The Activation Hub

American democracy is in danger and nearly 332 million people are in threat. According to Freedom House, the US had been on a democratic decline for 10 years before experiencing a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 (the first since the Civil War). After that, 147 members of Congress still attempted to subvert a free and fair election. 

Today’s democracy’s terrifying state can trace its roots back to this nation’s founding on the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the resulting policies designed to oppress anyone who is not white, male, wealthy, cisgender, heterosexual & Christian. Thus, whites are twice as likely as citizens of other races to communicate with elected representatives (Scholars Strategy Network).

Consequently, we’ve been experiencing a vicious cycle between democratic decline and a generally unengaged body politic, where even civic participation amongst whites have declined. According to the 1990-91 World Values Survey, 82 percent of Americans belonged to at least one voluntary association; today, only 30% of adult Americans volunteer to improve their community (Americorps). 

Meanwhile, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the electoral college have fueled further voter mistrust of the system and decreased participation, especially among people of color and the young. The erosion of an engaged body politic has led to a widening gap between the rich and the poor, the trivialization of fact-based reporting, the unchecked influence of corporate interests, and increased polarization, furthering democratic decline. 

This problem particularly impacts youth participation, especially BIPOC youth. According to CIRCLE, Tufts’ research institution focused on youth civic engagement, youth across the country have increased their turnout in federal elections since the low point of 2014 but still have lower turnout than the older generations. This generational difference, though, is not a sign of generational apathy but, in large part, a consequence of election policies. For example, pervasive barriers to voting, such as lack of automatic or same-day registration and voter ID laws, impact youth voting rates, especially for marginalized youth (CIRCLE). 

CIRCLE also reports that a majority of youth (60% of all youth, 56% of white youth, and 66% BIPOC youth) don’t believe that they’re qualified to participate in politics and therefore participate less frequently in more impactful forms of civic actions (i.e. actions focused on policy and electoral change). For example, while 57% of youth are interested in signing a petition or joining a boycott, only 32% have actually done so. Similarly, 43% are interested in direct actions, like a protest or march, but only 15% have attended one, and 29% are interested in volunteering for a political campaign, but only 7% have done so.

Yet youth increasingly want to engage civically. Teens are nearly 3 times more likely to volunteer than adults (AP-NORC), 83% of youth aged 18-29 believe in the power of youth and adults working together for social change, and 62% believe that their political views are important to their identity, a rate that increases for young women of color and LGBTQ youth (CIRCLE).

Addressing this massive problem of American democratic decline requires a massive singular solution that addresses the specific needs of everyday people, especially marginalized youth, and removes barriers to their civic engagement. We need a tool to easily connect everyday people with community and opportunities geared around driving systemic change on the very issues they’re most passionate about, no matter what zip code they’re from, the specificity of their issue, or how much experience they have with activism.

The Activation Hub aspires to be that massive scalable solution. It’s a platform that’s designed by the user, for the user to create intentional communities of learning and action based on shared causes and passions. When members join the Activation Hub, they have the opportunity to join “mini hubs” that fall under three categories:

• Geographic hubs are focused on civic engagement opportunities in a specific area. We are currently building state hubs. As we grow, we hope to create scalable infrastructure that allows members to easily create hubs serving their locality and region as well. 

• Issue hubs are focused on a systemic issue that impacts groups differently depending on their identities and where they’re from. Whereas the UN has 17 categories, we use a 12-category system to categorize every conceivable systemic issue (further delineated in impact goals).

• Identity hubs are focused on healing and justice for specific identity groups, namely racial minorities, disabled people, religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ identities. 

Through an ongoing onboarding process, members first join the one mini hub that they’re most passionate about by joining Slack channels and Zoom intro calls for their mini hub (they can join more mini hubs as they increase engagement with our wider community). After connecting with other members regarding shared stories, experiences, and passions, fostering a sense of belonging, members undergo a full collaborative learning and action journey with their mini hub members. Virtual training sessions guide members in learning the five foundational skills every systems change-maker needs—storytelling, research, tri-sectoral engagement (public, private, civil society), critical consciousness, and coaching–and applying skills through one of two roles: Hub Volunteer or Hub Affiliate. 

The Activation Hub's biggest value proposition is a one-stop-shop database featuring pages for each hub’s topic collating resources everyday folks can use to promote systemic change, such as model policies, strategies for passing them, and a database connecting citizens to up-to-date initiatives led by public, private, and civil society actors/institutions addressing root causes of the topic. The training sessions guide Hub Volunteers to keep their resource page up-to-date while guiding Hub Affiliates to leverage the resource page to join or launch an initiative or campaign and contribute content back to the page as their initiative develops. Together volunteers and affiliates build their civic skills by contributing to a live, evolving resource intended to remove barriers to youth and citizen participation in systemic change efforts for the issues folks are most passionate about, bringing more people into the learning and action journey, and creating an outsized civic impact on communities across the country. 

Over 700 people have signed up for The Activation Hub from 45 states, 95% of whom have at least one marginalized identity, 50% are BIPOC, 64% are LGBTQ+, 20% are poor or working class, and 7% are disabled. While The Activation Hub is open to individuals of all ages, the average age of Activation Hub members is 15. We specifically focus on youth who have little to no activism experience; 54% of youth have never contacted an elected official before joining the Activation Hub. Our solution has engaged over 1500 active participants in the past three years. Although we serve students from all over the country, we particularly focus on Maryland and the DC area, where we’re headquartered, as well as Michigan due to our strong partnership with Detroit Area Youth Uniting Michigan.

Due to current capacity and funding restrictions, only 200 are active members, 80% of whom are BIPOC, 60% LGBTQ+, 65% poor or working class, and 15% disabled. These youth joined The Activation Hub to solve a multitude of challenges directly impacting them, such as lack of mental health support, racialized and class-based opportunity gaps within schools, unwelcome environments for LGBTQ+ people ranging from school boards to state legislatures, and much, much more.  

Our solution addresses their needs at individual, collective, and systemic levels. At the individual level, all Activation Hub members learn self-management, leadership, relational, self-awareness, responsible decision-making, communication, capacity building, and a trove of other skills that prepare everyday people, especially BIPOC and marginalized youth, for prosocial careers and lifelong civic empowerment. Activation Hub members also drive tangible collective impact addressing the root causes of the issues hurting them the most. This happens either by leading (as a Hub Affiliate) systemic change efforts and strategies that yield real results that likely would not have happened without our solution or amplifying (as a Hub Volunteer) the results of Affiliates and other partners across sectors to inspire others to engage in these systemic change initiatives, thereby creating an even bigger impact. 

For example, a past Affiliate of an early version of our Education Hub is Students Toward Equitable Public Schools (STEPS) from Montgomery County. Despite this Maryland county’s strong student civic engagement culture, Black and Latinx students historically had been underrepresented in policy conversations that impact them the most. Through participation in our training program, STEPS leaders—who came from the county’s least-resourced schools and previously had no organizing experience–achieved two local policy wins and two statewide wins within a year. Many adult-led organizations take years to achieve the same results. Co-founder Avery Smedley said, "I would not have been able to start STEPS if it weren't for the Youth Activism Project. I had the passion but I had no idea where to start." Promoting STEPS’ victories and strategies inspired other youth-led groups, such as Carroll County Kids for Equity (Maryland) and Fairfield Equity Coalition (Connecticut), to also drive systems change through school boards, inspiring our idea for resource pages to further replicate the impact of these three groups.

Due to our lived experiences and proximity to the community that we serve and years working towards our technology-enabled solution (indirectly since our founding in 2004 and directly since 2018, when we began transitioning the Youth Activism Project to a staffed nonprofit and launched the first iteration of the Activation Hub), you’d be hard-pressed to find another team as knowledgeable as ours in cracking the code on harnessing the untapped civic potential of BIPOC and other marginalized teens through the power of technology.

Our Executive Director, Anika Manzoor, will serve as the Project Lead. At 7th grade, Anika was one of the co-founders of YAP. This work is her life's calling because she still finds her time engaging in federal-level advocacy as a minor of color—especially as a Muslim first-generation immigrant and closeted bisexual—to be the most transformative experience of her life. (More recently, Anika discovered that being genderqueer and neurodivergent also played a significant role in why these early activism experiences continue to be so pivotal for her, although she was unaware she possessed these identities at the time.)

With an unrivaled 19 years of expertise in the youth civic engagement space, starting as a youth activist herself, Anika leads a staff that is also overwhelmingly made up of women and gender-nonconforming individuals of color with significant representation of neurodivergent and working class communities. Given our focus on empowering youth, 50% of our full-time staff are under 25 and the vast majority of our part-time staff are between 15 and 20. We have also built an ecosystem of 100+ partners across a range of sectors and focuses, the closest of whom we work with also represent proximate leadership.

Our intergenerational team, skewed heavily toward youth, is therefore a direct representation of the community that we serve. We created our solution with a deep, intrinsic understanding of our community’s needs and challenges, based both on our youth staff's expertise as peer and near-peer representatives of our target population and our practice of regularly conducting interviews, surveys, and focus groups of Activation Hub members to elicit community-driven feedback. And while we used this knowledge to create the bones of our solution–through our onboarding and training process, resource page concept, and initial list of partners–it is our Activation Hub members that will be continuing to flesh out our solution in their roles as Hub Volunteers and Affiliates. Therefore, Activation Hub members are the true drivers of the design and implementation of our solution—our staff is simply there to guide.

Although one-time funding is important, it is the last reason for why we’re applying. We are applying to Solve because we believe that it can catalyze our ability to scale our solution unlike very few opportunities we have come across. From the targeted coaching and strategic advice to Solve’s formidable network of like-minded civic organizations and leaders across industries and sectors, all united by a passion regarding the intersection of technology and civics, we would take full advantage of all of Solve’s offerings in the nine month period. We are especially excited regarding the following sources of support: 

Financial (e.g. accounting practices, pitching to investors): While we are adept at traditional nonprofit fundraising, pitching to investors constitutes a new area for us. Our primary fundraising challenge is the lack of institutional funding sources for general civic engagement, which keeps us trapped in funding situations tied to specific systems change agendas that--while important--aren’t fully driven by those we serve. Thus, knowing how to pitch to investors and connecting with potential investors through the Solve network allows us to access a new pool of funding and more access to actors who are broadly interested in the intersection of technology and youth/intergenerational civic engagement. This knowledge will also help us simplify our messaging, which we struggle with since the scope of our problem and solution is so big. Because we believe we’ll be ready to scale our solution within a year, it will also be imperative that we learn more complex accounting practices and we currently don’t have deep accounting expertise on our staff or board. 

Product / Service Distribution (e.g. delivery, logistics, expanding client base): Because we have an overrepresentation of neurodivergent thinkers when it comes to service distribution, we have a tendency to make our systems overcomplicated and unwieldy, which is further complicated by the ambition of our solution. Targeted support in this area will enable us to create the streamlined processes needed for scaling quickly and efficiently and creating a process for Activation Hub members to create their own mini hubs while ensuring safety and accountability.

Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media): Public relations is our least developed area due to our capacity constraints and knowledge gaps. Our executive director has some experience with professional marketing and therefore deeply understands the importance of a good marketing and PR strategy. Relatedly, we would take full advantage of opportunities for exposure through media and conferences. 

Technology (e.g. software or hardware, web development/design): Our end goal is to create an application that brings our entire service into one place but we lack the technical expertise. Having access to software licenses is another plus in this area. 

The heart of our innovation lies in the creation of scalable and intersecting communities of learning and action organized by specific topics and issue areas. 

Imagine a questioning Black teen from rural Alabama hitting Google for some answers and discovering our Activation Hub database. After onboarding, she’s in #adp and #queer, our Slack channels for our African Diaspora and LGBTQ Hubs. Within a week, her mind was blown by a joint presentation by the African Diaspora and the Algorithmic Bias Hubs. She had never considered the racism embedded in our technology and reflected on how her education was not preparing her for the real world. Within six months, she is still involved with the African Diaspora and Algorithmic Bias Hubs, a leader with LGBTQ Hub, and also joined the Education Equity, Alabama, and Southern Region Hubs. In a year, they have new pronouns and find themselves in DC for the first time, lobbying for increased funding for STEM education in underfunded schools. They never thought they’d be this passionate about STEM education, nevertheless advocating for it on Capitol Hill. This is the pathway to policy and systems change we want to spark and nurture for thousands, and eventually millions, of youth in every corner of America for every social justice issue. 

We aspire to be a Reddit or Amazon for aspiring activists: search our Activation Hub database for an issue you must change, and you’ll find an existing mini Hub community that will enable you to take action. Such a concept doesn’t already exist because very few funders invest in general civic engagement. Organizations are consequently forced to specialize in issues to keep revenues flowing. For example, in 2019, we shared a dream with one of our partners, Future Coalition, of a general activism academy to properly harness the untapped civic power of youth. We never moved out of the ideation stage because Future Coalition had to prioritize environmental organizing. Today, we’re experiencing a similar pull to health equity organizing. 

But we have never given up building scalable infrastructure to enable grassroots-led systems change on every social justice issue imaginable. We often think about all the people we couldn’t support due to the lack of  targeted resources and community around obscure or unlikely civic issues, such as a former Activation Hub member traumatized by Child Protective Services. Or the conservative youth forced to attend an in-person Youth Activism Project workshop, who was turned off by our “social justice” framing regarding issues, but passionate about physical exercise, prompting our team to reflect on the potential of a Physical Fitness Hub to spark the civic leadership of young male athletes who would not consider themselves activist-leaning. By catalyzing new civic leadership through targeted civic homes for youth are otherwise disengaged civically, our solution’s potential to change the market is immense. It catalyzes broader positive impacts by making it easy for everyday people to drive tri-sector connections and tangibly amplify the ideas and initiatives transforming the root conditions of inequities and oppression.

The 12 issue categories we believe encompass every conceivable social justice issue include: physical and mental health; education; environment; arts, culture, and entertainment; violence and exploitation; immigrant and refugee rights; government and democracy; science and tech; diplomacy and international development; labor, workforce, and entrepreneurship; housing, transit, and infrastructure; and criminal justice reform. 

Our goal for the next year is to have at least 1600 active Activation Hub Members contributing to resource pages across the first four issue hubs (for which we currently have dedicated funding or a strong pathway to funding), eight identity hubs (African diaspora, Latine, AAPI, Indigenous, disabled people, religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ identities) and 10 state hubs. By the end of next year, we seek to publicly launch these 22 resource pages, featuring at least 500 cross-sectoral initiatives and opportunities across all pages, 125 being initiatives led by our Hub Affiliates themselves. We seek to measure individual impact data from our Activation Hub Members reporting increased measurements of our five key indicators compared to prior joining our community: belonging, confidence, access to power (as measured by relationships with community leaders, especially elected officials), civic expertise, and commitment to lifelong civic leadership. 

We will reach our goal by next year by implementing the following the following strategy:

• From our list of 700 registered members, recruit at least 300 in the development of our Activation Hub infrastructure over this summer

• By the end of 2023, the 300 involved over the summer will be able to grow membership to 800 (by recruiting an average of 3 members per person, which is very attainable)

• From a starting point of 800 at the beginning 2024, we will end the year by doubling the number engaged (a strategy that has worked for us in the past when we had less resources); 400 will likely be Hub Volunteers whereas the other 400 would be Affiliates, meaning that we’re counting on each Volunteer to vet 1-2 initiatives and a fraction of the Affiliates to contribute content to their resource page, which feels attainable

Over the next five years, using the same strategy to double year-over-year, we seek to grow our members to over 25,000 and launch pages for all 12 issue hubs, eight identity hubs, and 51 state hubs (61 pages total). By this time, we will have transitioned The Activation Hub from the various modes of technology we use now to a singular app that makes engaging with our solution more user-friendly and convenient, thereby further lessening barriers to meaningful civic engagement and systems change efforts. Reaching this goal will also give us a solid foundation to begin creating a process for helping members launch even more specific hubs, like an Algorithmic Bias Hub, a hub for a specific under-resourced county, or an identity hub specifically for people with cerebral palsy, in a manner that is decentralized and scalable. With the seeds we have planted with various funders and support from MIT Solve, we are confident in our ability to achieve this five-year goal.

As mentioned above, our five key indicators regarding individual impact, for which we take pre- and post- measures, are belonging, confidence, access to power (as measured by contact or relationships with community leaders, particularly elected officials), civic expertise, and commitment to lifelong civic leadership. 

We also track the following indicators to measure progress toward collective and systemic impact:

• Number of youth trained (including demographics such as race, age, gender, and education outcomes)

• Number of Affiliate initiatives supported 

• Number of additional community members organized by trained youth and campaigns supported who may not be registered in the Activation Hub

• The outcome of campaigns supported (such as any tangible policy victories, measurements in changes of public perception, changes in an elected officials’ point of view)

• Prestigious college acceptances and scholarships that members attribute in part to their participation in the Activation Hub 
  

• We also periodically conduct a skills and habits inventory regarding civic skills and actions and we plan on using this data to benchmark against the CIRCLE data regarding youth participation in signing petitions, joining boycotts, planning and attending a protest or march, or volunteering for a political campaign

The Youth Activism Project has a track record of success that shows it can reach its ambitious impact goals. Since our founding in 2004, we have:

• Provided training and mentorship to over 3,000 teens in 42 states to launch at least 20 advocacy campaigns. 

• Youth involved with our past and present programming have organized at least 5,000 additional community members in youth-led campaigns.

• We have seen a 20 percentage point increase in the number of youth who believe they have contributed to positive changes in their community due to YAP training, along with other enduring gains in leadership skills and commitment to civic engagement

• We have supported youth to achieve 41 policy wins at local, state, and national levels on foreign aid, healthy food in schools, gun violence, distance learning, and the Maryland state budget. 

• At least eight youth, all students of color, received full-tuition or full-ride scholarships to top-tier colleges (e.g. Duke, Harvard, Columbia) due to their civic engagement through the Youth Activism Project

Our theory of change posits that young people and everyday citizens are capable of producing systemic change if they:

• have access to community that share their passions and lived experiences (the more specific the focus of the community, the more engaged they will be) 

• leverage that community to engage in a cycle of learning and doing focused on building the five foundational skills of change-making: storytelling (the most effective way to mobilize others into action), research (how to understand the problem and find existing and potential public, private, and civil society solutions that address its root causes), tri-sectoral engagement (improving connections between public, private, and civil society actors, better connecting everyday people with current solutions, and advocating for new solutions if the current ones are inadequate to address the root causes of issues), critical consciousness (being vigilant about documenting social and political inequities in day-to-day life) and coaching (helping others develop these skills)

• create accessible and sustainable resources based on their learnings so that others can replicate their impact for years to come

Furthermore, it’s not only possible to create these conditions online, but it’s also necessary if we seek to massively invest in civic leadership development of everyday people, especially those traditionally excluded from power.  

Our theory of change is validated by research, such as political scientist Lance Bennett’s research that today’s citizens, especially youth, are more drawn to civic engagement rooted in self-actualization rather than earlier civic frameworks prioritizing responsibility and duty. The Activation Hub model encourages “dynamic content sharing” with peers and the resource pages are examples of “reputable, crowdsourced information,” which are key factors for motivating self-actualizing activists.

Research regarding the emerging digital civic engagement (DCE) space pioneered by youth--which comprises any form of online civic engagement, such as political memes, Instagram awareness accounts, and online discussions of civic issues, all of which we integrate into the Activation Hub--shows that DCE is found to be more equitable than traditional civic structures and actually improves incidences of offline civic action. Young people are most engaged in this space when they have options for digital networking, peer-to-peer content sharing, and other factors that promote self-actualized civic identity development, which are all key features of the Activation Hub. Given the “vastly scalable” nature of DCE and the urgent need to repair our democracy, it’s paramount that we invest in interventions, like the Activation Hub, that are focused on sparking and supporting grassroots systems change leaders at scale.

The core technology that powers the Activation Hub is the concept of technology-enabled civic learning communities organized by specific topics. The Youth Activism Project uses use Slack, Zoom, and Notion in integrative ways (i.e. using each tool to connect members to the other tools) to collectively create a virtual space for each individual mini hub: 

• Slack: The Activation Hub uses Slack as its primary mode of asynchronous communication and each mini hub has its own channel, connecting youth and everyday people on lines of shared identity,  geographic area, and systemic issues of interest. 

• Zoom: Each mini hub has regularly scheduled meetings for Hub Volunteers to collaborate on creating accessible and useful resource pages, for Hub Affiliates to strategize on increasing impact regarding their systems change initiatives, and for connecting both types of members to ensure that the latest successful strategies of Hub Affiliates are amplified on their Hub’s resource page. 

• Notion: This will house our one-stop-shop Activation Hub database, organized by the resource pages for each mini hub. In addition to featuring resources for aspiring civic change-makers, like model policies and a database for tri-sector partners and initiatives, it also features calls-to-actions to join each mini hub’s Slack and upcoming Zoom calls, serving as a recruitment mechanism to for aspiring change-makers to both receive deeper support from AND provide deeper support to the Activation Hub’s ongoing operations.

Other key aspects of our technology we would like to highlight include:

• YouTube: The primary way we guide all Activation Hub members through their collective learning and action journeys is through our training video series focused on developing our five foundational skills needed for change-making. The flexibility of having the training series in video form allows members to access on-demand content that can also be easily integrated into opportunities to more deeply engage with the content through conversation with other members through Zoom and Slack  

• Airtable: We use Airtable to manage all of our members, as well as track their individual progress and collective progress through their participation in their chosen mini hubs

• Offline actions: Through all technology tools, we seek to enable offline actions as much as possible. Blending online and offline actions is not only now the default model for civic engagement, it’s also critical from a pedagogical perspective, since the blended education model is emerging as the “predominant teaching model of the future” (North American Council for Online Learning). 

• Focus on narratives and storytelling: We’d like to uplift the practice of storytelling as a traditional and ancestral technology that humans have been using for ages. Neuroscience research overwhelmingly shows that humans are hard-wired for stories and it is for this reason stories are so impactful in mobilizing others into action. We often say that storytelling itself is half of systems change work; it’s why we begin Activation Hub members’ journeys with sharing stories and with one another to form prosocial connections and why it’s the foundational skill we refer to the most as we guide members through their learning and action journeys.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is embedded in the design and implementation of our solution due to the proximate leadership of our staff (described in the question about why our team is best equipped to lead this work) and the overrepresentation of marginalized individuals that are active members in The Activation Hub. 

Core DEI-related components of the learning and action journey we take Activation Hub members on include celebrating both the commonalities and differences of our stories, constantly asking who is not at the table and developing strategies to invite them (for example, we are focusing more efforts to build relationships with organizations working with system-impacted, homeless, and indigenous folks since they are underrepresented in our community currently), and developing critical consciousness to understand the nature of hegemonic culture, how they create inequitable institutions and perpetuate racial injustice and other forms of oppression by design, and how to unlearn harmful behavior because oftentimes marginalized people themselves are the most ardent upholders of hegemonic culture. 

Our Identity Hubs is perhaps our most crucial structure to promote DEI, as it brings together members with shared identities of race, ability, religion, gender, and sexuality to celebrate the inherent power of these identities, practicing intentional healing from the generational and systemic trauma inflicted on the minds and bodies of marginalized communities, uplift the ways in which everyday people are organizing for better outcomes for these communities, and consequently inspire greater numbers of marginalized people to join the fight for systemic change. In connecting with the other Hubs, Identity Hubs play a critical role in ensuring intersectionality.

Finally, here is our DEIB statement for our organization: We strive to create an organizational culture that celebrates all backgrounds and identities and that encourages everyone in our community -- staff, constituency, volunteers, and supporters -- to revel in their authentic selves. We continuously and reflexively seek to dismantle the enduring legacies of colonialism, exploitation, and White supremacy -- sexism, racism, anti-Blackness, classism, ableism, and queerphobia -- within ourselves and the systems that we create in place of the untenable status quo. Furthermore, we center the leadership of youth and staff from these communities most harmed by these legacies, which we believe is paramount to dismantling interlocking systems of oppression and heralding the liberation for all people once and for all.

We consider our key customers and beneficiaries to be in three categories (in order of priority): youth Activation Hub members, adult Activation Hub members, and tri-sectoral (business, government, and nonprofit/civil society) partners. 

Through the Activation Hub, we serve all these customer segments by providing a youth- and citizen-driven approach to improving connections between all sectors of society, namely by connecting everyday people with the public, private, and nonprofit institutions that serve them, uplifting existing efforts by these institutions to improve outcomes for everyday individuals, and amplifying new policies and systems that can further improve systemic conditions for everyday people. 

As a demographic that’s increasingly interested in civic engagement but often without the means to get started, Youth Activation Hub members find value in this service that’s targeted to their needs and passions and positions them as designers. The vast majority of Activation Hub registrations are from youth who find us, rather than us finding them, indicating the demand and value we provide for them. Even though our services are created with youth in mind, we have found that our service also provides value to adults who join The Activation Hub. Creating services with youth and marginalized people in mind ultimately creates more accessible services for everyone else and adults, who often are not the skills we teach through our learning and action journey, find great value in our service. Finally, the business, government, and nonprofit/civil society partners we cultivate through both Youth Activism Project staff and Activation Hub member’s efforts value our service, especially those who want to increase citizen engagement in their work, because we are amplifying their existing work with new audiences and allowing them to serve more people. The most savvy of these tri-sectoral partners also recognize the value of our focus on youth from a long-term perspective of keeping citizens engaged with their work for life.

In 2023, YAP has the following revenue streams:

• Institutional Giving (grants and corporate giving): 63.69%
• Individual Donations: 3.32%
• Earned Revenue: 33%

YAP plans to become financially sustainable by expanding these revenue streams to ensure that our funding remains diversified. Once we have established sustainable infrastructure for all three revenue streams, we will pursue other revenue-generating strategies, such as investment income and endowing the organization.

YAP has observed steady growth in our grants and corporate giving stream as we continue to refine our understanding of the institutional giving landscape. We have strong pitches for funders focused on organizing, advocacy, and civic engagement, including certain education funders. We are also tailoring our pitches for more traditional education funders and workforce development funders, as these areas overlap significantly with our programming and have significantly more philanthropic funding than the civic engagement space.

We raise earned revenue through a B2B service subsidization embedded model. In terms of earned revenue, our focus is developing on B2B infrastructure. We have a strong track record of partnerships with advocacy organizations looking to get their youth involved in their campaigns and schools (both private and public) and youth development organizations looking to get their youth and students more involved in civic engagement. With a large application pending with the Montgomery County Public School system in Maryland, we are just beginning to explore partnerships with school districts. Developing a successful partnership model with school districts would lead to a significant revenue boost, as the number of superintendents across the country concerned about developing engaged citizens rose by 24 points — from 50% to 74% — between 2017 and 2018 (Gallup). 

Finally, we seek to deepen our investment in individual grassroots and major giving. Although we have not been able to focus on this area due to lack of connections and capacity constraints, our individual giving campaigns are successful; for example, we have twice achieved top 10 status in fundraising competitions with 400+ nonprofits and we have over 300 past and present donors. Our board is currently focused on bringing our individual giving levels back to its highest level of $37,326. Our donor strategy—an integrated model because it doubles as volunteer recruitment—has been vetted by the former executive director of a million dollar organization that primarily raises funds from grassroots donors. Activation Hub members and alumni will be another strong base of customers through a pay-it-forward model, based on the strengths of their testimonials and youth interviews we did two years ago indicating 100% willingness to pay for our solution (80% enthusiastically so). 

In 2018, our executive director received $30,000 in funding to transition our organization from a volunteer nonprofit to a staffed entity. Below is our revenue breakdown since then, which indicates positive revenue growth since 2020 and that we are on the track for financial sustainability:

2018- $38,486.00

2019 - $29,100.00

2020 - $105,077.30

2021 - $223,398.16

2022 - $247,750.75

2023 (revenue thus far) - $217,902.54

Overall, we have raised $861,714.75 in the past five years, with a healthy mix across various streams: $176,055.05 in earned revenue from other nonprofits (20.43% of total revenue), $586,601.21 in institutional giving (foundation grants and corporate giving, 68.07% of total revenue), and $99,058.49 in donations from individuals (11.50%). From 2021 onward, we have seen consistent year-over-year growth in our institutional giving revenue and earned revenue. Our top five funding sources include:

• Allstate Foundation (grant): $100,000

• Center for Science in the Public Interest (grant): $95,700

• Mosaic Movement Infrastructure Fund (grant): $75,000

• American Heart Association (earned revenue): $55,000

• Social Innovation and Change Initiative (grant): $30,000

All of the above grants were secured from highly competitive application processes where we had no existing connections, indicating how powerfully YAP’s work speaks for itself. Furthermore, we have consistently high satisfaction ratings from our earned revenue clients and are confident in our ability to continue growing this stream. In fact, we have several allies at the American Heart Association who are actively supporting us to receive additional funding from internal and external sources due to the power of our collaboration and their increasing belief in the necessity of youth voices driving their systems change agendas. Furthermore, it's critical to note how our success with health-related fundraising indicates our ability to draw new funders to our work, since the vast majority of our collaborators in the general youth civic engagement space aren’t tapped into these sources of funding. 

If we finish the year at the current rate we are going, we are projected to raise $653,707.62, which is nearly 3 times more than our revenue in 2022 and indicates the potential start of exponential growth. With this funding, we will be able to maintain our current team and hire a full-time role focused exclusively on marketing and fundraising; we are confident that this role will enable us to build the infrastructure needed to make individual giving a sustainable and growing revenue stream, further our grant writing and earned revenue success, and continue our path towards exponential and sustainable growth.