Supporting young people to engage at the intersection of STEM & society

We are living through some challenging times—societies across the world have been battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate is rapidly changing around us and making our planet less hospitable to human beings, technology is evolving at a dizzying rate with dramatic consequences, and a new space race is on. It is easy to feel anxious—but there are reasons to be optimistic. People are mobilizing to tackle these challenges with empathy and ingenuity, and young people are a part of this effort just as they have always been a part of innovation and social change.

As we seek solutions to the most pressing issues facing us, we must recognize that young people are key stakeholders and must have a seat at the table. They not only have a lived experience of the current moment that is different from adults, but will also need to sustain the solutions we come up with. When engaged and given an opportunity to exercise their agency, young people bring powerful new voices and perspectives that can influence and shape crucial conversations and can lead to better solutions. Because many of today’s big societal challenges have solutions rooted in science, every young person needs access to both STEM learning and civic engagement opportunities. As these young people turn learning into action, they also need support and training in communications and advocacy to actively influence the systems around them for the betterment of their own lives and communities.

Recognizing this imperative to support and empower young people, the Afterschool Alliance and I have partnered to launch the Collective for Youth Empowerment in STEM & Society (CYESS). This new initiative brings together the Alliance’s strong history of supporting afterschool STEM learning and its more recent work to empower youth. CYESS will work with allies in afterschool and out-of-school-time (OST) youth driven programs who are already engaged in this space to amplify youth voices and perspectives. The aim is to help communities and policymakers more deeply engage youth as they develop and implement initiatives, agendas, and policies at the local, state, and federal levels.

Every community has young people keen to make a difference on a diverse range of issues that impact them; however, systems are often not set up to meaningfully engage young people, and opportunities for youth to participate are often not equally available to all. Afterschool and OST youth programs can play a key role in providing such opportunities.

Why afterschool?

Afterschool programs and other youth-serving OST programs are grounded in youth development principles and value youth voice as integral to their practice. Over the past decade, afterschool programs have dramatically increased the variety and frequency of STEM learning opportunities for youth, allowing young people to discover and engage with STEM differently than they can in the classroom. As safe and supportive environments for young people, OST programs provide content knowledge and empower young people as they gain confidence in expressing themselves and sharing their ideas for real solutions to challenges facing their communities.

The Afterschool Alliance is well positioned to lead this work and support young people’s aspirations to make change in society. We have a strong decade-long history in supporting afterschool STEM, building bridges, and convening people through the Afterschool STEM Hub initiative. Our more recent work on youth voice aims to amplify the perspectives of youth to inform policy and programming across the nation. We have a robust Youth Ambassador Program where we recruit, select, and train a cohort of youth to be afterschool advocates each year. Each cohort receives training on how to talk about their afterschool experience in the context of the national afterschool field and guidance on how to advocate to policymakers using their afterschool story. We now want to build on this to layer civic engagement on STEM in afterschool and support work at the intersection of STEM and society.

How will it work?

By providing a common platform for afterschool, STEM and the larger youth-driven OST fields, CYESS will:

• Bring together people already using afterschool and other OST spaces to actively engage young people in tackling problems that impact all our futures.
• Learn from ongoing initiatives to scale existing programs and pilot new approaches.
• Support young people to develop and use their voice to bring about systemic change.
• Build capacity and opportunities among afterschool leaders and OST youth programs.
• Help spread lessons learned and promising practices to the broader field.

By convening leaders at the intersection of societal issues and STEM learning, CYESS sees young people being meaningfully engaged to tackle pressing societal challenges at the local, state, and federal levels. Supported and empowered by their afterschool STEM programs, they are using their voices to shape decisions and agendas. We welcome partners and funders to work with us on further defining and shaping this initiative!