The Research Hub for Youth Organizing聽supports聽young people's capacity to claim power and create more just communities through field-driven research.
We advance youth participation and leadership by co-creating and sharing research and curriculum with youth organizers, teachers, education leaders and policymakers.
Founded in 2016 with support from the Ford Foundation, we are housed in the 麻豆视频's聽School of Education聽and comprised of staff, faculty, researchers and graduate students affiliated with聽CU Engage聽and the聽.
Examples of our work from our first two years include:
- Co-designing a YPAR toolkit and web platform to support new youth chapters working with local organizing groups in Colorado.
- Building a curriculum about social movements in the global south for partners in South Africa.
- Recognizing 45 high schools across the nation as Schools of Opportunity.听
- Co-publishing a policy memo and report establishing the research evidence supporting community schools as an effective school improvement strategy with the Learning Policy Institute.听
- Providing evaluation support to new initiatives and developing lessons for the field on how youth organizers build political power.
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Youth-led movements utilize evidence to draw attention to inequality, inform specific campaigns, and hold policymakers accountable. For example, South Africa鈥檚 Equal Education engaged in systematic research to document inequalities in school infrastructure, such as bathrooms and libraries, which strengthened their campaign for minimum norms and standards. Youth leadership groups with this kind of research capacity, however, are the exception rather than the norm. Contributing relevant and timely research requires far more than publishing excellent research鈥攊t requires building strong relationships between researchers and activists that ensure that research products are relevant and actionable.
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The Research Hub starts with the assumption that youth activists already have key knowledge about the needs and interest in their communities and insight about the most urgent research questions that should be pursued. We see our job as convening activists across regions and nations to support peer to peer learning, and in cases where new research is needed, develop partnerships that address those questions in timely and relevant ways. Drawing on methods from the learning sciences, this partnership approach improves the quality and relevance of research while strengthening education justice movements.听
The Research Hub leverages university resources for higher impact
Through the collaboration of its university research centers (NEPC and CU Engage), the Hub can leverage existing resources, networks, and expertise to disseminate research findings, respond to research requests in a timely way, and convene groups to strengthen relationships. Core to this proposal is the idea that NEPC and CU Engage are not building a new organization. Rather we serve as a conduit to facilitate and strengthen connections between multiple networks that cross communities, geographic regions and sectors.听