Giving Compass' Take:

• David Washburn  explains that 99Rootz works to catalyze young people around voting rights awareness in California's central valley. 

• How can funders support youth civic engagement? How are youth in your community already engaged?  

•  Read about the Brookings study on young people's voting behavior later in life and their poverty levels.

Decades after civil rights icons Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta brought worldwide attention to the plight of farm workers in California’s Central Valley, a new generation of activists are making an impact in the region — with the focus now on the myriad issues facing young people and efforts to get them involved in civic affairs.

The issues — which include poverty, environmental justice, immigrant rights and the school-to-prison pipeline — are not new to the cities and towns that dot the Central Valley. But, with this year’s pivotal mid-term elections looming, groups are emphasizing youth voting and civic engagement with a vigor that was missing in years past.

“Our primary mission is to build an unapologetic youth movement across the Central Valley that encompasses year-round voter registration and voter contact,” said 28-year-old Crisantema Gallardo, who this year co-founded the youth rights organization 99Rootz.

The nonprofit start-up’s small staff primarily targets high schoolers who live in the low-income communities situated along state Route 99 between Bakersfield and Stockton. In recent months 99Rootz has been working with UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Veronica Terriquez on a youth education and mobilization effort that they’ve dubbed the Central Valley Freedom Summer, a nod to the legendary 1964 effort to register black voters in Mississippi.

Among the highlights of this year’s Freedom Summer are nearly a dozen day-long “civic engagement” workshops (each in a different Central Valley town) that began in July and will run through mid-September.

What’s changed since 2014, say Terriquez and many others, is the current societal upheaval — mainly brought on by the election of Donald Trump and his policies and behavior since taking office — that has mobilized youth to a large degree in a short period of time.

Read the full article about getting youth to vote by David Washburn at EdSource.