Young People's Alliance

Hi everyone, I'm excited to announce that the Young People's Alliance is launching our inaugural Chapter program. We are training 100 high school, community college, and universities students to become impactful advocates for youth power in their communities. Please encourage any North Carolina students in your network, as well as university students in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Tennessee to apply to this program. We're incredibly proud of providing a transformative experience for many of our members, allowing them to have a real impact on state and federal policy while still in school. I'm excited to expand this opportunity to more young people!

tl;dr invest in youth organizers as partners, not pawns. Yesterday, the US Senate passed the first bill related to youth safety online since 1998. There's been much talk about the mental health crisis young people are experiencing. In addressing this crisis, I'm pleased that our elected officials are prioritizing the unmitigated disaster unfolding across our unregulated social media ecosystem. So many groups and individuals were involved in getting the Kid's Online Safety Act over the finish line. Still, I want to highlight how youth organizers brought new energy to the conversation, reframed the debate, and built critical support for the bill, which ultimately passed 91 - 3 after languishing in the Senate for several years. In his statement following the bill's passage, co-sponsor Senator Blumenthal credited the Design It For Us coalition for "coming back to the Capitol over and over to tell their stories." POLITICO described the partnership between youth organizers and parent activists as the "unlikely alliance bringing big tech to heel." In July, lawmakers arrived at work to find hundreds of yard signs with messages from young people demanding lawmakers pass legislation to require Big Tech to put young people’s safety and well-being ahead of profits. To be sure, KOSA is not perfect. But thanks to the influence of youth-led groups like Young People's Alliance and Encode Justice, needed revisions were made to prevent republican attorneys generals from using the law to target LGBTQ youth. Alongside my co-founders at the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund and my colleagues at Omidyar Network, I'm proud to have played a small role in securing funding and support for the brilliant young people leading this fight. KOSA's passage should signal to policy advocates and philanthropic funders that policy coalitions are more effective when they include young people as partners rather than just pawns. Invest in youth organizing.

This week, the Young People's Alliance held our inaugural Youth Power Reception, honoring leaders who have helped empower our team as we make youth perspectives heard. The recipients of our 2024 Youth Power Award are Congressman Don Davis and Senator Ted Budd. When Mick and I started YPA as high schoolers, Don Davis (then a State Senator in the NC legislature) treated us like adults as we advocated for pro-democracy legislation. By taking us seriously, he made us believe that we belonged in these spaces and fueled our work. Today, his office is a close collaborator with us on federal children's online safety legislation, and he was the first off-committee cosponsor of the Kids Online Safety Act. When we started our federal advocacy program, our team of student advocates worked to ensure that the manipulative social media algorithms were addressed in online safety legislation. Sen Ted Budd's office listened to us, even though we were new to the Hill, and coordinated with a number of offices to make our perspective on this policy heard. Today, the Kids Online Safety Act includes these provisions. We are incredibly grateful to these two recipients of the 2024 Youth Power Award on both sides of the aisle. I also want to thank the 30+ people who attended the Reception and supported our work. Special thank you to everyone on the YPA Advisory Board who helped us successfully pull off the event, our longtime mentors who have supported us as we've grown, and the team at YPA, without whom this would not have been possible.

We cannot wait for more folks to get involved with Digital Needs for Democracy (DND for short), a cross-sector working group that aims to foster an open, free, and safe internet, designed by and for young people! If you're interested in participating and helping design a better internet, sign up for our listening session at the link below or send me a DM! Special thanks to our existing participants ranging from iCivics to the National Education Association, and founding partners Youth Power Project, Young People's Alliance, and Global Compromise Collective!

We are excited to announce YPA's inaugural Youth Power Reception, where we will celebrate leaders who have empowered our team of youth advocates as we have made young people's voices heard. The reception will take place on May 29th at 5:30pm ET at Tobacco Road Sports Cafe in Raleigh, NC (a short walk from the NC General Assembly). Tickets are available for $150, or $50 for young professionals under 35. Students can reach out to Sam Hiner to join the waiting list for a free ticket! Purchase a ticket or make a donation: https://lnkd.in/ez7TaSrB We are looking forward to celebrating a successful year of advocacy and the leaders who helped us make it happen. This year, we have introduced novel kids’ online safety legislation in North Carolina, testified before Congress on mental health, and reached over 16,000 students with in-person voter education programming. Bob Phillips Chase Gaines Tiffany Gladney Jeff McNeely Jay Derr Zack Czajkowski Wilson Moore Ishvaraus Davis Greear A. Webb

We are incredibly proud of our Advocacy Director, Ava Smithing, who testified before Congress last week to discuss the importance of data privacy and kids online safety legislation!

One of my favorite photos from Wednesday because you can see Zamaan Qureshi behind me, hard at work, making sure we maximized every moment of the hearing. And this pic doesn't even scratch the surface of his work that went into this week. I have so much love and gratitude for this community that cheered me on and offered support (thank all y'all!) but I am especially grateful for the students. Sam Hiner may not love my gushy LinkedIn posts.. but I'm going to gush for a second.. the work environment he has created at the Young People's Alliance is a home for passionate kids who wanna play scrappy in order to give their two-cents and I am so honored to be apart of it. Noah Coffman and Sam gave me 14 consecutive hours of their time on zoom call. Neil Sairam may or may not have skipped class to join me on the hill. Ben Spaloss hopped on a train no questions asked. The students at Design It For Us and YPA will never cease doing work that makes us all proud. I'm sure of it.

"We have the opportunity to build products from the ground-up that work, that inspire collective action, that connect people to one another, that inspire people to hang out in real life. And I think that's a chance that we can't miss because if we let this bump of regulation come and go and we only make small changes to comply, then it's going to be a long time before we have another chance to really have a paradigm shift with how we're accepting the type of social media we get." - Ava Smithing, Advocacy and Operations at Young People's Alliance All Tech Is Human Head of Partnerships & Trust and Safety Lead Sandra Khalil hosted Adele Taylor (Youth Digital Programs and Partnerships Senior Manager at Thorn), Dr. Siva Mathiyazhagan (Research Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Strategies and Impact at the SAFE Lab, University of Pennsylvania and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University), Victoria McCullough (Leads TikTok's Trust and Safety Outreach and Partnerships team for the Americas), and Ava Smithing in a panel conversation about youth empowerment through autonomy, inclusion, and safety at Responsible Tech DC! 📺 Watch the full panel discussion and subscribe to All Tech Is Human on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/etb7RuD6

We are excited to announce our inaugural Advisory Board! Chase Gaines, Tiffany Gladney, Wilson Moore, Ishvaraus Davis, Rep. Marcia Morey, Zack Czajkowski, Bob Phillips, Rep. Kristin Baker, and Jay Derr are talented civic leaders who have shown a commitment to centering youth perspectives in policy. We are excited to have this group together to help achieve YPA's goal of creating and advocating for bipartisan youth-centered policy while also mobilizing students to get civically engaged.

Today, the Young People’s Alliance, #HALFTHESTORY, and Encode Justice jointly endorse the Kids Online Safety Act. As Gen Z-led organizations, we have watched social media companies prioritize profit over our mental wellbeing for 20+ years and now we are joining together to hold these platforms accountable. For our generation, social media is a core aspect of our social and professional lives. We are calling on Congress to pass KOSA so that our modern public square is a place that is beneficial and empowering for young people rather than a place that manipulates users for profit. Read the rest of our statement at https://lnkd.in/eF2yhC-b.