The Youth Change Leader Collaborative (YCLC) is a collective action collaboration of students, teachers, school leaders, and community members dedicated to developing the leaders of tomorrow through mentorship and providing the resources needed for students to enact change. For our project, we created an initiative called Agents of Social Change, which is focused on a peer-to-peer education system built to support student’s social/emotional growth and development. 

We began our initiative in the fall of 2022 in response to EdVenture Partners' "Invent2Prevent Competition." We were tasked with devising a plan to mitigate target violence by both protecting those at risk and motivating others to become involved in the prevention of targeted violence as well. 

Our solution was one based on education: to teach the younger generation about the groups they often overlook to encourage them to be more empathic people. We worked on our plan in Baldwin High School, and last year we presented our initiative to the first annual New York State Department School Safety Summit. Now We hope to expand our work to include schools beyond our district.