The Penn Youth Summit on Civic Engagement and Social Change

The Penn Youth Summit on Civic Engagement and Social Change will focus on the perspectives and research of high school youths regarding their roles in and possibilities for achieving positive change for their communities. It will convene young people in Philadelphia and elsewhere to share their ideas about the problems we face locally and globally and the significance of youth knowledge in addressing racial, social, and economic disparities and inequity. The Youth Summit is open to high school youth and youth-serving organizations, their teachers and other educators, and family and community members. The 2021 Youth Summit is being led by The Youth Civic Engagement Research (YCER) Project’s Social Inquiry for Social Justice Group in collaboration with The Community Literacies Project, both at the University of Pennsylvania, and the participation of The Youth Voices Project at Michigan State University.

The Youth Summit will consist of three segments:

• A Roundtable of high school youths who are members of three community research projects: The Youth Civic Engagement Research (YCER) Project-Social Inquiry for Social Justice Group, The Community Literacies Project, and The Youth Voices Project. Youth attendees will be able to raise issues and present ideas for discussion throughout the Roundtable.

• Research Concept Project Gallery, including short videos by YCER youths, representing their efforts to use research in ways that enhance their communities and address pressing issues.

• Conversation on Critical Social Issues by Researchers, Activists, and Students

The Youth Summit recognizes the increasingly critical role that young people play in engaging with and working on behalf of their communities. It builds upon the wealth of commitment and knowledge that they draw from their school and out-of-school experiences and that they enact to make a difference in promoting equity, justice, and change.

The Youth Summit is being held as a Pre-Forum Research Seminar, created in 1991as a collaboration between Dr. Vivian Gadsden, currently YCER Director and Professor, and Dr. Frederick Erickson, who at the time served as director of the Center for Urban Ethnography The Pre-Forum Research Seminar has been held traditionally the day before the official start of the Forum and was designed to bring together emerging scholars with senior researchers in using ethnography to examine persistent problems facing ethnically and socially diverse communities while expanding the knowledge base related to culture, race, and equity. The Youth Summit continues this tradition-embracing youth researchers and scholars alike committed to studying complex questions and creating approaches that support their communities.

The Youth Voices Project is a community-based Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) initiative that supports culturally diverse youth in a subsidized housing community in the U.S. Midwest in examining issues of importance to them and taking action to enact change. The Project started in the Fall of 2019 after Joanne Marciano, a faculty member in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, and Lillian Holloway, the housing community’s youth director, met to consider possibilities for developing and researching literacy programming that addressed educational disparities experienced by youth of color or those experiencing limited socioeconomic opportunities. Together, Joanne and Lillian discussed possibilities for collaborating to support students participating in the Achievers Program (a pseudonym), a college readiness and access program offered to middle and high school students in the community. After several meetings, they decided to engage students in a YPAR initiative, The Youth Voices Project.

Throughout the Fall 2019 semester, youth and adult collaborators, including the university-based research team, met at the property’s community center weekly for two-hour-long meetings where youth learned about research methods and formed two research teams to examine issues they considered relevant to their lives: increasing safety for children and teenagers living in the community; and understanding how children and teenagers in the community experienced access to participation in organized sports. The youth collected and analyzed data related to their research questions, presented findings of their research in December 2019 during a public event at the community center, and made recommendations for addressing the issues they examined in their research. In Spring 2020, the youth worked to take action in support of their recommendations until social distancing necessitated by COVID-19 led to the closure of the community center where weekly meetings of the project were held.

At the request of the youth, meetings of The Youth Voices Project transitioned online in March 2020 and youth shifted the focus of their YPAR projects to address the immediate needs of their community in response to the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism. Since that time, the youth have: raised $7,500 through a Go Fund Me initiative to assist residents in paying utility bills, purchasing groceries, and obtaining personal needs items; developed and facilitated an online summer College Ambassadors Program for their peers; and shared with local school officials their insights about the challenges students in their community are experiencing as a result of online learning due to COVID-19. Currently, the youth are designing community literacy projects to increase awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement throughout their culturally and racially diverse housing community.

The Youth Voices Project is supported by funding from the AERA Education Research Service Project (ERSP) Initiative, the AERA Division K Re-envisioning Teaching and Teacher Education in the Shadow of the COVID-19 Pandemic (RTTE) small grants program, and the Michigan State University College of Education, and the Michigan College Access Network.