Rising Where We’re Rooted: How Local Organizations Are Rebuilding Youth Trust
By: Hannah Botts
Rural youth trust their neighbors more than they trust Congress. That’s not disengagement, it’s discernment: and it should change how we think about civic trust.
Too often, national civic institutions design campaigns in conference rooms far removed from the communities they’re trying to reach. They assume that youth engagement is a matter of better messaging, cleaner design, or more streamlined programming. This approach misses the point entirely: trust isn’t scalable, at least not in the ways these institutions imagine. It doesn’t travel well through toolkits or targeted ads, particularly among already-marginalized communities.
The data seems to support this. According to CIRCLE, 77% of rural youth trust their peers and neighbors, which is the highest trust rating of any group surveyed. Sixty-five percent trust nonprofit organizations and 61% trust their local government. But this trust drops off sharply when institutions get bigger, more abstract, or more politicized. The President. Congress. Both major political parties. These institutions routinely fall below 50% trust among rural youth. This suggests a civic culture rooted in proximity and personal relationship, not budget or institutional infrastructure.
While rural youth are often portrayed as disengaged, the data suggests something different: not apathy, but selective trust. Young people know who’s showing up for them, and who isn’t. And more often than not, it’s local actors, not national ones, who’ve earned that trust.
We’ve seen this disconnect play out for years. National groups pour millions into voter outreach campaigns, civic education platforms, and digital organizing strategies, especially during election years when youth become a target demographic in get-out-the-vote efforts. But after the votes are cast, these same organizations disappear. The engagement feels fleeting at best and transactional at worst. For many rural young people, this is the only interaction they’ll ever have with national-level civic efforts: a reminder to register, a prompt to show up at the polls, a one-time message framed as empowerment. And then, silence. This kind of drive-by engagement isn’t just ineffective, but extractive. It sends a clear message to young people from any marginalized group: your voice only matters when it serves our goals.
While national institutions may understand this argument in theory, they too often approach youth engagement as something that can be engineered from the top down. It’s not. Civic trust isn’t a product of slick branding or newly-launched toolkits. It grows as a result of consistent presence, proximity, and participation. It grows when youth are seen not as a demographic to target or a problem to solve, but as partners.
Seeing Firsthand What Works
As a proud Kentuckian, I’ve only seen that kind of trust being built at the local level.
Organizations rooted in the communities they serve are succeeding where national organizations fall short, not because they have more funding or visibility, but because they show up with humility and stay long enough to matter. They don’t ask for youth engagement on their own terms, they create space for young people to lead on theirs.
That ethos is captured well by the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, which describes its work with a simple but powerful phrase: rising where we’re rooted. It’s a reminder that meaningful change requires proximity, relationships, and a deep respect for place. And it’s this spirit that defines the organizations I highlight below: each grounded in community, led by those who know it best, committed to building civic trust from the ground up.
Appalshop, a cultural institution based in the heart of Appalachia, offers one of the clearest examples of this. For decades, they’ve supported local youth in creating films, radio programs, and multimedia storytelling rooted in their own communities. It’s not just about teaching media skills, it’s about showing young people that their voices matter, that their history has value, and that they have the power to shape public narratives about where they come from. For rural youth. especially, the ability to speak from their experience and to their community is something that national institutions rarely allow.
Then there’s CivicLex, based in Lexington, Kentucky. While federal civic education efforts struggle to compete with misinformation online, CivicLex focuses on demystifying the political process at the local level, helping community members understand how local decisions get made, who makes them, and how to show up and participate. It’s not just about teaching people to vote. It’s about building them a roadmap to real civic involvement. By breaking down local government in plain language and engaging youth in the issues that directly impact their neighborhoods: zoning, budgets, public safety, CivicLex builds not only civic literacy, but a sense of agency.
Perhaps the most inspiring is the Kentucky Student Voice Team, a youth-led organization where students across the state are empowered to advocate for more equitable and responsive education systems. Their work doesn’t rely on adult gatekeepers to speak on their behalf: the students themselves lead research, develop policy recommendations, and hold decision-makers accountable. In a context where schools are often under-resourced and students are rarely invited to the table, this model reimagines what youth civic power looks like. It creates new norms for who belongs in decision-making spaces, rather than asking for permission.
These organizations succeed because they treat young people as full participants in civic life, not future citizens waiting in the wings. They don’t parachute in with pre-packaged solutions. They listen. They adapt. They co-create infrastructure that reflects the values, histories, and lived realities of the youth they work with. And in doing so, they restore something that’s been lost in many national conversations: trust, grounded in care and mutual respect.
This is the philosophy behind a summer fellowship I’m directing with the help of Campus Compact. The Rural Youth Voices Initiative is supporting young people from rural areas who want to reshape the national narrative around rural youth engagement. These fellows aren’t being trained to fit into existing civic frameworks, they’re being supported to lead from their own experience. That means highlighting both the excellent work and the struggles already occurring in their communities.
This project isn’t just about representation, it’s about shifting power. Too often, rural youth are treated as invisible in civic discourse, or reduced to caricatures in political debate. But when we trust them with leadership, with funding, and with space to tell their own stories, they become not just participants in democracy, but architects in its future.
National civic institutions have a role to play, but only if they’re willing to listen. Funding, following, and learning from local institutions and youth-led organizations already doing the work. The solutions to civic disengagement won’t be found in think tanks or national task forces. They’ll come from the margins, from communities that have learned how to engage with power even when power didn’t engage with them.
As Rev. Jen Bailey reminds us, “Social change happens at the speed of relationships. And relationships move at the speed of trust.” This kind of trust isn’t built through campaigns or top-down strategic frameworks. It’s built slowly and intentionally, in classrooms and community centers, in town halls and cultural hubs, in the voices of young people who’ve been told too many times that civic life isn’t meant for them unless their vote happens to be politically convenient.
If national civic institutions want to matter to the next generation, they’ll have to meet youth where they are, listen to and invest in them, and trust them enough to lead.
Trust thrives where institutions are willing to grow roots, not just plant flags.
The Rural Youth Voices Initiative is currently recruiting rural youth (ages 18–22) for a paid ($1,000) community engagement fellowship this summer. If you’re a young person with lived experience in a rural community, apply here to join the cohort by June 13th, 2025. If you're a rural-serving individual interested in learning more about this program or contributing to our report’s findings through an interview, fill out this form.
Hannah Botts is a Gen Z civic leader working to reimagine how institutions engage young people, especially communities too often left out of national conversations. A native of Kentucky, Hannah has advised foundations, local governments, and cultural institutions on youth engagement, and has worked with organizations including the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 18by Vote, and the Kentucky Student Voice Team. As Program Director of Campus Compact’s Rural Youth Voices Initiative, Hannah leads efforts to expand access to civic action for rural youth and to challenge the dominant narratives around rural disengagement. Her work centers proximity, power-sharing, and the belief that young people are not a demographic to reach, but partners in building what comes next.
