Many adults today fret about civic and voter engagement among younger people, pointing to their disaffection from politics and low turnout at the polls. But Jacob Merkle sees something different when he thinks about young people in America: an incredible untapped resource.
Merkle is the CEO and cofounder of Rhizome, a national, youth-led network that works to increase civic engagement among American young people. The organization calls itself “A space for action and ideas, a home for emerging leaders to create the kind of world they want to live in.”
Rhizome recently teamed up with the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to bring its Civic Service Fellowship program to high schools across the state of Washington. The foundation provided $620,000 for the three-year initiative, which will recruit high school students to promote civic engagement in their schools and local communities.
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation was created by the late Microsoft co-founder and his sister, Jody Allen, who is now the organization’s board chair and president. When Paul Allen died at 62, IP’s David Callahan noted his willingness to get creative with his giving and called his death “a major loss, cutting short one of the most intriguing stories in the philanthrosphere today.”
The foundation is working to keep Allen’s philanthropic vision alive. It supports programs across the Northwest in the areas of environment and healthy communities. It also funds the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a division of the Allen Institute, which works to advance bioscience research; brain science is a particular focus, as IP reported last year.
Cat Martin, the foundation’s director of arts and communities, says another goal is to empower youth as changemakers. “As a foundation, we’ve been thinking a lot about the disconnection we’re seeing across communities, but especially among youth; the U.S. Surgeon General has pointed to the issue of youth mental health and the crisis of loneliness,” Martin said. “Youth are the future, the architects of tomorrow — what do they need right now in order to feel connected and to contribute to thriving communities?”
Dedicated funding for civic education and engagement is a relatively new area of interest for the foundation, and one where a focus on youth makes Rhizome a natural fit. As Jacob Merkle said in a recent interview, “Our mission is to activate young people’s identities into action and help youth treat civic service as the work of a lifetime.”
“Antidote to despair”
Those seeking to boost youth civic engagement have their work cut out for them. New research by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found a high level of discouragement and disaffection among Gen Z-ers. Less than half say they are “thriving” and only 44% said they feel prepared for the future. At the same time, only 40% of all young people (and just 34% of youth of color) said they were well qualified to participate in politics.
Rhizome’s Civic Service Fellowship program aims to boost young peoples’ sense of agency by giving them the skills and opportunity to engage in their communities. The organization prioritizes Title 1 schools (that is, schools that qualify for federal funding based on the number of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch), as well as under-resourced and rural schools.
During the initial fall phase of the year-long program, fellows initiate projects in their own communities. Some examples of these student-led projects include a wildfire awareness and fire safety campaign in one community, and a beach clean-up initiative in another. Rhizome fellows have worked to create dedicated mental health spaces at their schools and to make female hygiene supplies available at no cost. In the winter session, fellows give lessons on democracy to elementary school students, and in the spring, they lead nonpartisan voter education drives and help peers register and pre-register to vote. When their fellowships conclude, participants can qualify to become paid organizers.
Since Rhizome was founded in 2021 by a group of 90 young people, it has grown exponentially — it now has 120 student organizers throughout the country and fellows at close to 200 schools. The organization also has a 12-year plan to have Civic Service Fellowships available in every high school in the country by 2035.
“Our work is designed to offer a path of self-determination to people who otherwise would feel helpless,” Merkle said. “I think civic engagement is fundamentally about self-determination and the ability of individuals and communities to create the world that they want to live in. It’s an antidote to despair.”
There’s evidence that Merkle is right. Rhizome’s surveys of fellows found that 97% said participation in the fellowship had increased their civic knowledge, 94% said that joining Rhizome had made their life more meaningful, and 89% reported they were more likely to pursue their dreams in life as a result of the fellowship (see more survey results here.)
Rhizome organizer and cofounder Kylee Norris says the work has helped her develop a sense of purpose and community, and she has observed that impact on other participants, as well. On initial Zoom calls, for example, some new fellows would often leave their cameras off and rarely speak. “Now, they are constantly talking — I have to actually plan more time in my meetings just to let them talk,” Norris said. “They’ve got such great ideas. Some new students tell us, ‘I’m worried that you guys aren’t going to accept me into the fellowship. I’m worried that I won’t be able to help.’ Those are the students that do really great when you let them have a platform to organize around the things they care about.”
Norris is currently a junior at the University of Oregon. She acknowledged that it can be challenging to juggle her school work and her role at Rhizome, but said the work inspires her learning. “Sometimes, when I’m stressed about school, I just dive deeper into Rhizome,” she said. “I feel like that’s a space where I can really do good and feel accomplished. And then I can go back in to school when I’m ready.”
Connecting purpose to action
Rhizome’s effectiveness and youth leadership stood out to the Paul G. Allen Foundation. “They have a clear plan and they are very organized — look what they’ve been able to accomplish in the first 18 months of operation,” Martin said. “Adults need to change how they show up for youth to support them. That means centering youth voices, putting youth at decision-making tables and forums so it’s not adults deciding what policy and what systems would be best for our youth. Our goal is to help young people connect their purpose to action.”
While a wide array of funders support democracy and civic life, a smaller number focus specifically on youth civic engagement. But this is still a fairly dynamic funding space, with big-name grantmakers focused on engaging college students — like the Kresge Foundation, as well as the Open Society Foundations, the Lumina Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the New York Community Trust, the Joyce Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and others.
Also active in youth civic engagement are the Wyman Youth Trust and Melanie and Richard Lundquist, Los Angeles-based philanthropists who promote efforts to boost young peoples’ news literacy, as IP has reported. The Rural Democracy Initiative recently launched a Rural Youth Voter Fund to increase voter turnout among young people in rural areas, particularly BIPOC youth, as my colleague Martha Ramirez reported. Meanwhile, the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FYCO) has been around for a while and brings a focus on social justice and progressive power-building.
Of course, supporting “civic engagement” can mean a lot of things. In a recent IP guest post, Louise Lief argued that philanthropy’s typical way of approaching that work — through a narrow lens of voter engagement and politics-adjacent power-building — does not reflect the true breadth of what civic engagement can mean, i.e., people working to strengthen their communities, whether that involves getting out the vote or simply getting people together.
Philanthropy-backed civic engagement for youth ranges across that spectrum, with some of the above funders defining the work in more political terms than others. Although voter engagement is an element of Rhizome’s fellowships, they also speak to civic engagement in that broader sense — through the student-led community service projects, for instance.
In any event, this is a powerful space to fund. A recent Brookings study found that young people — millennials and Gen-Zers — will become the majority of the electorate by the end of this decade, so their influence is only going to grow. Efforts to boost youth civic engagement could clearly use more philanthropic support, as Jacob Merkle observed recently.
“Big philanthropy needs to recognize that that there are millions of young people who are better equipped to empower each other than adults are, and that young people hold untapped collective power to create the safer, happier, healthier world that they want to live in,” he said. “Often, the narrative is that young people are flaky, but what we’ve seen is that young people will respond to people investing in their time and their insight and their energy with deep conviction.”
