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Our inaugural year has given us momentum.
Our inaugural year has given us momentum.
Initiated in the 2025-26 school year, Youth2Lead has engaged over 70 students from four districts in the St. Louis region to take evidence-based action in their communities.
Our students are learning valuable skills.
They have...Our students are learning valuable skills.
- Honed techniques of questioning and active listening when interviewing community members
- Engaged in thoughtful, evidence-informed debates and deliberation to select community problems to address
- Developed carefully worded surveys
- Collected survey data from hundreds of respondents and analyzed the data with statistical techniques
- Transformed data into action by developing and implementing innovative solutions to civic issues
Our students are achieving progress on real community issues.
They are...Our students are achieving progress on real community issues.
- Raising awareness and donations for organizations that serve unhoused families
- Spreading positive messaging to improve the external image of St. Louis
- Creating new student leadership organizations at their school
- Organizing events to connect underserved youth with afterschool and summer programs
- Advocating for reduction of plastic waste in their school cafeterias
In their own words:
I love Youth2Lead because it is a chance for ordinary middle school kids to make a big difference. It is a great club where kids can work together to find a problem in the community and help fix it.I remember solving issues in classes but just writing it down and then forgetting about it. Youth2Lead teaches us what process to start fixing a problem in.I have learned teamwork skills and realized that even when we don't all agree on a really big thing there are smaller things that we can all agree upon. Working with different people has also shown me that everyone's opinion matters and can always serve a purpose in the problem we are trying to solve.In Youth2Lead I have learned various ways to get community input and that the questions you ask genuinely matter. From surveys, interviews, multiple choice questions, rank questions, open ended questions, and so much more, I now know the importance of these types of questions and when and where to use them.In their own words:
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