Listen to the youth: IRL > phones
Today’s teens are craving community, meaning, and agency. Peer-to-peer organizing in high schools is one way to deliver those things, and protect democracy at the same time.
Imagine you were born in October 2008. You are a senior in high school. A Libra. Your first political memory is the 2016 election. You were 11 when Covid started. You are applying for college this year – but maybe AI means that no jobs will exist in the areas you’ve been told were important. Will you wind up living in your parents’ basement forever?
Recent surveys highlight how you and other young people might be feeling heading into the midterms. American University’s Sine Institute youth poll found that 71% of young people are not proud to be American as the country is today. Common terms they use to describe the country are broken, polarized, chaotic, and corrupt. A Harvard Youth Poll from this spring reported that “[j]ust 33% of young Americans say they trust the 2026 elections will be conducted fairly, while 43% do not and 21% are unsure, highlighting deep uncertainty about the integrity of the process.”
Add to this picture more recent headlines about the upcoming election: “Postal Service Rule Could Bar Millions from Voting by Mail” or “Federal Presence at US Polls Could Intimidate Voters” or “Meet the Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2 Billion Into the Midterms” or “2026 Will Be the Most Expensive Cycle Ever, New Estimates Show,” with more than 11 billion in overall spending.
It is not lost on you that the lion’s share of those billions are not going to reliable election information that can help you navigate the process or improve your sense of agency in our country. You know this because you are on the receiving end of micro-targeted, AI infused, misinformation campaigns designed, first and foremost, to make you conclude your own participation is pointless.
This is obviously a pretty alarming picture, but if we take it seriously, it also represents an important path forward. What I take from it is the urgency of building trust and helping to create structures for students based on what is real: friends, teachers, and families. Building community. Focusing on the people in our lives who we trust, looking together for actions and experiences that are tangible, meaningful and rewarding.
Research supports this approach. The AU survey found that young people crave community: 66% want more opportunities to interact with people in their communities and 59% want more ways to get involved locally.
Rachel Janfaza, founder of Gen Z strategy firm The Up and Up, also surveyed young Americans this summer. She found that “young people want more control over their own lives... they’re increasingly skeptical of anything that feels decided for them, whether by an algorithm, a tech company, a political institution or someone with a massive following. Instead, they’re gravitating toward the people, places and choices where they feel like they have a say.”
Many of us agree that phones down feels better than screens on all the time. More school districts are implementing bell-to-bell cellphone bans, and have reported improvement in student focus, behavior, and learning outcomes.
All of this relates to civic participation. As Rachel Janfaza found, “it’s the anti-algorithm era” for Gen Z. “Young Americans are rediscovering community as a source of power. And when it comes to their politics, they’re deliberately routing civic energy offline. When national politics feels impossible to influence, the places where people can actually see their impact become more important.”
I’m not anti-tech. At The Civics Center, we’ve built an integrated suite of digital resources that include data visualizations, an interactive, embeddable map that connects to state-specific resource pages, free lesson plans for educators, and a state-by-state policy guide of statutes and standards to ensure students and educators know civic engagement in school is backed up by policy. Our social media channels allow us to connect with high school communities to help students lead IRL voter registration drives for their school peers all over the country, and share the experience with their friends online.
Resources like these are critical to growth and scale, and we’re already seeing some amazing results. Without any paid promotion, students from 32 states have found our online resources and registered or preregistered to vote over the summer, typically the slowest time of year. We’re on track for hundreds of educator downloads of free materials before Election Day. Over the same “slow” period, we’ve seen double-digit week-over-week average growth in web traffic to our state resources.
But our goals are far broader and deeper than digital metrics can measure. They extend far beyond activating a one-time vote in a single election. Our mission is to build a sustainable on-ramp to democracy in high schools, so all young people have the opportunity to develop agency, leadership, confidence, and trust, before they turn 18 and step into their futures as voters.
The digital tools are there to support high school communities as they build real-life civic muscle and traditions. They are designed to spark joyful, experiential learning opportunities in which students can work together to set goals, allocate responsibilities, solve problems, achieve results, analyze the effort and keep improving over time. They give educators and partner organizations accurate and trustworthy materials, so they can support student development toward a lifetime of civic engagement in their communities.
These are the best strategies we know to help students to register and vote as soon as they come of age. And that is one important goal. But we also want students to feel safe, healthy, happy, and fulfilled. We want them to develop a sense of belonging in their democracy, of motivating others, of joining together in common purpose. We want them to feel and act on their own capacity to lead.
That is why we measure not just views and votes, but in-person, student-led, peer-to-peer drives and other civic engagement events where young people can find community, learn about elections, and shape their own role.
Here’s what it looks like.
But that’s not all. Importantly, the practice of structure-based organizing within a high school community also creates the real-life connections of trust that can help to inoculate against a coming tsunami of misleading digital messages in a way that truthful digital messaging alone cannot counter. In-person efforts are capable of reaching and helping to register people who cannot register to vote online; some because they live in a state with no online registration (like Texas, New Hampshire, and Montana), or because they don’t have the driver’s license or other state ID required by their local online system (but not needed when using paper forms to register).
These are the kinds of details that are lost during isolated digital transactions, especially for teens unfamiliar with government forms. But when their friends and teachers know the ropes and they work together IRL, learning takes place, hurdles are cleared and everyone benefits. (BONUS: students who gain mastery of voter registration can take their new skills home to the dinner table and into their futures to help others.)
We really can change the world one person at a time. Skye Perryman, the inspirational CEO of Democracy Forward, has written “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times,” as a guide for each one of us to take action at our kitchen tables and in our neighborhoods. Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer have just published “On Courage – How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear,” which not only tells absorbing stories of brave activists but also shares practical lessons for anyone concerned about our country.
The common thread in both books lies in the building of community and acting together in small, achievable ways. That’s how we find what we need to nourish ourselves, and both envision and create the world we want to live in. That’s how we enable our friends, families and neighbors to do the same. That’s how we communicate to our youngest voters that our democracy needs their voices to be heard, and that they have the power to make a difference.