Working and Learning Together for Equitable Impact

Citizens & Scholars recognizes a unique opportunity to leverage the “out-of-school space” to help young people grow their civic skills and interact with people from diverse backgrounds and beliefs.

This civic learning can take place on field trips, on the sports field, after school in community service groups, and at summer camp. Out-of-school activities are especially valuable in under-resourced communities, where parents often lack the capacity to provide their children with these sorts of experiences.

In the summer of 2020, with the pandemic as our backdrop, Citizens & Scholars was eager to test our hypothesis that significant civic learning happens outside of the classroom, and, for that civic learning to be deep and equitable, young people need to be at the table and play a substantial role in designing those learning experiences.

We launched the Civic Spring Fellowship to provide six youth-centered organizations across the United States with grants to launch projects addressing pandemic-related challenges facing their communities, and to promote local civic engagement during the 2020 general election. Through our support of each grantee, Citizens & Scholars also sought to address the gaps in our understanding of civic learning, reduce barriers to equitable civic access, and build sustainability in the civic engagement space.

We are pleased to present an evaluation of the Civic Spring Fellowship, which confirms the incredible opportunity that exists to bolster civic learning and to expand equity in out-of-school spaces.

The evaluation was conducted by The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), part of Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life. As the evaluation partner, the CIRCLE team assessed the overall reach, depth, sustainability, and impacts of the Civic Spring Fellowship. The evaluators triangulated across diverse qualitative and quantitative data to identify findings, key lessons learned, and implications for future civic projects.

Highlights from the evaluation:

Meaningful civic learning takes place outside of the formal school setting:

• 96% said they were learning what would typically be part of a Civics class.

Program participants gained diverse types of civic skills.

They reported strengthened social-emotional learning capacities, their abilities to navigate both civic institutions and their mental health, and their strategies for working with stakeholders across lines of difference.

• More than 90% agreed or strongly agreed that the Civic Spring Project helped them find or strengthen their own voice.

Youth-centered civic initiatives have broad and deep community impact.

That impact includes advocating for policy change to city leaders, securing seats for youth on local government committees, holding voter registration events, and engaging local news media.

• 61% said they often or very often helped make their city or town a better place.