by Daniil Karp

This July the Endowment for California Leadership, in collaboration with the Junior State of America, the Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project, the California YMCA Youth and Government program and Youth Community Service carried out the first ever California Youth Summit (CYS) Summer Institute on the campus of Stanford University. For one week 80 high school students representing our 4 partner youth leadership development organizations came together to embark on an unprecedented crash course in effective civic engagement.   Highlights of the week included presentations from Gary Hart, former California Secretary of Education,  and Don Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University as well as in-depth public relations training from professionals at Ogilvy Public Relations and creating and hosting a press conference that was captured on film.

The institute was designed to give students intensive hands on training in 3 main topic areas: issue development, strategic communications, and issue advocacy, with the overarching goal of giving the first CYS graduating class an opportunity to develop, plan and carry out their own civic outreach campaigns statewide and in their communities.

The students dove into the substance of the Summer Institute by participating in interactive seminars  on K-12 education and immigration (issues that were selected by students at the CYS Spring Summit), led by Gary Hart (former State Senator and California Secretary of Education) and Laura Hill (Associate Director and Research Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California), respectively. Hart and Hill tailored their presentations to respond to the opinion papers students submitted prior to the start of the Summer Institute. After each lecture students gathered into their learning groups to analyze the issues more closely and to synthesize the complex ideas they heard during the lectures. The discussions were animated, enthusiastic and collegiate although just like their adult counterparts there was much disagreement about the issues and the necessary solutions. As the day ended our participants and facilitators remarked with pride at the high level of discourse that defined the long and hardworking day of issue discussions. Though every question was far from answered and every disagreement far from resolved the students went back to their dorms with a more nuanced and mature understanding of the tough choices and serious constraints facing the state of California and their local communities.

The morning of the third day of the institute was surrounded by a lot of buzz as the Ogilvy Public Relations team and our social media expert Susan Gordon of Causes on Facebook, prepared to give the students a crash course in strategic communications by helping them take their issue messages and advocacy project plans and building 4 press conferences around them to be delivered at the end of the day. Joining our staff for the day were two working journalists, Associated Press reporter Judy Lin and SF Gate political blogger Greg Lucas.

Throughout the day students were given opportunities to learn about and employ the skills they would need to effectively utilize new and traditional media in their advocacy and outreach projects. Students worked in groups that focused on logistics, messaging, press outreach, and social media strategy.  In the evening the different groups reintegrated into 4 press conference teams and planned every aspect of their press conferences to be held that night in the presence of a professional camera crew with our Ogilvy PR team and their peers as members of the press.

In the evening the four teams wowed everyone with 4 professionally carried out press conferences that included logos, expert testimonials, emotional personal accounts and clear messages to the public. The topics of the press conferences included a launch of a new peer mentoring program, a push for having student representatives involved in the budgetary decision making process at public schools and the creation of a CARE (Californians Acting to Reform Education) Campaign that would open chapters throughout California high schools that would engage students in addressing the local and statewide issues facing public schools in the state. As the press conferences ended Brian Green, Vice President at Ogilvy Public Relations, surprised the students by informing them that they and CYS would be on CBS 5 Morning Show for their Hi – 5 segment.

Thursday was dedicated to CYS participants turning their issue messages and communication skills into effective tools through an advocacy tutorial led by Jessie Ryan, Associate Director of the Campaign for College Opportunity. Students discussed all the barriers to change in their communities and mapped out the civic landscape in their regions by identifying the various interest groups and stakeholders of their issues. When they recognized the complexity and intricacy of the civic environment they would have to exist in to make change possible they broke into small regional groups to begin planning their civic advocacy projects in earnest.

Throughout the program in their community learning groups, which represented the diversity of the organizations, regions, and ethnicities, CYS leaders shared their personal goals, expectations and desires and through small group conversations began to identify those issue areas they wanted to focus on and those values that they wanted to define their civic engagement projects. Though the students had plenty of time to prepare it was only upon their arrival at Stanford and their first group discussions that it began to sink in that this wasn’t going to be a regular institute; everyone at the CYS Summer Institute was there to learn from each other, build professional relationships and collaborate on advocacy projects to learn about how various state issues affect their communities and how they could get involved.  By the end of the program, the personal bonds created in the community learning groups were strong.

On Friday at the graduation ceremony, Don Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, joined the program to hand out certificates and give some inspirational remarks.  President Kennedy was impressed by the caliber of students he met and mentioned that he needed to put his Stanford “recruiting hat on” as he interacted with these future leaders.  As students were saying goodbye, they reflected on Kennedy’s concluding words: “now you are not students, representatives or participants, you are citizens.”