Political shifts in education policy can have immediate and long-lasting consequences for all generations, particularly young people. Amid federal, financial, and ideological attacks on public education by the Trump administration, education leaders must make sure youth are at the table when decisions are made. One way to do this is through youth-led participatory action research, or YPAR, which positions young people as leaders in scientific research so they can inform practice and policy.

I’m leading EdTrust’s YPAR initiative and actively building our capacity to center young people’s voices and expertise to improve their own well-being and communities. By creating a YPAR framework, we can transform spaces so that youth can be heard and invited to weigh in on politics. This framework will help other youth-serving organizations — especially those in the nonprofit sector — uplift the lived experiences, needs, and wisdom of young people using an intergenerational approach. This is incredibly timely, as youth consistently experience high rates of mental health and are concerned about social divisiveness. Many educators, practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and advocates like me are passionate adults working to reimagine a holistic and sustainable education system, and YPAR is a powerful strategy we can use to better support students learning to advocate and participate in civic life.

By investing in YPAR, EdTrust will expand its collective efforts to share power across diverse age groups and redesign education policies with the creativity and recommendations of young people. As an organization, we plan to hold up a mirror to ourselves and come up with new ways to think about student engagement in policy and advocacy. By using an YPAR framework, EdTrust acknowledges the structural, institutional, societal, and even mental shifts that need to happen for us to view youth as equal partners and decision-makers. We will work in collaboration with schools, communities, and universities to develop actionable research that allows students from all walks of life to thrive through equitable policies and practices. The YPAR approach has been gaining traction in education; witness the recent arts-based YPAR project uplifting the resiliency of Puerto Rican college students in the wake of President Trump’s neoliberal and anti-immigrant rhetoric and recent climate disasters that disproportionately affected children in underserved communities.

With roots tracing back to Central and South America in the 1970s, YPAR is both a set of principles that centers youth voice and a research process in which young people and adults authentically engage on issues affecting their lives. This approach stands in stark contrast to the more traditional methods of research that center adults as sole experts in investigations and knowledge construction.

Young people are an essential asset to education reform, yet their opinions are often left out of civic spaces. This is not due to a lack of interest or expertise on their part. Youths are eager to have more input on what and how they learn and more ways to connect what they’re learning to real-world experiences. Young people understand school systems and what is required to improve them. They want more opportunities to identify and pursue their own goals with support from adults, and giving them increased leadership opportunities can lead to beneficial policy changes and enhance positive social, emotional, and academic development.

Without those opportunities, young people and adults alike may miss out on that kind of cross-generational collaboration: “Engaging in YPAR has taught me that young people are the future of the world, and that if you cannot build a bridge with the future, all systems fail,” said Jahyonna, a college student in Philadelphia who has participated in YPAR since high school.

YPAR projects are common in partnerships between schools, communities, and universities. Some noteworthy examples of YPAR projects include the following:

• The Justice-oriented Youth Education Lab at Drexel University recently partnered with local college students, high school youths, and older adult alumni from the community to preserve the history of West Philadelphia High School at a time when the community is experiencing erasure due to ongoing gentrification in urban areas.
• Undergraduate students and adolescents from local community youth organizations gathered to develop an action research project using phone interviews and a collection of photographs to advocate for justice-impacted individuals.
• At the University of Virginia’s Youth-Nex research center, multigenerational research teams leverage youth participatory approaches to introduce students to YPAR and advocate for change.
• University of Puerto Rico researchers conducted an arts-based YPAR project uplifting the resiliency of Puerto Rican college students in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

Unfortunately, this type of research and advocacy is less common at nonprofit organizations that are doing policy advocacy.

However, nonprofit policy and advocacy organizations in the education space are uniquely positioned to engage young people as co-researchers, enabling them to lead change in their schools and communities through YPAR. This approach can be used to highlight youth voices in their advocacy areas and is especially useful for amplifying the voices of students from various identities, including those with LGBTQIA2S+ identities, learning disabilities, from families with mixed citizenship status, and from low-income backgrounds.

Doing this work will not be easy. It requires changing adult mindsets, recognizing barriers to access, and adopting innovative approaches to dismantling these inequities. Advocates for youth voice must acknowledge the need for nonprofits to critique and reform their own institutional practices that create challenges for the equitable and sustainable engagement of young people. As an evidence-based strategy to reduce inequities, YPAR also requires organizations to directly interrogate external and internal practices that may be impeding youth participation in political spaces.

Though difficult, YPAR is essential. A common theme in civil rights advocacy, particularly within the disability community, is “nothing about us without us.” I’m excited to involve that “us” — students — in more of EdTrust’s work of dismantling racial and economic barriers in the education system.

Karena Escalante, Ph.D., is the Spencer Fellow for Youth Participatory Action Research