Beyond Wishful Thinking: How to Build Lasting Youth Political Infrastructure

If sustained youth political engagement is the goal, then more attention must be paid to long-term institution building.

“Young people will save us.” It is a common refrain, often said by older progressives praising younger people for being politically engaged and challenging the status quo. It is meant to inspire hope. But it also quietly abdicates responsibility. What happens when that new generation, expected to lead the nation forward, starts to show signs of disillusionment, division, and doubt? Those familiar with voting patterns in the 2024 elections will recognize that this is not a hypothetical question.

Relying on hope as a strategy undermines power building. A trigger event sparks mass mobilization, youth leaders rise, organizations scale, funders flood in, and the “young people will save us” chorus echoes nationwide.

But generational energy is not self-sustaining. If sustained youth political engagement is the goal, then more attention must be paid to long-term institution building.

The Weakness of Existing Progressive Youth Engagement Strategy

For over a decade, at least since the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama, much of the progressive ecosystem has operated on the belief that each generation would be more progressive than the last. That belief shapes strategy: Donors invest resources into engagement, inclusion, and turnout rather than centering on political education and ideological development. The Schott Foundation for Public Education accurately describes the familiar pattern as “boom-and-bust cycles of funding whenever a big election is looming.”

Assuming young people always lean left has meant sidelining building a more lasting common sense of purpose. Focusing on turnout is limiting; you are not building deep bonds of connection based on shared values. Instead, you are hoping that the people you mobilize already share your values. If you’re wrong, then you’ve made no effort to engage in the hard work of political persuasion and common meaning-making. Even if you’re right and participants do have some degree of shared values, you haven’t reinforced those values for the long term.

As Harvard Kennedy School Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society Marshall Ganz points out, there is a large gap between mobilizing and organizing. Mobilizing is short term; organizing is long term, even generational. As Ganz observes, “Mobilizing is a tactic. And social media has facilitated that by reducing the cost of information sharing. So, instead of building commitments to each other and building real organization, we engage in these transactions where we show up and then we go home, and nothing is built.”

For years, I’ve worried about this approach. Back in 2019, when I first sounded the alarm in NPQ, Donald Trump’s first presidency had been met with a massive ground game of protests and rapid response defense. Thanks to the work of Justice Democrats and other groups, the first members of “The Squad” had just been elected to Congress. The idea of the Green New Deal was transforming what people thought was possible or practical for the government to do. It felt like a hopeful moment.

Understanding the Current Moment

The past decade has seen a lot of youth mobilization. Consider, for example, March for Our Lives, founded in 2018 by then-students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, in the wake of a horrendous mass shooting event. Or the Sunrise Movement, which was founded in 2017 and helped popularize the notion of a Green New Deal. These movements shifted national conversations and influenced policymaking across the country.

But in the absence of deeper organizing, the de facto political education of young people today has been the major events of our times. COVID-19 pushed their childhoods online, changing how young people think about community, interpersonal dynamics, and where they get information. They are growing up in a period of backlash against movements of the previous decade such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

The relative weakness of long-term, movement-building organizing on the left has left a vacuum that Trumpism has been relatively effective at filling—marketing itself as a populist revolt against a “liberal elite” that ends up seeming to defend the status quo of a broken system.

Pocketbook concerns also matter. For instance, tens of millions of former students, after having had their student loan payments paused for three-and-a-half years due to COVID-19 disruptions, were forced to resume making average monthly payments of $500 in October 2023, lowering their standard of living. Millennials and Gen Z have never known the kind of job market stability of previous generations.

Building for Success

Many organizations that center young people are often also led by young people. And what they’ve taken on is no small thing: stepping into the spotlight, where they’re suddenly navigating multimillion-dollar budgets, shaping strategy in the complex nonprofit ecosystem, and onboarding waves of new members—all while staying grounded in their mission, vision, and theory of change. When they get it right, it’s a powerful testament to their capacity and tenacity.

But youth organizations don’t always figure it out, especially when they haven’t been funded or set up in ways that support longevity. There is often very real pain involved in in these cases. Sometimes, organizations regroup and rebuild in new ways, but sometimes they cannot.

Many postelection conversations about reaching young people conflate tools—such as podcasts—with strategy. More podcasts might be a good idea as a counterweight to the permeation of conservative culture, but the long-term work inherent in contesting for power to build a more just world requires more than new communications channels. It requires an understanding of history, strategy, and community.

Author adrienne maree brown emphasizes the importance for movement activists to find a political home, which she defines as “a space where you can grow with others, together.” Building places that can be political homes matters, especially for young people, who are often still forming their political identities. It is even more critical now, as they are forming those identities, at a time when dissent is being criminalized, protest is more dangerous, and institutions are failing all around them.

Alas, these days political homes are often short-lived. When a young person gets politically involved for the first time, the collective effervescence experienced can be a powerful thing. But when the crash happens, it can feel world-shattering.

Building for the future requires a generations-long strategy that truly centers youth leadership development to build long-term power.

A more sustainable form of political education is necessary. That starts with the basics: What are the institutions of government and how do they work, really? How do we think they should work, and why?

Long-term political education also has to include movement history, the strategies and tactics that have been effective at building influence and power, including things like engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience, planning direct actions, and running strategic public communications campaigns. It is also important to teach how to have productive conflict, how to build genuine relationships and networks, and different theories of change and practice.

Organizations need to think about leadership development too. The City University of New York’s Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice program offers an example of the type of work required.

A recent report from Project Democracy and CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement), titled How Does Gen Z Really Feel About Democracy? confirms the value of this approach. As the report’s authors write:

Young people’s democratic attitudes are defined less by their identities (race, gender, rurality, etc.) and more by their experiences of civic development: whether they have had the opportunities to develop civic skills like political efficacy, whether they trust civic institutions, and whether they participate in various civic actions.

Looking to the Future

Building for the future requires a generations-long strategy that truly centers youth leadership development to build long-term power. The right has already shown how effective this approach can be. For example, the Federalist Society—a conservative organization that advocates for an originalist interpretation of the US Constitution—for decades has cast a wide net on law school campuses and in early-career spaces, eventually funneling ideologically aligned people into a tight, well-resourced network. The result? At least six people affiliated with the Federalist Society now sit on the US Supreme Court, ruling on how much democratic backslide the nation will allow. Other lesser known but similarly effective examples from the right include the Leadership Institute and the Conservative Partnership Institute.

If we take seriously the idea that personnel and policy are fundamentally linked, we must start with organizing young people. There are precedents to build on. For example, one area where former President Joe Biden’s administration had some of its greatest economic wins was in reviving consumer banking regulation. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, headed by Rohit Chopra (then age 39), reinvigorated banking regulation, securing an estimated $21 billion in settlements on consumers’ behalf.

What is important to understand here is that finding people like Chopra was not dumb luck. Rather, Biden’s ability to appoint younger people and reach people not normally engaged in the political process was assisted by the work of many outside organizations that strategically recommended candidates in 2020 and built on pipeline work from years before.  So progressives are not starting at zero, but large gaps remain.

At my nonprofit, the Roosevelt Network, which recently turned 20, we shifted from campus chapters to fellowships to provide what we hope is greater depth and consistency of support for the next generation of progressive leaders. Another promising example—the United States Student Association (USSA), a national campus organizing association—is coming back with the help of alumni who understand what would be lost for this generation without it.

Much more, of course, is needed. If there has been a central fault of progressive organizing—and the donor and philanthropic networks that help to fund it—it has been a focus on short-term mobilizing to the exclusion of long-term organizing. Finding the right balance will be tricky, but waiting for the next generation to save us is not a strategy. By investing in institutional networks where young people can find stable political homes, transformational change can become an achievable long-term goal.