Report: Improving Communities through Youth Civic Engagement in Afterschool Settings
Civic education encompasses far more than what happens inside a classroom, and extracurricular programs can serve as meaningful paths to young people's civic learning and engagement.
To explore and expand the connections between afterschool programs and civic participation, CIRCLE partnered with The Afterschool Alliance and its Collective for Youth Empowerment in STEM & Society (CYESS) on a new report: Improving Communities through Youth Civic Engagement in Afterschool Settings. Noorya Hayat, a CIRCLE senior researcher who serves on the CYESS Advisory Board, was a key contributor to the report.
The report highlights the well-studied positive impact of youth civic engagement on young people themselves and on their communities. It draws on CIRCLE data to identify a civic opportunity gap: the vast majority of youth want to have an impact on issues they care about and believe they have the potential to effect change, but fewer have the concrete knowledge and opportunities to take action. The report explores the potential of strengthening ties between K-12 civic education and community engagement efforts in afterschool programs often operate to create a more robust ecosystem for youth civic participation—with a special focus on the growing intersection of STEM and civic engagement.
To that end, the report makes five major recommendations which can be explored at length in the full document.
- Empower Authentic Youth Voice and Leadership
- Focus Intentionally on Developing Youth Civic Identity and Engagement
- Break Down Silos and Promote Cross-sector Collaborations
- Support Integrated Research on Youth Civic Engagement
- Establish or Expand a Coordinating Entity for Resources, Partnerships, and Exchange of Expertise
To help educators and other stakeholders implement these recommendations, CIRCLE and CYESS also co-created a practitioners' toolkit with guides and next steps.
