We Were Never Waiting, but this Moment Calls for All of Us

The conversation has spent years diagnosing youth disengagement as a cultural problem, a motivation problem, and an attention span problem. It is none of those things. It is a structural problem.

For as long as I can remember, young people have been the stated priority of civic institutions and the last ones in the room when decisions get made. That is not an accusation, but rather a structural observation.

As someone who has spent the last several years working at the intersection of youth civic engagement and the creator economy, I would argue that we are at an inflection point, one that the nation’s 250th anniversary is making impossible to ignore. This national milestone is arriving inside a political moment defined by the dismantling of democratic norms, the consolidation of media power, and a coordinated effort to narrow who counts as American. There is a role to play in this moment. But only if we are honest about what we haven’t yet figured out.

Here is what I know from working directly with Gen Z creators and civic organizations: young people are not disengaged. They are navigating a civic landscape that was not built for them. The conversation has spent years diagnosing youth disengagement as a cultural problem, a motivation problem, and an attention span problem. It is none of those things. It is a structural problem. And structure is something we actually have the power to change.

Gen Z grew up watching local newsrooms disappear. We came of age in a media environment where a creator with a genuine relationship with their audience has more civic reach than most institutional communications budgets. We are already having the conversations democracy depends on—about housing, healthcare, immigration, climate, and belonging—whether organizations show up to those conversations or not. The question now is whether we are building infrastructure that meets young people where they are in the culture they inhabit, or whether we are still expecting them to show up to structures designed for a different era.

This gap between infrastructure and culture needs to close, and closing it requires more than programming. It requires reorienting how organizations think about young people: not as a constituency to be engaged, but as co-designers, decision-makers, and leaders whose understanding of this political moment is differently situated but no less sophisticated than that of their elders.

This is where Youth250 is trying to put that principle into practice. Led by Made By Us, Youth250 is the national effort to increase youth representation and influence in how the 250th anniversary of the US is understood and carried forward. As a co-founder of Youth250, I have seen firsthand what it looks like when institutions operationalize that principle rather than just allude to it rhetorically. Hundreds of young people helped shape and build real infrastructure that connects them with the context and narrative tools they need to bring civic ideas into the spaces where their audiences already live.

But I also want to be honest about what one initiative cannot do. Youth250 exists in part because this infrastructure has not been built at the scale it needs. The organizations effectively mobilizing youth civic engagement are underfunded, relative to the scope of the problem. There is a wide gap between institutions that are genuinely restructuring around youth leadership and institutions that feature young people in their communications without giving them real authority.

When Made By Us asked museums across the country to engage youth from their own local communities rather than rely on national recommendations, the response from many institutions was telling: “we don’t know any.” That is not a communications problem. That is a relationship problem. And it is exactly why the Youth250 Bureau exists.

The 250th anniversary risks becoming exactly the kind of moment that looks inclusive from the outside while reproducing the same hierarchies on the inside.

On June 27, National Youth Day, institutions across the country opened their doors for Takeover Days, including America’s Black Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Kentucky Historical Society, the Lincoln Presidential Foundation, and others. That is meaningful. But a day is not a transformation. What happens on June 28 matters as much as what happens on June 27.

June 27 also aligns with a broader national mobilization in Washington, D.C., which brought together labor, immigrant rights, racial justice, democracy, and youth organizations around a shared vision for the next 250 years. The convergence of National Youth Day with that larger mobilization is significant. It reflects a growing recognition that youth civic engagement is not a program area. It is the condition for everything else we are trying to do. We cannot build a multiracial, multigenerational democracy without the generation that will live in it the longest having real power to shape it.

We know this. The challenge of this moment is closing the distance between what we say and what we build.

That means funding youth-centered organizations at the scale the problem requires. It means giving young people decision-making authority, not just visibility. It means taking the creator economy seriously as civic infrastructure, not a communications tactic. It means being honest when a program that features young people is still, at its core, designed by and for adults.

The 250th anniversary is a genuine opportunity. Not because milestones are inherently meaningful, but because they create a window where the country is paying attention and where the distance between intention and action is visible enough to finally do something about it.

We cannot build a multiracial, multigenerational democracy without the generation that will live in it the longest having real power to shape it.

Young people have been doing this work without waiting for permission. They have been building civic power in digital spaces, in mutual aid networks, in creator communities, in ways that the broader civic ecosystem is still learning to recognize as the infrastructure it is.

The invitation is open. The question is whether everyone will show up to it fully, or just enough to say they were there.