Data Powered Difference Makers

Young people are interested in new forms of engaging with civic life and activism that is accessible, interesting, trusted, and creates community for them in nontraditional ways. MFOL and our peers’ polling consistently ranks gun violence among the top 3-5 issues young Americans are most concerned about, and with good reason. Gun violence is the leading cause of death for American children and teens. 40,000 people die from a fatal gunshot wound each year, and the impact this has on the communities of those lost is immeasurable. Additionally, the American gun industry’s irresponsible sales and marketing practices have led to an outflow of illegal guns from the United States to countries already experiencing violence, such as Mexico. Not only is this issue affecting Americans, but it is increasingly harming communities globally.

The digital organizing space has been a key way for Gen-Z  to connect with each other, with their communities, and with the gun violence prevention movement, particularly in the last five years. As a youth-led organization we have had a digital organizing program that has not been sustained to its full capability. 

At the core of this problem is our data. We have a significant database of intergenerational supporters, including tens of thousands of young people under 25 that emerged from the 2018 March For Our Lives and subsequent campaigns, that are eager to be activated. However, the initial data we collected was put together rapidly and haphazardly in the heady early days of 2018. We intend to address both of these concerns - gun violence and youth civic action on a national scale, and data hygiene and procedures internally. The latter fuels the former.

We intend to meet young people where we are at, in the digital space, to drive generational change on gun safety. To do this, we aim to reactivate and formalize our digital organizing program, which in the past has engaged people by building communities on discord, in slack, through online game nights, and as a result had a significant uptake of youth members who engaged with us, even through the early days of the pandemic. That digital program is presently nascent, but with the changes we implement, we know it will have a tremendous impact on current and future MFOL members.

To accomplish this, we will first clean up our historical data to ensure that we have the most up to date information about our members and are best able to serve our current base. Then we will collate our data and begin user-base research to clarify who our base is and who we’d like to grow to serve in our base. Simultaneously, we will define our membership journey, the various levels of engagement with MFOL, and design the digital program needed to serve that journey. Lastly, we will build and implement the various digital touch-points and how they interact with our in-person field program, in order to encourage our members to deepen their engagement with us, with the political process, and with the gun safety movement.

We’ve revamped our volunteer-led hubs on campuses and in communities across the country. We are in the beginning stages of signing up and training new volunteers in middle school - college. As our data becomes cleaner and our processes more sophisticated, we will be able to better deploy these volunteers in moments of rapid response, such as to protest deadly gun laws, or to register their peers to vote as we gear up to the 2024 election. Some of the technology that we are currently using and plan to improve throughout our solution includes: Slack, EveryAction, Zoom, Google Suites, Asana, Scale to Win, and Strive. If selected to be part of the MIT Solve cohort, we would love to work with experts to find innovative ways to use our existing technology or learn about new platforms that might be an even better fit.

This work will lead to more youth engaging with our work, learning about the political and judicial processes in the US, and working with us to reduce the gun violence epidemic and its impact on young people.

Our solution primarily serves young millennials and Gen-Z in the US. Soon, it will also serve Generation Alpha, as they too are deeply impacted by the gun violence epidemic and are searching for ways to get involved in the political processes in the ~5 years before they can legally vote. Adult allies will also be served, though more indirectly. In many ways, all Americans are underserved when it comes to gun safety. So far this year, we’ve seen more shootings than days, and yet there has been only one Executive Order signed at the federal level, and we are seeing state legislators stall and actively worsen gun safety across the country. If our nation’s political leaders aren’t going to serve their constituents, we will.

A significant number of Gen-Z marks MFOL as a trusted messenger and the core touchpoint that sparked their activism. We anticipate that with a stronger, more cohesive digital organizing program, we will be able to continue being that initial touchpoint for young people.

Reducing or ending gun violence will save lives and lead to a reduction of the nationwide fear of going to school, the grocery store, a movie theater, event, or of mistakenly knocking on the wrong door. If gun violence ended tomorrow, we could save nearly half a million American lives in the next decade. If it continues, this is how many lives we will lose.

Overall, through our proposed solution we will be able to address these life-threatening issues through our collective action. In the process, hundreds to thousands of young people in the US will have opportunities to participate in the civic process whether they are able to vote or not. At March For Our Lives, we believe that very valuable lessons can be learned outside the classroom, in the “real world,” and that these lessons are the building blocks by which young people learn to lead and make strong, sustainable, and equitable change in their communities. What we propose is a direct-to-learner solution that will meet young people where they’re at, bring communities together, and save lives along the way. We’ll have our intergenerational allies there to support along the way, led by our incredible team of Gen-Z staff and volunteers.

We’re able to do this at a scale that is difficult to replicate simply because of the nature of our organization and the deep familiarity and trust that young people have with March For Our Lives. At this scale, there are no other organizations that do what we do—organize and build youth leadership, civic engagement, and community—and are a youth-led organization.

We believe, and polling tells us, that MFOL and gun violence prevention was and continues to be an entry point for hundreds of thousands of young people in our country to civic engagement and social justice movements. Many young people who marched with us in 2018 and have shown up with us since go on to also organize around other issues like climate, racial, and immigrant, reproductive justice, among others. We are proud to serve as a nurturing home for youth activism, education and skills building, and community.

Half of our staff are Gen-Z and the remaining are young millennials. At the Board level, we typically have ~6 Gen-Z members who advise on strategy at a high level. Our team represents a variety of genders, sexualities, races, and ages. We are located across the country, from NYC, to Sacramento, to Nashville, and many states in between. Our solution’s Team Lead, Gaby Salazar, is our National Organizing Director and has been with MFOL for over 4 years, first as a volunteer activist and now a full-time staff member, leading hundreds of young organizers throughout the US. Gaby is a young person herself and knows how to connect with her peers, teaching them to plan events, advocate for gun safety, and educate fellow young people on civic actions. 

We are applying to solve as we face financial and technical barriers that we believe MIT’s network of experts can help us overcome. The funds received from Solve will allow us to devote more resources to our data cleanup project and more quickly implement our plans for our organizing team. We hope the experts can help advise us on technology to analyze our members and continue expanding our network of volunteers and activists. Once our data is improved, we anticipate a ripple effect of increased efficiency across our teams, allowing us to engage with more young people and advance our mission of ending gun violence.

This project plan has been developed by and for young people who are at the center of the gun violence epidemic, carrying the weight of this crisis in their classrooms, community spaces, and homes. MFOL has, since its founding, empowered young people to be the architects of the future they want and deserve–one free from the daily threat of gun violence. We are the leading youth organization in the broader gun violence prevention movement and completion of this project will bolster our hard work for a seat at a table that young people are traditionally excluded from.

MFOL has two overarching objectives that will guide our work over the next five years:

• • Objective #1: Advance gun violence prevention measures at the local, state, and federal levels (see It Ends With Us and Five Forces for guidance)

  • Objective #2: Build youth political power and have that help drive change to end gun violence in America and create a safe and healthy future for our generation.

We will achieve these goals through our three core programs: policy advocacy, judicial advocacy, and youth civic engagement. This project is critical to achieving these objectives because it addresses inefficiencies and gaps in our existing membership recruitment and development pipeline.

We will measure progress towards our goals by tracking developments and advancements in gun violence policy at the state and federal levels, our success rate of defending gun safety laws already on the books and supporting successful cases to bring accountability to the gun industry, and rates of youth voter participation in the each election cycle, with a particular focus on significant increases in youth voter turnout in states where youth voting rates have historically been lower than the national average.

March For Our Lives is a movement dedicated to ending all forms of gun violence — not just mass shootings, but everyday gun violence, police violence and more. We fight for a world where no person has to face this tragic and preventable end.

Our mission calls for something more bold and transformative than gun control alone. We call for a world that is re-imagined: a world where oppressive power structures are abandoned and community is embraced. A world where all human needs are met and love of people is centered.

People with access to food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, and clean water — who are part of loving and thriving communities, where they are valued, safe, and belong — do not turn to guns. But our capitalist, white supremacist society has made it nearly impossible for everyday folks to attain all of the essentials for human wellbeing. Violence is the result of that brokenness.

Gun violence is the direct consequence of failing to address the larger, systemic issues in our society that exacerbate it. To fully eradicate gun violence, we must understand and liberate ourselves from its root causes and restore what has been destroyed.

In order to understand our approach to taking on gun violence, our theory of change, we want to be clear about the forces that fuel gun violence in our country. They are gun glorification, armed supremacy, political apathy and corruption, poverty, and the national mental health crisis. 

To read more please visit our website: https://marchforourlives.com/forces/

The core technology that powers our solution is our CRM database. This is where we record and track all interactions with individuals and institutions within our ecosystem. Our people are our most valuable resource, and creating the best system for moving people through the MFOL journey is simply the only way we can build the people power it will take to counter the monied special interests that are responsible for the proliferation of the weapons, fear, and hatred that fuel this deadly crisis.

At the time at MFOL's founding, and for too long after that, white leaders in our movement were given platforms, accolades, funding, and other resources that had been and still is denied to Black and brown organizers and leaders, many of whom have been doing this work for decades. In the past two years, MFOL has taken several steps to meaningfully address that history, center Black and brown organizers and survivors in the creation and implementation of our programs and the gun violence solutions we fight for. Those steps include:

• •  In 2021, MFOL underwent a transformative justice process with the support of an outside equity and culture specialists. We aimed to increase accountability, address past conflicts and harm caused by MFOL and individuals within it, and making commitments to each other and the communities we serve. We undertook an assessment of our people, programs, and processes under the guidance of our consultants and implemented several changes as a result, for example expanding paid opportunities for part-time staff and stipended organizers to remove a common barrier many young people, and especially young people of color facing systemic economic inequity, are up against when they do advocacy and organizing work.

  • As our organization evolved, we wanted to create a new framework for change that went beyond a traditional "gun control" approach to address societal forces fueling the gun violence epidemic. As such, we released The Forces Fueling Gun Violence to guide all of our programs and communications efforts. This framework is an intersectional approach to our work and has helped us expand not only the way we understand gun violence, but how we fight against it. For example, The Forces highlight armed supremacy, police violence, systemic poverty, and other issues disproportionately impacted people of color and driving gun injuries and death in communities of color. The Forces help us illustrate our values and priorities as an organization

  •  In 2021, MFOL released a new 5-pronged policy plan, It Ends With Us: A Plan to Reimagine Public Safety, which was shaped by The Five Forces and helped us solidify our commitment to racial justice within our policy work. For example, it makes clear our commitment--backed by our resources and advocacy--to divesting from systems that cause harm, like policing, and investing in community resources and healing; our intent to fight barriers to the ballot box designed to exclude voters of color; and more.