Written by: Kyle Park
Youth Civic Impact Collective: Students Transforming Civic Education
On the night of the 2020 election, silence hovered over my high school dorm in New Jersey as students carried on with their usual routine. It was just me and the plasma television. Instead of watching the returns, my dormmates were in their rooms, finishing poetry explications, Geometry problem sets, and Biology lab reports. It astounded me that students were spending the night preparing for their individual futures instead of witnessing the collective future of our country.
In the 2020 presidential election, only half of eligible voters aged 18-24 cast their ballots. This apathy extends beyond voting patterns. According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, less than half of Americans can name all three branches of government, a figure that drops even lower among the Gen Z demographic. Despite the worsening civic engagement gap, it’s shocking that so many high schools, colleges, and universities still have classes on Election Day. A staggering number of voting-age students remain in the dark about how to participate in the democratic process, perpetuating the idea that youth equates to political irrelevance.
Following that quiet election night, I started looking for ways to make civic engagement an essential part of my high school’s culture and began developing the idea to replace Election Day classes with civic experiences. After several proposal presentations and discussions, the administration approved my idea to implement my high school’s first, class-free Election Day––an opportunity to give students the time, space, and motivation to prioritize civic participation. Instead of a normal day of classes during the 2022 midterm elections, students heard from Congressman Andy Kim and civics advocate Pete Davis, engaged in mock elections, attended workshops on civic leadership, and performed in democracy-themed open mic concerts.
As a junior at Stanford University, I’m continuing to build this mission through the Youth Civic Impact Collective (YCIC). YCIC is a nonpartisan, student-led organization focused on expanding class-free Election Days across the country and empowering students to creatively transform civic education. Many institutions individually were making exciting progress with class-cancellation or general civic engagement programming, but I realized that we were missing a vital collaborative piece. YCIC therefore prioritizes its network: a diverse platform of high schools, public and private universities, and community colleges exchanging strategies and collectively building this momentum around civic education. Instead of traditional top-down approaches, YCIC’s network allows for situated learning and knowledge sharing where institutions can grow with each other. The classic 1990s example of Xerox copier technicians––where top-down manuals fell short, but peer storytelling made quicker repairs possible--very much holds true in civic education.
One of the ways this network effect came alive was through YCIC’s Intercollegiate Gathering for Civic Engagement, just a week before 2024 Election Day. Student leaders from across ten schools––including Brown University, Community College of Philadelphia, University of Mary Washington, and Wayne State University––shared unique perspectives on mobilizing their peers and administrators as well as specific goals moving forward, urging other institutions to follow suit. The conversations from this gathering highlighted how the process of implementing class-free Election Days looks very different on each campus. Some schools take months to implement such an initiative while others take years. Varying levels of existing engagement, available resources, student population, faculty support, and institutional processes as a whole invite extensive nuances and caveats that can be challenging to balance. To help student leaders navigate this demanding process, YCIC created a toolkit with universal advice and general overviews to serve as an initial guide to canceling Election Day classes.
YCIC is not a solo mission and our network of partner organizations and institutions is constantly growing. We’re able to take action on our ‘what ifs’ and passionately branch out to new subprojects because of our partnerships and committed base of student leaders. Just this past year, our team has developed workshop modules as curriculum extensions for high schools where class-free Election Days are logistically challenging, launched a podcast to amplify authentic, youth perspectives that deserve more attention, and diligently built out our policy advocacy committee. Looking ahead, we are excited to host the 2025 National Civic Education Conference this coming fall which will spotlight innovative student initiatives that tie civic education with recent technology, walk through actual case studies on Election Day programming, and continue to create meaningful opportunities for cross-learning.
YCIC is becoming a platform for generational change. We are not just encouraging youth participation but cultivating a culture for Gen Z where engaging with the public is celebrated and expected. One campus at a time, we are building a future that thrives on a civically engaged youth. Your campus could be next.
To get involved or for questions, please get in touch with Kyle Park at [email protected] and check out YCIC’s outreach page at ycicollective.org/get-involved.