill gaps.

Voter education and engagement work in high schools is key to achieving stronger and more equitable youth participation. Not all youth go to college, which means high schools may be one of the last times young people are in a space that can support their civic learning and development. CIRCLE has long focused on growing voters in schools, including by helping educators teach for democracy and tracking states’ policies about voter registration in schools. 

The National High School Voting Summit featured presentations by organizations like the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, the Maryland Democracy Initiative (MDI), New Voters, and the National Women’s Foundation—including research on whether mobilizing high school principals is an effective way to increase high school voter registration.

For our researcher Katie, the conference underscored the fact that voter education and engagement in schools goes beyond teaching students how to register or giving them opportunities to do so. It also includes making sure they understand that their vote matters and giving them the skills to become lifelong voters.

Most recently, CIRCLE senior researcher Kelly Siegel-Stechler presented at the New Voters Research Network Conference to showcase data on the impact of youth voice in high school on voting. To continue supporting this work, fellow Naraya Price has been attending monthly meetings of the New Voters Collaborative, which recently published an op-ed in Teen Vogue about the importance of high school voter registration.

Young people in rural areas, and young people who are not in college or working—known as “opportunity youth”—tend to have lower voter turnout than their peers and often face barriers to civic learning and participation. Understanding and addressing those barriers, in order to equitable grow all voters, is a major focus of CIRCLE’s work.

Earlier this summer, our deputy director Abby Kiesa and researcher Ruby Belle Booth held a workshop at the Opportunity Youth Forum in Boston. The forum brought together hundreds of intergenerational leaders from its network of 40 urban, rural, and tribal communities across the United States to learn from one another. The shared goal is building and scaling reconnection pathways that achieve better education, employment, and overall well-being outcomes for opportunity youth.”

The CIRCLE workshop “Work, Education, and Community: Supporting Opportunity Youth Voices in Democracy and Communities,” shared the CIRCLE Growing Voters framework, as well as new data about Opportunity Youth and insights from our rural learning community. We walked participants through an activity to think about how they may already be promoting civic skills and mindsets and how they can further incorporate efforts to grow voters into existing work.

One of the themes of the event was thinking about the links between belonging, meaning, well-being, purpose, and democracy. This has been a key focus of our rural learning community with Rural Youth Catalyst, which has surfaced that, for some groups of youth, barriers to participation can be far deeper than a lack of information or resources.

As part of our work on supporting rural youth civic engagement, Abby and Ruby Belle also traveled to the Keystone SMILES Retreat in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. A local community nonprofit, Keystone SMILES is one of the organizations developing an action plan as part of our Rural Growing Voters Learning Community alongside Rural Youth Catalyst.

Our team presented the CIRCLE Growing Voters framework and key lessons from our rural learning community during the retreat and facilitated a workshop to help staff reflect on the connections between their existing work and civic engagement. CIRCLE leaders also met with the young people who participated in Keystone SMILES’ AmeriCorps programs to discuss how they perceive their rural communities, what they would want to change, and what civic engagement means to them.

Hearing directly from young people provides valuable insights that shape our understanding of what youth need to equitably participate in democracy. Some of our main takeaways from these conversations included:

• There’s still more work to do to build enough opportunities for connections and belonging for young people in rural communities
• Third spaces, including political homes, but also other healthy environments for young people in these communities, are critical to building those connections and belonging
• Civic engagement and service opportunities can be both a path to community change and to careers, and emphasizing opportunities that serve as career pathways could be a big draw for rural youth

One of the biggest barriers to implementing the systemic changes recommended by the CIRCLE Growing Voters framework is capacity. That means it’s important for organizations to embed this work as much as they can into what they are already doing. For Keystone SMILES, an AmeriCorps program, that meant thinking about how to make service opportunities into civic engagement opportunities that would deepen young people’s learning and development.

We had other opportunities this summer to speak with young leaders and organizers to bring our work directly to them and to hear their own ideas and perspectives on civic engagement work.

Ruby Belle Booth presented at the Our Generation’s Electoral Justice Summit held in Phoenix by Generation Vote. Ruby shared a our research on the youth electorate: who they are, the barriers they face, their views on democracy, and how they are already working to create a democracy that works better for young people. This overview helped to offer some context and mutual understanding throughout the conversations that followed.

In addition to Ruby Belle’s presentation, one of the members of our Young Leaders Learning Community also attended the summit to share his perspectives. Triston Black, who works for Arizona Native Vote, was part of a panel about Native voting rights and civic engagement opportunities on tribal lands.

Our research on political homes especially resonated with attendees, including the many organizers who are working to build political homes in their communities. Overall, the summit was a good opportunity to think structurally about the inequalities embedded in systems that impact young people’s electoral and civic participation and to connect with youth-led organizations working on democracy reform.

CIRCLE has also spoken to youth locally. Our outreach specialist Mari German presented to HEART interns from the town of Randolph, Massachusetts, who are part of a civic engagement internship program for high school and college students. She helped the interns build knowledge of different forms of youth civic engagement and discussed opportunities for youth to use their voice to promote positive change in their community.

Mari also spoke about the power of young people’s voices with students from the Leadership for Social Change summer program, an initiative of Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life—where CIRCLE is also based.