Made By Us

What happens when the future inheritors of American democracy don’t have access to credible context on “how we got here?” 

Gen Z is passionately demanding a more resilient, inclusive and equitable future in the United States, but institutions haven’t given them the tools to build it. Though they will soon out-earn and out-vote older generations, only 16% of 18-29 year-olds in the United States are proud to live in the U.S. and only 25% feel confident in U.S. democracy (Morning Consult, CIRCLE 2023). They do not feel they have a voice or a space to practice hands-on civic participation. 

There’s a knowledge gap, too; less than a third possess basic knowledge of U.S. history, and the civics and government numbers are similar. School alone isn’t the answer; civics classes are rare, most history classes are a far cry from applied knowledge, and as battles rage over what’s taught in classrooms, only 27% of Gen Z trust education officials to be politically neutral (More in Common 2023). 78% of young adults will turn to entertainment sources like TikTok and YouTube, but misinformation and outrage can dominate these spaces (American Historical Association, 2023).

A sense of history is the first building block of civic participation. If you can’t see yourself as part of the story, it’s hard to imagine shaping the future, let alone finding the motivation to learn and grow on your own. Storytelling is a powerful tool that cultural institutions have the gravitas and authority to wield; but history has largely been unevenly recorded and shared, presented as static facts. We need dynamic, user-centered content that takes into account the lived reality of young people today and meets them where they are. 

Cultural institutions like museums can help. But getting their resources in the hands of those ages 18-30 requires a new approach. Most cultural institutions don’t have the skills or capacity to leverage technology to this end; many museums have at most one staffer juggling social media as an add-on to their other roles, they prioritize the needs of older adults and school groups who are perceived to be revenue sources, and there is a strong pull to maintain the status quo of “how we’ve always done it.” Despite creating bespoke programs and content for other audiences, there is a dearth of learning opportunities designed to meet Gen Z’s needs and preferences - and they’re the group that arguably has the most to gain from a comprehensive, out-of-school, tech-forward history and civics education – in their terms, on their words. That’s where Made By Us comes in. 

Made By Us harnesses the credible expertise and resources of nearly 200 history museums, sites and libraries across the U.S. to close an information gap for young adults ages 18-30. The result is an urgently needed, user-centered crash course in the timely, relevant history and civics knowledge we need now to safeguard our democracy and empower the next generation. 

Here’s how we do it:

• Our work begins and ends with the needs of Gen Z today, based on data and direct input from our community. 

• We use our online hub to put the call out to our network for relevant expertise, pulling in multiple perspectives and credible sources to bear on the issues of the day.

• We invite Gen Z creators, voices and community members to participate in creating digital content, putting the American experience in their own words, for their peers. We design content for social, mobile learning in modular formats. 

• We deliver this content into the stream of everyday life for young people – Instagram and TikTok, creator accounts and partnerships, youth media and hobby and issue groups. 

On the institutional side, we develop workflows to surface resources and expertise from labyrinthine, opaque systems. We spent more than a year testing and improving our responsiveness, curatorial lens and coherency, using social media as our primary “lab” space, working on an ad-hoc basis with influencers, creators, and youth media. 

With Fellows, interns, creators and our BFF Community, we invite passionate and civically-engaged media creators to experiment with social platforms and various formats using credible historical content as their raw material. 

Example: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cpx1L-zgE9n/

Our solution delivers educational content (directly increasing civics knowledge) and builds relationships, awareness and community (indirectly increasing opportunities for civic action and participation). But it goes beyond that. By working within powerful, established institutions using new narratives and formats, Made By Us is generating change from the inside out, leveraging New Power and technology to drive the adoption of audience-first, co-creative and intergenerational practices. 

We serve U.S. adults ages 18-30. If you’re 22 years old today in the U.S., you’re becoming a voter, taxpayer, neighbor and consumer in a complex moment. Your entry into adult citizenship takes place in the era of TikTok and ChatGPT, during the invasion of Ukraine and the murder of George Floyd, under threats of COVID-19, economic recession and mass shootings. Your first time voting for president was the 2020 race, followed by the January 6 insurrection and the second impeachment of the sitting president. In this post-truth world, you get 200+ notifications every day and see disinformation online every week.

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday in 2026, the fate of American democracy lies in the hands of a generation that has only ever known political dysfunction, culture wars, and existential threats. Though only 16% of Gen Z say they are proud to live in the United States, they have already taken up the mantle of engaged citizenship, ushering in a reckoning around race, climate, and work, and disrupting institutions from Wall Street to Monument Ave. They will soon out-earn and out-vote older generations.

Gen Z isn’t going to let democracy die. But do they have the tools to save it?

For young people to become civically engaged they need to see themselves as part of the story. Our hundreds of experiments over the last three years at Made By Us have convinced us that it’s essential to focus on what precedes a civic act, shoring up the reasons and promise of why someone might vote or run for office or fact-check their news.

But institutions haven’t gone far enough to incorporate the daily concerns of Gen Z. There is a disconnect: we're asking students to learn how our government works – while our government is not working. Institutions are not proximate. Congress is in a bubble. 93% of the federal workforce is over 30. Museums do field trips. But life (and learning) is happening on Discord, in the group chat, on Quizlet and Youtube, at festivals and beach clean-ups.

By centering Gen Z needs and experience, getting curious about their worlds and spaces, and bringing them into the full cycle of learning and producing educational material together, we are closing this gap. Time and time again we see that the content we provide fills a major void in the digital media ecosystem, right at the intersection of credibility and curiosity, in shareable, peer-led formats. 

Proximity is essential to the design of our solution! Our approach to close the gap between "institutional" expertise and the needs of young adults is to center youth roles and voice. Made By Us is really "made by us," with a matrix of input. 

Caroline Klibanoff, our Team Lead, is a Millennial. As a public historian who has worked for 10 years in digital strategy for civic engagement and public opinion organizations, she is close to the history and civics material, the research and data, and the constraints that institutions face for adopting digital practices.

The Made By Us team is made up of two Gen Z-ers and one Millennial, incorporating backgrounds in history, social media and digital organizing. Geographically dispersed and bringing diverse experiences, this team brings varied input and expertise. We are also joined by Kaz Brecher, a human-centered design and innovation strategist and facilitator who has worked in tech. 

Made By Us hosts annual cohorts of Gen Z fellows ages 18-30 (at least 10, with plans to expand in 2024). Fellows live across the country and represent a broad range of careers, interests, backgrounds as well as race, gender, religion, urban/rural, sexual orientation and gender identity. We select Fellows for their lived experience and curiosity.

We have 50 members in our online Gen ZBFF community who contribute to content creation and other activations. A Dream Team and advisory board of approximately 40 museum staff complements this.

Finally, our network of nearly 200 partner museums and historic sites in the coalition participate in quarterly calls, provide input on content and design, and join and drive activations in their communities. The Made By Us Board of Directors is composed of 8 museum directors from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Conner Prairie, Monticello, the National Archives Foundation, the First Americans Museum, Atlanta History Center, Senator John Heinz History Center, New-York Historical Society and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

The urgency of securing and strengthening democracy in the United States grows every day. We know that next-generation solutions are key to a sustainable future, but barriers to learning and participation are real. We have battle-tested our interventions in communities with diverse needs, from Cheyenne, Wyoming to Boston, Massachusetts and everywhere in between. We have run experiments and design sprints using a wide variety of tools, including and beyond social media. We have honed our workflows overtime to accommodate institutional needs and constraints. And yet scaling up is an immense challenge due to cultural and financial barriers. 

Solve will connect us with a network of like-minded world-changers, increase our access to funds and expertise, and validate our approach for institutions that can be reluctant to the material changes necessary for success. 

We are tackling this problem from both sides of the market – the end-user (Gen Z) as well as the source (institutions), with technology as the marketplace in between. And, we are doing this in real, iterative time, with a small team and short runway. Solve is an accelerator that can help us clear hurdles like institutional preconceptions, access to networks of impact and funding, and connections to culture makers. 

Our solution is innovative in two primary ways.

First, we are collaborative. Museums, archives, and historic sites tend to be siloed and fearful of losing control over donors, stories, and attention. We have modeled a path that shows that collaboration is not only smart, but essential, to future-proof institutions. Through quarterly knowledge-sharing calls, templated programs from one institution for the others, how-to guides and workshops, and storytelling that brings in more than one perspective from more than one source, we are starting a path forward that relies on organizations working together. We are able to gain more viewership by young people, and increase individual capacity, by co-creating, and coposting on social media. Since we began in 2019, we have helped drive a groundswell of collaborative work in the history and cultural sector, especially when it comes to civics education work. Institutions are realizing that it is safer and stronger to work together, and it creates a better end product for the user - and increases trust! - to share plural sources and perspectives. 

The second way is applying human-centered design to history and civics information. Civics and history are some of the last frontiers for this design approach. Our process starts and ends with the needs of young adults. We conduct research on their lived experience. We bring them into the full cycle of product development and leadership roles, and we test and iterate our solutions. Since we began this work, this approach is growing across the field. We are seeing museums recognize that they are not merely artifacts storage, but are seen by the public, and especially by young people, as places for entertainment, community, air conditioning, and even voter education. 

In the next year:

- Grow our network to 300 museums, historic sites and other institutions

- Develop and share content delivered in popular online communities, formats and channels that reach 8 million young adults 

- Grow our BFF community and online community to 250 participants 

- Host regional storytelling incubator workshops bringing together Gen Z-ers and institutional leaders to co-create for the U.S. 250th anniversary in 2026 that reflects Gen Z needs and preferences

In the next 5 years:

- Grow our network to 1,000 museums, historic sites and other institutions to power the content initiative

- Develop and share content delivered in popular online communities, formats and channels that reach 20 million young adults 

- Fund and empower bi-annual Creator Cohorts based on regions or issue areas

- Drive an engaging, meaningful 250th anniversary for the United States that serves as a launchpad to Gen Z's strong and secure future

• The number of innovative experiments we lead
• The number of new spaces hosting historic sites or experts
• The increase, since launching Made By Us, in multi-perspective program collaborations between institutions
• The increase in conference sessions and leadership meetings in the history sector that prioritize Gen Z civic engagement 
• Across our partners, the number of just-in-time responses to breaking issues delivered to streams younger people already inhabit
• The percentage of institutional content that directly maps to what Gen Z is already talking about (versus static calendar dates and news pegs)
• The number of new relationships built with Gen Z-ers directly (i.e. inviting a student group to visit vs. inviting a professor’s class)

Inclusion is one of our core values. 

Across many demographic and culturegraphic measures, Gen Z is the most diverse generation yet, and are seeking stories and leadership that reflects this. While museums have a way to go for leadership and staff to reflect America's diversity, the power of Made By Us lies in opening the door to new and more voices, and leveraging a collaborative, coalition approach bringing together pluralistic perspectives to show a richer, fuller picture of the American experience - striving for 3 or more perspectives in any given story. 

Young adults have an equal seat at the table for Made By Us. Our team and Fellows represent diverse backgrounds and we prioritize this, as an internal and external value. Fellows and creators are paid for their work, and we center equity in the work we ask people to contribute for the project.

In every sense we create an inclusive environment that prioritizes learning and humility. See our code of conduct: https://historymadebyus.org/co...

We know museums have done harm in the past and we work to center underrepresented stories, make room for more voices, and join forces to stitch together a more complete narrative.

We are largely philanthropically funded, however our business model focuses on transforming the practices of institutions so that they better serve young adults, who then benefit from relevant, timely information that meets them where they are. Made By Us coalition member organizations make a financial contribution to the project and benefit from skills training, collaborative programming and content, cross-learning calls and connections, and data and research. Additionally we offer consulting services on discrete projects and staff trainings.

We operate closest to a market intermediary model.

We have received grants from the Mellon Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, National Endowment for the Humanities, Arthur Blank Family Foundation and some corporate support.