2026 StudentsBuild

Top Achievements from the StudentsBuild Project

Civicate Youth set out with a question Los Angeles had never seriously asked: what happens when teenagers actually run the city's hyperlocal democracy? Through StudentsBuild, we built the infrastructure to find out.

• Reached 10,000+ students through workshops, school assemblies, chapter programming, 2026 StudentsBuild National Summit, and direct outreach across Los Angeles

• Established 5 high school chapters across LA, training student leaders to deliver civic education programming on their own campuses without adult facilitators

• Built 10 civic engagement and community partnerships with Neighborhood Councils, youth organizations, and grassroots advocacy groups

• Represented youth voice at the LA Congress of Neighborhoods, the only organization tabling specifically to make the NC system accessible to teens — placing Civicate Youth directly in front of NC commissioners, the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment, and citywide stakeholders

• Developed a replicable chapter playbook — curriculum, training materials, and onboarding flow — so each new chapter launches without rebuilding from scratch

Evidence Collected (Use of Data)

We tracked impact across four data streams:

• Engagement metrics: workshop attendance, chapter meeting rosters, tabling sign-ups, school assembly headcounts

• Knowledge gain: pre/post surveys at workshops measuring whether students could correctly identify (1) what a Neighborhood Council does, (2) the eligibility age to run for NC office (14), and (3) the eligibility age to vote in NC elections (16)

• Partnership growth: documented partner MOUs and ongoing collaboration with Neighborhood Councils, civic nonprofits, and educational institutions

• Reach analytics: website traffic, Instagram engagement, and resource-download counts on civic education materials

Short-Term Outcomes

Quantitative:

• 10,000+ students reached through StudentsBuild programming

• 5 active high school chapters launched across LA

• 10 civic and community partnerships formed

Qualitative:

• Students walked into workshops not knowing the words "Neighborhood Council" and walked out knowing they could run for one at 14 — eligibility most LA adults don't even know exists

• Underrepresented LA youth, especially Korean American, immigrant, and low-income students, encountered local government as something they could shape rather than something happening to them

• Chapter leaders reported new confidence speaking with elected officials and NC board members

• Adult civic stakeholders began actively asking Civicate Youth how to recruit teen board members — flipping the usual youth-engagement script

Long-Term Outcomes for the Community

• A standing pipeline of youth into LA's Neighborhood Council system — the first generation of Angelenos to enter civic office in their teens rather than their thirties, structurally shifting who participates in grassroots democracy

• Higher voter registration and turnout among LA's 16- and 18-year-olds as students who registered early through Civicate Youth carry forward as lifelong voters

• A replicable chapter model that scales beyond LA to any city with hyperlocal governance — Civicate Youth's curriculum, training materials, and chapter playbook are designed to be adopted, not just admired

• A permanent change in who LA's local democracy belongs to — moving the Neighborhood Council system from a structure dominated by adults with existing political knowledge to one accessible to the underrepresented teens it has always been meant to serve

Reflection

What surprised me most this year wasn't that LA teenagers wanted to participate in local government. It was that most of the adults running it didn't know teenagers could.

When I founded Civicate Youth, I assumed our job was to teach teens about a system that adults already understood. A few months in, I realized that wasn't quite true. Half of our partnership conversations were spent explaining to Neighborhood Council commissioners that 14-year-olds can run for NC boards and 16-year-olds can vote in NC elections. These are rules already written into LA's NC bylaws. The rules existed. The problem was that almost no one — teens or adults — knew about them.

If I could start over, I would have pushed harder on Instagram outreach earlier. Most LA teens are on Instagram every day, and if we had been posting consistently from the start, we could have reached far more students than we did through in-person events alone in our first months.

What I most want judges to know is that Civicate Youth isn't just a club that teaches civics. It's an effort to change who LA's local government actually serves. The 10,000+ students we've reached are the first generation of LA teens who will know, before they turn 18, that they can participate in their local government.

Project Budget