2025 DMV Youth Summit on Youth Policymaking

Are you a Washington DC-area resident and in 8th-12th grade, or of that age?

Want to develop your voice, learn a lot, get community service hours plus a chance to win awards including $100 cash, and have fun meeting diverse youth throughout the DC region?

Then RSVP to take part in the 2025 DMV Youth Summit on Youth Policymaking!

Context

By several measures, the United States is undergoing a democracy crisis, including rising polarization, proliferating disinformation, lack of public civic knowledge, longstanding inequality in civic participation, and declining trust in government, media and other institutions, among other problems.  In many cases, these problems are acute among American youth.

American youth have always grown up in unequal communities, but those inequalities are getting worse, leading to vastly different family, health, safety, education and work experiences and outcomes.  Further, in schools, learning is typically divorced from participation in power.  School tests, papers, and projects tend to be strictly academic exercises, intended foremost to move youth along toward the next grade level and graduation, rather than to connect and engage students as citizens in wider learning communities where youth can participate with adults in government policy-making.

For these reasons, Learning Life, a Washington DC-based educational nonprofit, is organizing a Youth Summit on Youth Policymaking (hereafter, “the Summit” or “YSYP”) for up to 150 diverse DC area youth in 8th-12th grade to be able to come together across lines of difference, learn, deliberate, and propose policies that could help give young people in the region more voice in government policymaking that affects them.

Longer-term, Learning Life envisions an annual summit bringing young people together from the DC region, across lines of class, race, religion and other divides, to connect, learn and propose policies on issues that affect them, with preparation via school classes and/or extracurriculars, plus opportunities for youth to help implement and evaluate these policies with the support of foundations, schools, nonprofits, businesses and governments.  Such regular, community-supported summits should help (a) bridge social divides between DC area youth, and between youth and governments in the DC region, (b) engage more diverse young people in the DMV as connected, capable and caring citizens, (c) increase their influence on policymaking, thus improving government accountability to youth, (d) cultivate greater public trust in government, and (e) strengthen regional employment pipelines for the benefit of youth and employers.

Summit Schedule

The Summit is scheduled to occur in two parts, on Saturday, September 27, 1-3pm via Zoom, then Saturday, October 4, 1:00-3:30pm as part of the second DMV Democracy Festival, taking place at 1-6pm.

All participating youth must complete a survey, about 15 minutes long, online before the September 27 session, then in person at the end of the October 4 Summit, to help assess the impact of the Summit.

The September 27, 1-3pm Speakers & Discussion via Zoom will combine speaker presentations with discussion to provide participating youth with some policymaking knowledge in preparation for the October 4 Summit in person.  The diverse speakers will come from the DC area and internationally to give participants wider perspective on youth involvement in policymaking.

The October 4 Summit will proceed as follows:

1:00-1:15pm: Orienting remarks, and random assignment to small groups of up to 10 youth, each with at least one adult moderator.

1:15-2:00: In small groups, participants propose, discuss and agree upon one to three draft policy proposals for school, city, county and/or state policies that would increase youth voice in policymaking that affects them.

2:00-2:45: Participants reconvene as one large group to present their proposals, and ask each other questions about their respective proposals.

2:45-3:00: Each participant votes on all the priorities proposed, assigning a priority score of 1, 2 or 3 (1 is lowest priority, 3 is highest) to each proposal.

3:00-3:30: Concluding remarks, then participants complete post-survey, and receive raffle tickets (see benefits section below for more about the tickets).

DemFest 2025 culminates on October 4 with a comedy show for democracy at 3:45-4:45pm, then a party at 5-6pm with a variety of tasty sweets, music, community info tables, and raffle prizes.  Summit participants get free access to these culminating DemFest events, and are encouraged to attend.  Click here for the full DemFest schedule.

Following the Summit, Learning Life will produce a YSYP report, including the youth’s policy recommendations, and the impact of the Summit.  The report will be shared with all participants, elected officials and government staff, plus interested civic organizations in the DC region.  YSYP youth will have the opportunity to attend and in some cases share their experience of the Summit at any public meetings at which YSYP will be reported.

YSYP is a project of Learning Life’s DMV Democracy Learning Community (DLC), an association of DC area individuals and organizations working to make democracy more fun and inclusive by developing social events, products, services and spaces that entertain and nurture learning, networking, collaboration and wider, deeper citizen participation.

Requirements & Benefits