Students Stand Up

Students Stand Up is an international youth-led organization streamlining the process of civic education and community involvement among young people.

When I was initially trying to get involved with advocacy, I found it extremely difficult to both find organizations to join and to organize well once I joined them. Through meeting other young organizers in the years since, I’ve come across a similar sentiment; most young people take part in advocacy efforts because they feel it’s important for them to do so. However, the sense of helplessness that often comes with being young and facing huge issues such as discrimination or environmental degradation is only exacerbated by not knowing where to start when getting involved. With the myriad of issues directly impacting today’s youth, I felt it pertinent to create a more streamlined pathway for kids like myself to get involved in their communities, which quickly developed into SSU.

Students Stand Up is an organization run entirely by youth organizers with the goal of helping other young people get their starts in advocacy and organizing efforts. First, civic-minded youth from around the world are made aware of SSU through members of the SSU team, our partners, former participants, and social media. From there, we encourage them to look into and potentially apply to our program, a 6-week curriculum delving into the fundamentals of government, democracy, and everything they need to know as prospective organizers — from the logistics of planning protests to social media content creation. Our curriculum is available to participants in multiple formats so as to accommodate as many learning styles and preferences as possible. These formats primarily include live lessons, asynchronous slideshows, and interactive asynchronous lessons. Finally, upon completion of the curriculum, participants are “matched” with our partner organizations who represent a wide variety of issue areas, and are also encouraged to join the SSU team itself!

SSU serves young people from around the world who are looking to get involved in their communities, but may not know where to start or have the resources to learn the ropes of advocacy work and governmental functions. So far, we’ve already been able to impact the lives of the 50+ kids who have completed SSU and gone on to work with our partner organizations on issues they’re passionate about; we continually receive feedback following completion of the program and even of individual lessons that simply being more educated on the fundamentals of democracy and advocacy is an understandably empowering experience. After completing SSU, they have the opportunity to easily join organizations that align with their interests and passions, and to influence change in their communities.

Everyone on the team is either an experienced organizer themself with organizations from around the world, or a former participant in SSU's program itself. Through learning about and/or working firsthand in advocacy, our team members are extremely well-equipped to help others take the first steps in their organizing journeys. Additionally, everyone on our team is between the ages of 14 and 24, with most still being high school-aged. This makes it even easier for us to work with the 12-19 year old demographic we target as it's natural to connect with them on a personal level and get to know them as friends even more than as colleagues. Our team is also representative of a variety of geographic regions, races, gender identities, and sexualities, which is mirrored by our participants. Team members also represent a wide variety of issues they work on in advocacy, and participants are encouraged to reach out and ask questions about certain fields they're interested in. As previously mentioned, we also send out regular feedback surveys to gain insight into anything participants enjoy or do not enjoy about certain stages of the curriculum and edit it appropriately.

As someone who was in the exact position of our participants only a few years ago, I and everyone on the SSU team understand firsthand how difficult it can be to get started in advocacy. We’ve also made an effort to reexamine our own experiences and piece together what would have been beneficial to know before starting. Additionally, we send out optional feedback forms following every unit of our curriculum and at the end of it so that participants have the opportunity to share what they enjoy about the program in addition to what could be improved upon.

SSU is completely revolutionizing the way young people are able to empower themselves and their communities. We take the burden of independent prep and research, which causes burnout and has led many not to get involved at all due to being overwhelmed with the strain of finding out how to help in addition to the issues they already face. This is a sentiment I've encountered personally when first trying to get involved, and one I've seen reflected time and time again by the kids I work with at SSU.

So, I created SSU to streamline the entire process of involvement. First, we identify young people through social media and our network of partner organizations, who apply to SSU. Once accepted, they connect with other civically-minded youth from around the world and take our six-week curriculum covering everything from democratic concepts to the history of civic engagement to specifics of daily work in various branches of advocacy (eg. social media, outreach, event planning). We deliver lessons in a variety of formats (live, asynchronous, and interactive) to best accommodate different learning styles. Finally, they are matched with our partner organizations (existing advocacy groups operating in a variety of issue areas) based on their interests and the issues they're passionate about.

In the nearly three years I've been running SSU, we've seen great successes: we've helped over 300 kids get involved in their communities and expanded our team to 20 members. However, it's become clear to me that the process could become even more efficient and effective if condensed into something like an app—where students could choose courses to complete (eg. American Democracy, Advocacy through Social Media, Youth Movements throughout History) to be shown on their profiles. Through this app, youth could connect with other young people and organizations looking for more members. This would be a win-win situation: kids get an education more tailored to them and can easily connect with organizations; these organizations can gain spirited and committed members with less funding spent on outreach. SSU will become dedicated to managing this app and its users while continuing to host live events such as Q&A's with existing activists to keep the community engaged.

We hope to completely revitalize how we deliver our curriculum, namely by creating a dual-purpose app that would work in both education and networking. Users could complete lessons and knowledge checks to add knowledge to their profiles and connect with existing youth organizations. However, our team lacks the expertise necessary to create such an app, and would love to utilize the resources available through the Solve[ed] Innovation Challenge to create the app and make it accessible to as many young people as possible.

Our other goals for the next year are to expand our geographic reach and serve at least 500 more students. We are also looking to add partner organizations, specifically more localized partner organizations, so as to provide a wider variety of potential organizations with which participants can be matched. We're looking to expand our team and grow our followings on social media to increase our reach as much as possible; our primary approaches for these are allocating some funding towards social media to reach more people, continually editing our curriculum based on feedback so that every participant can have a positive experience, and expanding our curriculum development team into 3 additional timezones to better accommodate live lessons for participants who benefit from live learning experiences.

While one of our primary goals in applying for this opportunity is expanding our technological capacity (elaborated on in next paragraph), we are already a completely digital organization and thus rely on many existing technologies. Currently, one of the main focuses of our curriculum delivery formats is offering multiple ways to learn so as to accommodate various learning styles. We use presentations through Canva and Zoom, but have found great results especially by using Articulate 360, an online interactive lesson builder. We try to make our lessons as interactive and immersive as possible, and Articulate allows us to create real-life simulations through which our participants can learn the ropes of advocacy. For example, in our crash course on outreach, participants go through a simulation of a call with a potential partner organization, in which they choose the best points to raise in an initial conversation and communicate their goals. Finally, we also use Notion for the bulk of internal organization as well as coordination of our curriculum. Through our participant hub on Notion, participants can easily find all of our lessons, the units they're part of, dates they're delivered on, links to Zoom meetings to watch them live, links to recordings to watch them asynchronously, and links to the interactive lessons on Articulate (they only have to complete the lesson in one form!). Notion's table databases allow us to display all of this information in an easily accessible and understandable manner, which is extremely valuable to make sure that communication and coordination with the participants is as clear as possible!

Now, after having worked with SSU for three years, it's become clear to me that while continuing live deliveries and community engagement efforts through SSU is extremely beneficial, we could have more impact by doing that in addition to having a widely accessible app and website which allows kids to do two things: educate and connect. 

For education, young people could complete SSU's curriculum (and hopefully, additional skills: eg. social media content creation courses, more in-depth outreach courses) through the app, and share these skills in a social network-like environment where they can connect with other activists and organizations.

Through this, young people everywhere can go from having next to no access to advocacy to becoming very educated in activism and connecting directly with the activist community globally. I can't express just how much impact we could have with this app in conjunction with SSU's existing work and network, and how incredible of an opportunity this would be to expand SSU's impact around the world.

Currently, we have served over 300 youth from around the world.

Within the next year, we are aiming to serve at least 500 additional youth through the expansion we'd be able to accomplish through funding and aid regarding the creation of an app.

We currently have an Instagram following of over 500 and a LinkedIn following of over 200; we hope to grow these to 1,000 and 500 respectively. Our social media platforms are primarily for educating young people outside of our curriculum, with more of a focus on current events.

Our team is currently comprised of 20 core members, and we would like to expand that number to 35 in 2024.

As a youth-led organization, attracting youth with little professional experience or mainly professional experience in advocacy/politics, we severely lack access to the technological experience and expertise necessary to do what we believe will revolutionize SSU's mission, in creating an app and expanding through the use of technology.

Our partnerships fall into two categories: continued/part-time funding and mentorship partners (who, as the name suggests, provide funds and mentorship to support our work) and advocacy partners (who accept interested students upon completion of our curriculum to work in advocacy). We look for advocacy partners across a variety of geographic areas and issue areas to best accommodate the passions and accessibility of our students.

Funding Partners

Civics Unplugged

GripTape Learning

VELA Education Fund

Minnesota Alliance with Youth

Future Coalition (Youth Direct Action Fund)

Advocacy Partners

One Up Action

Global Girlhood

The Period Society

Civics Unplugged

Dream Equal

OutFront

GripTape

Future Coalition

Fridays for Future USA

DICCE

The primary goal of Students Stand Up is to provide a streamlined pathway for young people globally to get involved with their communities.

This is accomplished through offering a free, comprehensive education on civics, democracy, and advocacy to youth from around the world, and having a network of partner organizations which students can join upon completion of the curriculum.

SSU is necessary because I, and nearly every other youth activist, struggled finding ways to get involved in their community, and to learn the ropes of organizing once they joined advocacy groups. With the plethora of issues facing today's youth, I found it pertinent to streamline the involvement process so that other young people don't have to worry about how to get involved when they're already worried about the issues they're attempting to resolve.

We continue to apply for grants from a variety of organizations and initiatives to help SSU as it grows and develops. We also look for funds continually while having enough remaining in the account to sustain our work for the time being and take on some expansion efforts. However, one of our primary goals currently is searching for a more centralized, stable source of income.

Regarding specific social enterprise business models, we are an imbedded enterprise/organization, and operate most closely under the cooperative model.