Giving Compass' Take:

• Generation Citizen is working with schools to promote and coordinate action civics projects for students to foster agency and student leadership. 

• According to Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life, strong civics education leads to increased student participation in the political process. How can donors help provide resources to these civics programs? What can donors do to ensure that programs like this survive the COVID-19 pandemic? 

•Read more about teaching democracy and lasting civic engagement.

Scott Warren wants civics to be the most exciting class in school.

That’s why his organization Generation Citizen helps schools adopt action civics, a school-based approach to civics education that empowers students to find a problem in their community and work together to solve it.

Warren started Generation Citizen in 2009 when he was a senior at Brown University and now serves as its CEO, but his interest in what it takes to keep a democracy alive started long before that. He spent most of his childhood traveling the world with his family after his dad got a job in the foreign service.

Generation Citizen “was really started as a way to figure out, how do we get civics back in classrooms, how do we transform and revolutionize the subject, and how do we make it the most exciting class in school?” he said. “How do we see democracy as this vibrant, alive concept that we don’t take for granted but we’re constantly molding and cultivating?”

Generation Citizen works mostly with schools where a majority of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty, to reach historically disenfranchised groups and close the civic participation gaps.

Countries that have higher levels of engagement tend to have less economic and political inequality, Warren noted, which is why he wants students to learn how to be good citizens early.

Generation Citizen is working to close that education gap and to empower historically disenfranchised students, Warren said. Strong civics education correlates to students being more engaged in political processes, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a research center based at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life.

Read the full article about empowering citizens by Laura Fay at The 74.