Citizen University

The youth collaboratory brings together civic-minded high school sophomores and juniors from across the country for six months of learning and two national convenings where they engage around the idea and ideals of civic power, how to harness it, and how to share their learnings in their communities in the form of a personal project. In addition, our youth collaboratory students have the opportunity to participate in our national civic collaboratory meetings, offering an unparalleled opportunity for cross generational relationship building, which has led to several new partnerships between our youth and national collaboratory members. Students are active participants in the meeting activities and make commitments of help and support for national civic projects.

Citizen redefined brings together groups of young people, guided by an elder, for an arc of civic and ethical formation, culminating in a civic confirmation rite of passage. Citizen University trains educators and other adult mentors from across sectors and across the country to form and facilitate small groups of high school-aged participants as they develop their identities as citizens. Youth participants then engage in self-reflection, reckon with moral tensions in american history, make sense of the current state of our democracy, and develop the skills, confidence, and conviction to live acs responsible citizens.

The civic saturday fellowship prepares motivated americans to inspire a renewed sense of shared civic purpose and moral courage in their community. Fellows learn how to create and then host civic saturday gatherings, which we think of as a civic analogue to faith gatherings. They're a ritual designed for reflection, reckoning, and recommitment. The fellowship begins with our immersive four-day training called civic seminary. From reflecting on the unique challenges facing their communities to learning how to write a civic sermon, fellows gain everything they need to know to design their own civic saturday gatherings.

The national civic collaboratory is a national mutual aid society and project incubator for hundreds of the country's most innovative civic practitioners and catalysts from across the political spectrum. At our meetings held in cities around the us, innovators experiment and test new ideas, share cutting-edge projects, and form norms of collaboration as they support one another in their work. We have members from across the political spectrum and many domains immigrant rights, veteran's advocacy, civics education, voting reform, tech in government, arts and culture, worker organizing, corporate citizenship, and more. This group meets quarterly to support each other not just with ideas or feedback, but to provide true commitments of help and support to get a slate of national projects and initiatives off the ground.

Building on the success of our national-scale civic collaboratory model, we have begun working with local leaders to create these mutual aid networks in cities across the us. The collaboratory approach provides a scaled framework for practicing mutual aid in support of civic action. Local civic collaboratories are a place where people can connect across identities and issue areas, circulate power and resources, and be inspired and renewed by other civic practitioners pushing for transformative change.