Our team advocates for youth-centered policy at all levels of government and mobilizes our generation to take action around issues affecting our generation.
Chapters
We are partnering with students from high schools, community colleges, technical schools, and universities across North Carolina to launch new YPA Chapters. These chapters empower students to engage with and influence policy at local, state, and national levels. Details on how you can participate and contribute to this growing movement will be provided soon.
Advocacy
Our advocacy work includes directly lobbying elected officials, educating policy experts about how policy affects young people, speaking at press conferences and events to educate the public about youth-centered policy, conducting research into understudied issues affecting our generation, and designing new policy. We also coordinate other aligned organizations to advocate for issues that intersect with youth issues.
In Congress:
- We testified before the House Energy & Commerce IDC Subcommittee about manipulative Big Tech practices.
- We successfully advocated to amend the Kids Online Safety Act to let users opt out of manipulative recommendation algorithms.
In North Carolina:
- We wrote novel legislation to prevent Big Tech companies from using young people’s data in manipulative algorithms.
- We successfully advocated to get 62 state representatives and 12 nonprofits to endorse data legislation, and
- We aided in the successful advocacy effort to end child marriage in North Carolina.
Campus Organizing
Our campus teams work at 11 universities across North Carolina to engage and mobilize students while advocating for youth issues on campus.
Civic Engagement
We host events including speaker series with Congressional Representatives, roundtables with local activists, art-activism events, and civic-related game nights. These events have provided over 6,000 students across North Carolina an opportunity to learn more about politics while increasing their sense of civic responsibility.
We also hold Democracy Days on college campuses, where we lead event programming in partnership with a institutions across campus. Our inaugural Democracy Days at Duke University each doubled voter turnout compared to other days of early voting, mobilizing an estimated 300 additional voters each time.
Student Voter Mobilization
To build the political power of young people, we mobilize students around our campuses to vote. That work starts with registering students to vote all across campus. We go into class and club meetings, table at major university events, and launch campus-wide media campaigns to ensure students are registered to vote.
Then, we partner with university offices and student groups to build a grass-roots voter turnout campaign. This campaign leverages both traditional and social media to raise awareness about the importance of voting in an election and helps students understand the Voter ID requirements to vote on their campus.
Across our 11 campuses, this operation has registered over 1,700 new students voters. We have also reached over 10,000 students with high-quality, in-person mobilizations.
