Youth Civic Engagement: Systems Change and Culture Change in Hampton, Virginia. CIRCLE Working Paper 31

The burgeoning literature on youth civic engagement points to many different ways in which youth can contribute to the democratic life of communities, institutions, and the larger polity: voting, advocacy, service learning, community-university partnerships, and youth organizing, to name just a few. Hampton, however, represents a case where the city itself has taken responsibility to help institutionalize youth engagement. Hampton, a city in the Hampton Roads area of the Virginia coast near Norfolk, provides the most ambitious case to date to institutionalize youth civic engagement across the city in ways that have much in common with other models. None, of course, is without its problems, and much needs to be done in the coming years to make these systems more robust. Together, however, they provide a map of possibilities for how the city--and city government--can be a dynamic generator of democratic public work, co-production, and problem solving. (Contains 1 figure and 35 endnotes.) [This working paper was produced by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE).]