Twenty years ago, I published Taking Back the Vote: Getting American Youth Involved in Our Democracy. The book grew out of a personal passion: Once my oldest child was able to cast a ballot, I became fascinated with the potential and obstacles facing our youngest voters.

I delved into the lengthy and messy midcentury struggle to pass the 26th Amendment, extending the franchise to 18-year-olds. The first bill to lower the voting age was introduced in Congress during World War II—why should young people be old enough to be drafted but not old enough to vote? It had to be introduced 10 more times before it finally was enacted, in 1971.

The bill’s proponents expected the hard-won victory to bring a surge in youth civic participation. Historically, when disenfranchised groups such as women and Black people got the right to vote, participation levels increased. But the 55.4% turnout in the 1972 presidential race remains the highest ever achieved for voters age 18 to 29.

Why?

In my book, I identified several causes and short-term solutions, including ending gerrymandering districts (which disincentivizes voting), strengthening civic education, and making registering and voting processes easier. But I noted that enduring solutions would require voting to become a habit—a civic ritual, embedded in the American ethos. Every young person’s first vote should be a communal celebration, I wrote. If we memorialize proms and graduations, why not this rite of civic passage?

We’ve seen cataclysmic changes to the nation’s politics and civic behavior in the years since. Campaigns have moved online, and social media and misinformation have transformed the voting ecosystem. The youth electorate is far more diverse, and the nation far more polarized.

Still, the central message—now borne out by decades’ more research, analysis, and experience—has not changed. Accessibility and peer encouragement drive younger Americans to vote. A galvanizing candidate (Barack Obama, especially in 2008) or a hot-button issue (abortion in 2022) might help. But it is having the opportunity to vote that seems most impactful—and that varies greatly state by state, thanks to the U.S.’s highly decentralized election system. To get more young people to vote and make it a habit, we must dismantle barriers and disincentives.

Positive trends over the last two decades show the way.

The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, known as CIRCLE, is a nonpartisan, independent research organization based at Tufts University. CIRCLE has compiled youth turnout rates for midterm and presidential election years since 2014. When the group looked at midterm data, all but one of the 40 states tracked had higher turnout in 2022 than in 2014, though the path wasn’t all positive. In 2014, only 13% of 18- to 29-year-old voters went to the polls; turnout climbed to 28.2% in 2018, then slipped to 23% in 2022.

The uptick over the two presidential campaigns CIRCLE followed was more dramatic: 39% in 2016, 50% in 2020. But there were discrepancies among states. The lowest 2016 youth turnout rate, in Texas, was 28%; the highest, in Minnesota, was 57%. The gap between lowest (32% in South Dakota) and highest (67% in New Jersey) only widened in 2020.

Why? CIRCLE’s analyses suggest that election laws may play a central role. Consider: First-time voters must register, while established voters don’t have to. If potential voters move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction—and many young people are very mobile—they must register again.

States with easier, more inviting registration policies often have higher youth voter turnout. CIRCLE found that turnout over the years studied was 9% higher in counties that allow young people to preregister to vote before they turn 18. In 2020, youth voter registration was 10% higher in states with online voter registration.

Conversely, in many states with onerous registration requirements, young people simply don’t vote. Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma do not have same-day, automatic, or pre-registration, and their youth voting rates in the 2022 midterm were abysmal—13% in Tennessee, and not much higher in the other states.

Voting rules vary dramatically across America. Many states loosened rules during the COVID pandemic allowing voting at home, and easier absentee balloting. Some never turned back. Eight states automatically sent mail-in ballots to all registered voters in 2022, and many of these boasted high youth turnout as a result. Data from the National Vote at Home Institute indicates that states with the most generous policies in 2022 had youth voter turnout at or above the national average. States with the most restrictive policies fell far below that average.

Another trend expressly targets younger voters—the growing number of states which require voter identification but won’t accept student ID cards. Permits to carry concealed weapons are often acceptable. Proof of attendance, even at a public university, is not.

This particularly rankles, because college campuses are easy and effective targets for mobilization. In a 2006 study, Elizabeth Bennion of Indiana University and David Nickerson of Temple University found that classroom-based registration drives increased registration by 6%, and voting by 2.6%. Face-to-face presentations worked. Remote outreach such as email, the researchers found, did not.

“The most effective way to mobilize new voters is to catch their attention and to personalize the invitation,” Bennion and colleague Melissa Michelson of Menlo College wrote last year, asserting that voting “is strongly shaped by one’s social environment.”

One might think that more and better civic education would enhance that social environment—I certainly thought so when I wrote my book—but research since then suggests that the results are mixed at best. Knowledge does not necessarily promote action.

Even the most creative and intensive voter mobilization efforts do not confront the underlying structural reasons why so many Americans, especially so many younger Americans, find no purchase in voting. Elections have become increasingly non-competitive in the last 20 years, often decided by a sliver of primary voters who represent the extremes and alienate the rest of us. The Electoral College sweepstakes anoints a few states as essential, and the others as throwaways. Even the fact that Election Day is not a federal holiday suppresses turnout. (Here’s an easy fix: Combine it with Veterans Day. What better way to celebrate freedom?)

The upswing of youth voting over the last few electoral cycles is a hopeful sign. Continuing the trend demands persistence, passion, and patience. The strategies to encourage more young people to vote are sensible, well-documented, and well-known. But 20 years on, I remain haunted: Do we, as a nation, genuinely want to welcome new voters?

The post Will Young Americans Finally Rock the Vote? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For years, I’ve told people that I started keeping a journal at 13. But when I go back and look, what do I find? I was an elderly 15, already starting high school. That’s the thing about old journals—they have the power to keep your memory honest.

Fifteen? You always hear about artistic types who started being creative when they were 6. But I’ve always been a late bloomer (“Late Boomer,” I joked in my journal), and had only discovered my intellect in the seventh grade, when I had an amazing teacher, Mr. Marinello, whose instruction hit just right. A door crashed open in my brain: Hello, I can really think, and it’s kind of fun, but also rather terrifying!

What to do with all these insights that made my friends, my family, my whole life look strange? Not to mention the legions of insecurities they gave rise to. I was a nerdy, pretentious, emotionally underdeveloped teenager in a very small town. When I finally got around to keeping a journal, I was about to explode. I did it to save my sanity.

I still have that first journal, a dark-green spiral notebook full of rounded, slightly back-slanted printing. Here is part of the inaugural entry:

We have all been competing for the “tiredest of the week” award … [one friend] in particular has been applying herself. I should caution immediately that I am unsuccessfully attempting to exorcise a whopping jealousy of her – please disregard all sarcastic remarks.

This combination of seeing beneath the surface of things and articulating self-knowledge became addictive. Of course, it may have also kept me in my shell longer. But it furnished the shell. I have developed a cozy inner life with comfortable couches, interesting nooks, good views, great art on the walls—and closets stuffed with insecurities that I obsessively let out for air, which keeps them from blowing the whole place to smithereens.

Throughout my adolescence, I clung to my journal. It’s interesting but a little disheartening to read those early notebooks now. Maybe it’s good that we don’t always remember just how raw, how dire, things seem when we’re young. On the other hand, it’s not a bad idea to be in contact with that chubby, self-conscious teenager. “The child is the father of the man,” said Wordsworth. Like it or not, she’s my mother.

My journal followed me to France as a high school exchange student, faithfully lapping up my struggles with a strange language, culture, and family, and a curriculum that expected me to read Kant and Marx (in French!) and graded me for physical ability in P.E. I’ve always remembered proudly that my journal transitioned into French about four months in. But on rereading it, I discovered that this happened directly after a huge blowout with my French family. It came out that they had been mistaking my introversion (always squirreled away in my room, writing in my journal) for cold rudeness. They yelled at me: “You’re so selfish! You never try to be part of the family!” I cried and cried. Jolted into French, my journal described the shell-shocked, and then surprising, aftermath: After tip-toeing around each other for a while, we started developing into the family we had been trying for, and finally joyfully became. Could I have gotten up that steep slope to a real relationship with that family, that culture, without processing it in those pages? Growth is painful; my journal was a midwife.

By college so many things were happening that my journal became a chronicle, a bildungsroman, a satire—or was it a farce? It described in cringing detail a twee tea party I threw. It recorded my first bout with depression: a long, dark sophomore year. It documented the intense friendship that opened me up emotionally, the despair and elation of trying to be good at music, my surprise at liking calculus, my excitement as literature opened up to me—along with my stumbling inability to attempt romantic relationships without drowning in humiliation.

Later, my journal saw me through a flirtation with yuppie-dom and a period of adventurous travel. It helped me achieve that graduate school balance between intellectual exhilaration and disillusionment with academic politics. It got me through the bumpy start of my career as well as the revelation that depression runs in my family and is something that can be dealt with. It took in the richness that suffused my days when I finally met the love of my life.

Gradually, my entries got more spotty. I had work to do; it became harder to take my little life so seriously. But then something happened: I had to teach a three-week intensive class, and I got the idea to make it about keeping a journal. I thought it would be interesting to meet others of the journal-keeping kind and reflect together (in our journals, of course) on what the practice means. And oh my God, it was. We read famous journals together: Samuel Pepys, hoovering up the juicy 17th-century details and delivering a London so rank, energetic, and stuffed with life that you start to recognize how strange your own times are; Anne Frank, brilliant and incisive, a born satirist dropped into an abyss of evil; Edward Abbey, so sexist and egotistical you’d slap him if he didn’t write so gorgeously about nature; May Sarton, heroic voyager of the inner cosmos. What they all have in common is the secret super sauce of journal-keeping: honesty.

We tried writing like them. We did all kinds of creative writing exercises, the wackier the better. We wrote in the woods, in graveyards, on city corners, at the top of towers, in hidden greenhouses. We plumbed our memories, our obsessions, our dreams.  We wrote collaborative poems. Our journals grew rich and fecund. And when we shared our work (only when we wanted to), we discovered a paradox: It is extremely fun to write privately in community.

As the 21st century unfolded, I uncovered another great truth: A journal is not a blog. On a six-month fellowship in Sri Lanka, I thought I might try blogging—to keep the friends and family abreast of my adventures. But I quickly discovered that I did not have the psychic wherewithal to publish a cheerful, or perhaps meaningful and incisive, account of learning my way in a strange culture. Rather, I needed to write privately about the bewilderment and terror that lurks beneath the surface when you skate along in a new culture, looking fine from the outside but not knowing how anything works, or what anybody means, or who the hell you even are in this context. I needed to record that afternoon, one month in, when I stood paralyzed on the steps of a university building for three hours waiting for a ride that never came, staring at my cellphone and trying to contain the seep of tears, while around me flowed groups of people who knew exactly who they were and why they were there. And once I, a 50-year-old professional woman, had gone through that, and written about it—I fell in love with Sri Lanka. My whole life changed, and I opened myself to its richness and complexity. This is what my journal is for: to help me pay attention as life flows by, so that I can live more deeply, grow.

I have kept my journal unfaithfully. I come, I go. I leave it, for weeks or even months. Then I pummel it with insights, gags, dreams, memories, and boring minutiae. I paste in letters, postcards, and doodles. I copy passages I like. I fool around. And when I need it, it takes my mewls of insecurity and dark depressions in its stride. My journal doesn’t care; it opens its pages and welcomes me back, every time. That’s the beauty of a journal. It’s better than a dog. OK, not really, it’s different than a dog, but it is an unwavering friend: it asks only for what is really going on, accepts all, and never dies.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> A Lifetime Spent Journaling appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California kids, do you follow the news about the culture wars over the boards that oversee your schools?

If you do, you’ll see these wars portrayed as political contests between groups that want to take education in different directions. You’ll see reports about loud conflicts between progressives and right-wingers, and fights between parents’ groups and teachers’ unions.

But you won’t hear much about the role of students in these debates. Because there isn’t one. School boards are meetings of adult politicians; kids are rarely even present (much less heard) in those loud and angry rooms.

You might think not having to listen to grownups yelling is a good thing. It’s not. There’s an old adage in politics: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

That’s cynical, but so are your parents and teachers. For all their performative battles over your schools, the adults in your lives share a unity of purpose in the education wars.

They all want to trample on your already very limited rights as children. And they want to prevent you from having control over your own education.

They just attack from different flanks.

On the right, conservative parents and their political allies seek to take away your right to read what you want. Groups with Orwellian names—like Moms for Liberty—are pursuing bans on books and curricula. (Note to you kids: “Orwellian” refers to George Orwell, the sort of satirical author that grown-ups, right and left, are trying to keep out of your hands.)

Now, you may not care about books, but their censorship influences more than just what you read. Banning books limits what your teachers can teach, and which of your questions they can answer. The right is particularly interested in limiting what teachers can tell you about the most hot-button topics, like race and sex. Maybe you think parents are just trying to protect you, but this sort of paternalism always leads to the erosion of more rights.

The right is also demanding that teachers violate your privacy and make official reports, including to your parents, if you dare deviate from old-fashioned gender norms. I know, it’s crazy. Figuring out your identity is hard enough, in this world of gossipy classmates and social media, without your teachers being required to inform on you. Why can’t these uptight adults live their own lives, and stop inserting themselves into yours?

Now, the political left, to its credit, is fighting back against these intrusions on your privacy. But they have their own ways of trying to limit your freedoms and your educational horizons.

It was groups on the left—especially teachers’ unions and Democratic politicians—who violated your right to an education by closing the schools for more than a year during the pandemic. Those same state and local leaders haven’t done enough to help you recover the learning you lost in the pandemic. Some even maintain that learning loss is a myth, even though most of you are testing below grade level and many of you are chronically absent from school.

And inside your schools, the left is determined to keep you on their prescribed path by limiting your ability to study what you want. Progressive politicians defend outdated traditional school curricula, while adding new requirements that match their political preferences—like labor rights or ethnic studies. Meanwhile, schools rarely provide the technology courses that many of you want. Unbelievably, just 40 percent of high schools in California, home of Silicon Valley, even offer computer science.

Maybe you think this is a budget problem. It isn’t. Spending on schools is way up, even as the number of students declines. It’s just that the new money ends up going to adults—teachers and administrators—and their salaries.

If you still think your teachers, school administrators, and elected officials respect you, let me tell you a story that will disabuse you of that notion.

During the pandemic, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified Schools faced litigation charging that he was violating students’ right to a good education. He responded by saying that students only had the right to a free education. It didn’t have to be good or even useful.

Perhaps even more shockingly, California’s leaders and schools have embraced the superintendent’s position as their own. In fact, the state’s political and educational establishment is opposing a ballot initiative that would give you the right to a “high-quality” education.

Don’t believe it? Here is language from this measure they oppose: “The state and its school districts shall provide all public school students with high-quality public schools that equip them with the tools necessary to participate fully in our economy, our society, and our democracy.”

The establishment says that you, the students, have to accept whatever dismal education, and whatever meager rights, they choose to give you. In arguing against the initiative, they have claimed that a requirement of “high-quality” education will produce a barrage of lawsuits and demands from you.

For your sake, I sure hope they are right.

Now is the time for students to go on the offensive. If adults chastise or punish you for being combative, you can laugh in their faces—and remind them how loud and combative they are being in their own educational wars.

You could try a one-day-a-week student strike, like the climate activist Greta Thunberg, and spend that day trying to find lawyers to sue your school districts. (Lawsuits, and their costs, are what really move school administrators.)

An even better move would be to demand democracy from the Democrats who rule California. Students know more about how education works than most adults. Why shouldn’t you have the right, regardless of age, to vote and run in school board elections?

Indeed, school boards have been so captured—by teachers’ unions and parent groups, and all their conflicts—that there’s a strong case for turning school boards entirely over to students, who could check adult interests.

This may sound radical, but it isn’t. In other countries, teens have parliaments and councils, some with real powers. And even our state has a number of “democratic” schools—like Diablo Valley in Concord, and California Free School in Altadena—where students set schedules and curricula, and vote on how the campus is run.

Also, please remember that grown-ups like to say that you kids need to learn civics, even though no one provides much in the way of civics classes. Turning school boards and school governance over to kids would be the greatest civics lesson possible.

And it’d be far more educational than the current culture wars in our school boards.

The post Let the Kids Rule School Boards appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My best friend’s 13-year-old son recently asked me to friend him on the social media app BeReal.

She had decided to let him download BeReal partially because it lets users post just once per day and has very limited chat features, and only under the condition that they had to be friends. But he was free to choose what and when to post, what to comment, and whom to befriend (including, to my amusement, me). My friend was treating it like a learner’s-permit version of Instagram or Facebook. Her son could drive his social media car, but only with an adult present in the front seat.

Like many parents and caregivers, her aim was to develop a way for her son to safely learn about and prepare for our increasingly virtually connected world, while still respecting his right to speech and self-expression in an age-appropriate manner. This vision of adolescence as a driver’s permit to adult-sized rights regularly emerges in my work as a historian of law and childhood. Throughout histories of childhood and youth, my profession is examining the boundaries of young people’s rights in various contexts, from medical consent to due process rights that have contemporary political implications.

But in some states, the law may soon criminalize these very actions.

In the wake of remote learning’s increased screen time and the rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation, predominately conservative lawmakers have been raising a new round of moral panic over young people’s mental health and their exposure to adult content. Their push for a radical new vision of internet access is rooted in political fears about youth and social media, and threatens decades of free speech protections.

There is a long history of moral panics around youth and the popular technology of their eras. The Victorians worried that bicycles enabled teens and unmarried adults to avoid chaperones, and that they contributed to a growing popularity of bloomers over dresses or skirts. For Cold War parents, comic books symbolized the rise of the violent and crazed juvenile delinquent and sparked a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation. These panics were less a reaction to reality, but rather, they represented cyclical anxieties of generational segregation and control over young people.

Foundational child protection law is already in place in the United States. In 1998, the Federal Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibited the collection of online data from online users under the age of 12. In 2013, it was amended to expand its reach. But now, state lawmakers want legislation that would criminalize internet access for millions of Americans.

For adults, this legislation has focused on limiting access to pornography. But more changes in process are targeting young people’s social media usage. In Texas, state representative Jared Patterson filed H.B. No. 896 last December, which would have banned any person under the age of 18 from using social media apps, and allowed parents to request the removal of their children’s social media accounts. Though the bill failed to pass, undeterred conservatives in Utah pushed forward a similar bill, quickly passed and signed into law this March, which prohibits minors from having any social media accounts. It also has created a nearly unenforceable “internet curfew.”

While the Utah and Texas cases represent the most extreme measures in the new efforts to control youth internet access, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers has also introduced the more seemingly palatable Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, a revamped version of the previously rejected Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which aims to censor material considered potentially “harmful.” Yet, as law and technology expert Mike Masnick has written, with no clear definition of “harmful content,” state attorney generals can define the term as it suits them, and use it to target websites they want blocked for ideological reasons. Last year, over 90 LGBTQ+ and human rights groups signed a letter in protest of KOSA.

It’s true that there is content on the internet that poses dangers to minors. The media has featured heartbreaking stories of cyberbullying and online predators. But it’s because of those dangers that nuance in lawmaking is so critical. Blanket bans replicate the very dangers they are designed to prevent: Strict parental controls create a ring of invisibility around domestic abuse, while increasing data collection from all Americans, child or adult.

Likewise, while studies have pointed to social media’s impact on mental health, banning it won’t solve the youth mental health crisis, as the legislation suggests. Social media is just one part of American childhood today, alongside rampant gun violence, anti-LGBTQ+ fascism, and endemic economic inequality.

And then there’s the First Amendment. By seeking to purge children from the internet, conservative lawmakers are denying young people the right to expression, speech, and creativity. Stripping them of their right to speak out on platforms, often about issues that impact them directly, runs counter to decades of precedent for young people.

Young people had their earliest First Amendment victory in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), when siblings Mary Beth and John Tinker, who had been expelled for their silent protest of the Vietnam War, argued that their rights to free speech did not end at the entrance of their public school. The Supreme Court agreed. Subsequent decisions, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988) and Morse v. Frederick (2007), upheld Tinker’s basic ruling, while carving out caveats in favor of school administrators. But until 2021, the Supreme Court had yet to deal with a case regarding youth free speech and the internet.

Then came the memorably named “Cursing Cheerleader” case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. After a student recorded and uploaded a Snapchat story featuring a caption cursing and criticizing her high school, school administrators suspended her from the junior varsity cheerleading team. The case asked the Court if Tinker applied to a student’s social media post. With an 8-1 decision, the Court found that it did. (Justice Clarence Thomas, the sole dissent, argued for a chipping away of Tinker in favor of schools and parents.)

When Utah’s latest social media ban is inevitably challenged in court, the state will need to argue against these Supreme Court rulings that uphold youth First Amendment protections. But it takes time for a case to make its way through the courts. Until then, this law and others like it will deny young people their right to be online, while creating a much more dangerous digital landscape for the very children they allege to protect.

Though the internet isn’t perfect, it can be a space of creativity and intellectual engagement for youth. Ranging from budding craftspeople learning to operate a business, to youth activists working on climate change and LGBTQ rights, young people wield their digital literacy for positive efforts, often using social media in the process. Banning their social media use will merely push them to further hide their online activity, and to speak less freely about the issues they face in digital spaces. It criminalizes their attempts to learn to live in a virtual world and ignores the necessity of the internet for modern life.

It’s better to arm the young people in our lives with digital literacy and open dialogue. Take a page from my friend’s parenting book, give them space to learn, post silly pictures, and teach you a thing or two. And, while we’re at it, encourage them to get outside and ride a bike—no matter the legwear they choose.

The post Let the Kids “BeReal” on Social Media appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Perhaps by empowering young people to do the job themselves.

That, at least, is what happening in the state’s most innovative small town, Gonzales (pop. 8600), in the Salinas Valley.

Starting in early 2020, middle school and high school students—members of the Gonzales Youth Council, a parallel city council for the young—have taken the lead in documenting the damage the pandemic was doing to their peers. But they didn’t stop there. Using their data, they created a new mental health strategy for the city and its schools, and secured resources to enact it.

In the process, Gonzales teens offered a model of do-it-yourself pandemic response with such potential that a report describing it was recently published in a peer-reviewed academic journal for school psychologists.

It’s no surprise that this work was done in Gonzales, a working-class marvel of self-governance in California’s lettuce lands. It’s a center of agriculture, food processing, and manufacturing, with a population that is 90 percent Latino and quite young for today’s Golden State (with one third of residents under age 18).

Over the past generation, the town has prioritized public participation and empowerment of its young people in community problem-solving—a strategy dubbed “The Gonzales Way”. In the process, Gonzales has produced eye-popping solutions to challenges from economic development to energy independence. Gonzales has been especially strong on health issues—winning national awards as it found ingenious ways to get clinics and medical professionals to serve its people, and vaccinating more than 99 percent of its eligible population for COVID.

The Gonzales Youth Council at work. Photo by Michelle Slade. Courtesy of Gonzales Youth Commissioners & Council.

Gonzales’ Youth Council—a student-selected body of ninth to 12^th graders first established in 2015—has been a big player in this work because it has real power. The body has written local laws on underage drinking, and led a police-community relations effort. Its members sit in on job interviews at the local schools.

Back in fall 2019, youth council commissioners began talking about focusing next on mental health. When the pandemic hit, they accelerated their plans.

The council wanted to start with an extensive survey of Gonzales youth. Unable to work in person, they needed to do the survey online—and to make that happen, they secured funding (from the Trinidad & Lupe Gomez Family Fund, a homegrown philanthropy), and sought advice from Gonzales’ own CoLab, a collaboration between the city and area colleges to develop solutions to community problems.  At a CoLab networking event, the young commissioners met Cal State Monterey Bay child psychology professor Jennifer Lovell.

“They were on the path to creating their own survey already,” says Lovell, whose research team then joined forces with the council. Under the partnership, university researchers helped the youth leaders to design the survey, gather anonymous responses, and analyze the quantitative and qualitative data. The youth council had final say on the survey’s contents and owned all the data.

The council conducted its first mental health survey in late spring 2020, focused on the question, “How well are youth doing during the COVID-19 crisis?” The survey included 52 questions (multiple choice, rating based, and open answer) on subjects from loneliness and screen time to academic coping.

The results revealed considerable mental stress among Gonzales kids. It wasn’t just that two-thirds said they were falling behind academically as they struggled with school closings and unreliable online lessons. Some 60 percent of the middle and high school students with younger siblings surveyed reported that they were having to help brothers and sisters complete their schoolwork online. And more than half of high school-age respondents gave answers that indicated they were suffering from anxiety, depression, or both. Gonzales’ young people also reported that they needed more information about how to handle these and other mental health problems.

The Youth Council swiftly developed plans to provide that information and assistance. The council circulated its own mental health check-ins via Instagram. The council also shared hotline numbers, inspirational messages, coping tips, and self-care reminders with students, and sought training for young people in how to respond when peers are having mental health issues.

In fall 2020, the youth council met with school, city, and county officials to advocate for more resources to assist Gonzales youth with their mental health burdens. As a result, these local governments resolved to reduce the stigma around mental illness and to make it easier for students to report mental health challenges.

The meetings also produced a new financial commitment. In January 2021, the city and school district agreed to share the cost of hiring an additional licensed clinical social worker to support student mental health.

People are paying attention to the Gonzales work—as an example of what scholars call youth-led participatory action research. Three youth council commissioners worked with Lovell’s team to write the peer-reviewed study in the National Association of School Psychologists’ quarterly journal, School Psychology Review.

But the youth council isn’t finished with this work, or satisfied the mental health of Gonzales. Earlier this year, the young people conducted a follow-up survey to test the impact of the new mental health resources, and asked students what else they need.

The good news: The 2022 survey revealed decreases in the high rates of mental stress, anxiety, and depression reported in 2020. But students reported continuing struggles balancing the burdens of homework, family, and managing their own health, and said they wanted better access to mental health services.

“We’ve had a bit of progress, mental health is being talked about more at school, but we need to keep talking about reducing the stigmas of mental health,” youth council commissioner Sherlyn Flores-Magadan, a Gonzales High School senior, told me. “And we have to provide more information to parents—that’s one of the keys for helping our teens.”

In Gonzales, there is also talk of new peer-to-peer projects—especially around tutoring, pedestrian safety, and community gardens. The logic is straightforward: Who better to help kids than kids themselves?

The post It Takes a Village to Tackle the Teen Mental Health Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My depression was triggered by The Lion King. Watching Scar throw Simba’s father to his death, I started crying and couldn’t stop. I was 11, terrified something would happen to my mom—my lifeline, and the parent who had removed us from an abusive situation six years earlier. That night, it felt like a dark room opened inside my chest, filled with feelings I couldn’t name.

The room stayed with me—sometimes growing larger, containing hopelessness and instances of self-harm, and sometimes emptying, only to fill up again with a new sense of despair. Ashamed of this endless loop, I struggled with how to integrate mental illness into my personal narrative.

Those feelings were the catalyst for my new children’s novel, Zia Erases the World, the story of an 11-year-old girl facing her first depression. Zia doesn’t know how to talk about her room of shadows, which she calls the Shadoom, and keeps her secret locked inside her. Upon discovering a magical dictionary that can erase whole concepts from existence, Zia erases fear, pain, and sadness. After the world unravels as a result, she has to make it right.

When I speak at schools around the country, I share two stories: Zia’s, and my own. I acknowledge that today’s students face realities I never imagined, from accelerating climate change to active shooter drills. In 2019 more than 1 in 3 high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a 40 percent increase since 2009. That same year, 21 percent of American children reported having had a major depressive episode at some point.

In December 2021, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a landmark advisory on the youth mental health crisis—which he called “alarming” before the pandemic and “devastating” after a year and a half of quarantines and isolation.

But if tweens and teens were given the chance to shape their own narratives, what would they say?

I decided to find out by speaking with them directly. Most of the young people I interviewed were strangers to me. But after more than a dozen interviews, I got to know Diemond, Camryn, Iona, Jaime, Wyatt, and Rayan, all of whom asked me to use their first names for this piece. “Depression feels like a bad dream,” said Diemond, a 19-year-old from New York. “The same dream over and over, and you can’t wake up.”

Camryn, an 18-year-old from Illinois, described depression as “a lot more than just feeling sad. It’s those ups and downs. Feeling empty and not having motivation to get out of bed, brush my hair, brush my teeth.”

Iona spoke to me outside their therapist’s office, two days before their 11th birthday. For them, the depression began as numbness. “When my dog got sick, I felt absolutely nothing. I couldn’t grieve or cry. That was tough. My dog passed away and I didn’t feel anything. It was just like if a snail died.”

“I got worse,” Iona went on. “I started feeling again, and I wanted to hurt myself.” These desires “weren’t scary to me at the time—I just thought they were normal and this happened to everybody. Now that I’m better and taking medication, I realize those weren’t normal thoughts.”

As I conducted more interviews, I noticed that the young people who identified as female or non-binary spoke more about depression. Those who identified as male spoke more about anxiety. My sample size was admittedly small—according to the CDC, boys and girls report similar levels of anxiety. But the statistics do point to higher rates of depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide among girls.

Jaime, a fifth grader from Los Angeles, told me by phone how he tries to stave off his anxiety attacks by focusing on something else. “But sometimes it feels like you’re delaying the feeling, and then it builds up like water boiling. You get that low heat and it starts to simmer, and then you notice it and think, ‘I’ve gotta turn down the heat.’ But at some point, you’ve just gotta throw in the pasta. You gotta let it boil. And then let it pass. Just try not to burn down the house.”

Despite the subject matter, these weren’t depressing conversations. One mom shared that her son came out of his room “looking a foot taller.” He told her, “It felt so good to talk about everything.”

That was the one resounding common thread in all the interviews: Talking helps. Young people don’t want to be forced to talk, but having even one person they feel safe opening up to makes a huge difference, whether it’s a teacher, therapist, parent, or friend.

For 13-year-old Wyatt, the anxiety and depression began in third grade. “My uncle, my grandma, my cousin, and my cat all died, which was pretty hard for me,” he said. Eventually, he tried counseling. It took a couple of counselors to find the right fit, but the second one gave Wyatt tools that helped him move through the grief. “In my house we had this little corner with soft blankets and squishy things. Me and my mom set it up. It felt like you were getting hugged by a whole bunch of penguins. We called it the ‘Cozy Corner.’ I could go lie down and burrow in for a couple minutes or a couple hours, close my eyes and relax.”

Unsurprisingly, the pandemic came up often, and many acknowledged a pervasive sense of loss. “I’m 11,” Jaime said. “Covid was 25 percent of my life. When things finally started to get better, my mom took me to Trader Joe’s, and I just walked around remembering half the products in the store. ‘Look at the Fig Newtons! Look at the mango popsicles!’ I was having the time of my life. Only later did I get sad. I realized what a big part of my childhood I missed.”

Rayan, a high school senior from Syracuse, used the time to be more creative. “I created my first ever documentary during the pandemic,” she told me. “It covered my daily routine, coming to the United States, the fears of being an outsider. I have so many things people hate. I’m Black, I’m Muslim, I’m female.”

When I asked Rayan about mental health, she said she doesn’t like to talk about her emotions. But watching her quiet, haunting documentary, it’s abundantly clear she has found other means of self-expression. “When I write, it’s kind of like I’m talking to my emotions,” she said. “If nobody is listening, at least my notebook will listen to me.”

As a writer, I believe in the power of artistic expression to heal, comfort, and connect. Shaping our own narratives can help us find light amid the shadows: something the tweens and teens I spoke to did with stunning clarity and courage.

As a child, I was fortunate to have adults in my life I could open up to. After The Lion King, I told my mom what I was feeling, and she immediately found a mental health professional to offer support. Even so, it took many years before I could find the right words for my experience. But as I speak more publicly about my depression in the wake of Zia Erases the World, it has put me on a path parallel to Zia’s. Inspired by the honesty of the children and young adults I’ve met, I’m trying to embrace mental illness as a part of my narrative. And by naming my most private pain, my darkest secret, I hope to help young people feel the same way they’ve made me feel: less alone.

At my last school visit, a fifth grader asked: “When did your Shadoom go away?”

The answer, much like depression itself, is complicated. It did go away, and it didn’t.

But what I told her—what I tell everyone I speak to—is that you are always adding tools to aid in your self-care. Therapy. Medication. Friends. Art. Music. Books. If you can name your own dark room, the people in your life can rise up to meet you. Mental health struggles become a means of connection, not isolation. And instead of erasing your story, you tell it as a way to survive.

The post How the Kids Are Getting to All Right appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What if California actually decided to put the needs of its poor kids first? What would that look like?

Here’s one answer: it might look like Gonzales, a small city of 9,000 people—many of them farmworkers—along Highway 101 in the Salinas Valley.

The people of Gonzales don’t have educational credentials (less than 10 percent of adults over 25 have a college degree) or wealth (the median income is less than $17,000 annually). But they do have one incredible resource: youth. Thirty-six percent of the population is under the age of 18, and about 1,000 of the 9,000 residents are under age five. More than 85 percent of the Gonzales Unified School District qualifies for free and reduced lunch.

Very much against the odds, Gonzales has relentlessly assembled a rich suite of supports and services that touch the lives of every young person in town, from pre-school through high school. Today Gonzales has so many different programs for youth—service programs, recreational programs, after-school programs, summer programs, job programs—that it is now the rare California city spending more on youth than on its fire department.

As Gov. Gavin Newsom seeks to deliver on his campaign promise of a new system to support children from the womb through the college dorm room, Gonzales should serve as inspiration—and a reminder that there are no good excuses for not doing more for California’s kids.

Gonzales residents are poor, but they still voted for a half-cent sales tax to fund enhanced services, like youth services. And while leaders in the small city don’t have much power, that didn’t stop them from creatively sharing that power—and granting Gonzales children the authority to help make decisions about how money is spent. The kids even shape policy through a separate youth version of the city council.

Gonzales, for all its challenges, has real strengths. It has developed an industrial park of food processors and agriculture-related businesses that produce steady tax revenue. And, despite being a city of migrant workers, it has stable and thoughtful local leadership. City manager René Mendez, who also coaches the high school’s tennis team, notes that when two new city council members were sworn in recently, one was the former police chief and the other was the wife of a former councilmember who decided to hire him 16 years ago.

Early in his tenure, Mendes asked the city council members to make drawings of what was most important to them in Gonzales. They all drew pictures of parks, playgrounds, and other places for kids. That exercise triggered a shift in the council’s focus to children. Also guiding the shift were recommendations from Youth for Community, a panel of young people convened with help from city police and the Monterey County Office of Education. Ultimately, the city and the school district created a partnership called Gonzales Youth 21st Century Success Initiative.

The city started by developing year-round sports offerings and an aquatics program. Later, the city added full-day, five day-a-week summer camps that working parents can afford ($50 a week) and that keep kids physically active and engaged with community. The city now provides this same full-day coverage during spring break, winter break, and any other weekday when schools are closed.

“Our attitude is: if we don’t have the money, we’re going to find the money,” says Sara Papineau-Brandt, the parks and recreation chief, who has led the ramp-up of programs.

In 2016, the city joined with the school district to launch a robust after-school program, with a focus on homework assistance. It now serves 226 kids in elementary and middle school.

Still, Mendez and Papineau-Brandt note that most child care in this city where people work long hours in the fields is provided by grandmothers, or other family and friends, who have little training in early childhood development. So the city applied for and won a United Way grant to start a program called the Friends, Families & Neighbors Playgroup, in which caregivers learn how to handle challenges with the children they care for. The city is also working on initiatives that would create a city pre-school program that could also help the city’s’ informal caregivers become licensed.

When test scores showed the town’s high school students underperformed in math, the city funded a STEM program for middle and high school students called Wings of Knowledge, which uses math and science to tackle real-world technology challenges. (One project involved building, placing, and collecting data from digital soil monitoring devices that help farmers manage water usage).

As much as possible, Gonzales employs the city’s own children as part-time workers or interns in its programs. Students as young as 9th graders are asked to interview and fill out applications—giving them experience. The city also gives part-time work to college students from Gonzales to keep them connected to the town.

How does a town like Gonzales, where per capita income is half that of the state, manage to do better than many wealthier communities? Mendez, the city manager, says Gonzales has more money for kids because it limits spending on other things. The city doesn’t offer retiree health benefits, which have been a big burden for other cities, and it keeps its police force small, which provides significant savings since police are the biggest part of municipal budgets. Gonzales can do this because crime is low—property crime is 40 percent below state averages, and the robbery rate is 60 percent.

Is there some kind of virtuous circle between youth programs and low crime rates? Gonzales officials say they can’t be certain whether their emphasis on youth has led to low crime. But it sure doesn’t hurt.

Gonzales isn’t immune from the problems of California cities. There is a lack of housing both for existing residents and for teachers and other professionals being recruited there. In response, the city is annexing land and pushing for new housing development, with developers paying their impact fees by providing school facilities, day-care centers and other services for young people. In Gonzales, many wonder whether new state investments, especially in pre-school and early childhood, will prioritize smaller cities that often struggle to compete for grants.

Here’s hoping that the state, in doing more for children, also embraces the democratic spirit of Gonzales. In the after-school program, middle schoolers meet with staff weekly to decide on activities. And when the city had to put in a new playground structure at its tot lot, staffers were required to give a presentation on different options to kindergarten and transitional kindergarten students. The kids then had a binding vote to determine which structure would be purchased. “No one over the age of 5 got to vote on that,” says Papineau-Brandt.

I got a taste of youth democracy recently in the city council chambers, where the Gonzales Youth Council meets two Wednesdays a month. In 2014, the city and school district jointly appointed two youth commissioners, who are 18 or younger and attend city council and school board meetings; those commissioners lobbied to create the Youth Council, which consists of middle and high school students who go through an application process to serve.

“We were trying all this stuff for kids, and for some of it, kids weren’t showing up at first,” says Mendez. “The fundamental idea for the youth council was to bring the kids in so we could see what we were missing.”

Youth Council members set their own agenda and take on various tasks, from organizing the city holiday celebration to researching local cannabis regulations to hosting workshops for young people (one recent one was about college applications). Youth council members even handled the sensitive job of surveying the community about police department conduct; the idea was that immigrant residents, who are wary of federal immigration authorities, would be more likely to speak with the young people.

The Youth Council can also make policy. In 2017, the Council held hearings and drafted a new and comprehensive ordinance on underage drinking that replaced a heavy fine on parents who served alcohol to minors with a requirement that those parents take an educational course. This ordinance was unanimously adopted by the city council.

At the meeting I attended, the Youth Council discussed ongoing efforts to reduce extracurricular fees charged by the school district, and to increase transportation for kids who attend Gonzales schools but live in small communities outside the city limits. Youth commissioner Cindy Aguilar, a high school senior, explained their effort to create a Youth Innovation Center, with computer labs, a maker space, and a music studio. Sales-tax dollars are helping the project, but the council will need to raise money as well.

“We got to meet again with the architect,” said Aguilar. “We said we wanted it to smell like chocolate chip cookies.”

Don’t be surprised if the Gonzales kids get what they want. With representation comes power. And if California is serious about putting kids first, the state should form its own youth legislature.

The post The Small California Farm Town That Puts Kids First appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I wish California children were doing as well as California children’s hospitals.

Even as the Golden State has maintained the nation’s highest child poverty rate, underfunded its schools, and made housing prohibitively expensive for families, California has developed a system of children’s hospitals that seems to occupy a parallel universe in which kids’ needs actually come first.

California has 13 children’s hospitals—eight private not-for-profits (in San Diego, Orange, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Loma Linda, Oakland, Palo Alto, and Madera) and five within University of California medical centers. Collectively, they receive more than two million visits from injured, disabled, and sick children annually.

In these children’s hospitals, you can see California’s ability to be kind, egalitarian, and generous to a fault—and also how our budget politics and piecemeal policymaking frustrate our aspirations for children.

Children’s hospitals offer a rare place where California’s rich and poor mix; the surgeon who operated on TV comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s son also performs surgery on kids on Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid. These hospitals treat everyone; nearly two-thirds of their patients are eligible for Medi-Cal, compared to about one-third of patients in community hospitals. And virtually everyone is covered, since all California children, even undocumented kids, are insured because of Obamacare and state law.

Children’s hospitals thrive on this mandate: While they lose money on Medi-Cal patients, they make up for it by being aggressive with commercial insurers who cover a minority of their patients, through other government programs, and through powerful fundraising operations for private donations.

And, like other interest groups, children’s hospitals have won taxpayer dollars through the ballot. This November, California voters are all but certain to approve Prop 4, the third general obligation bond to support children’s hospitals in the past 14 years. Through this and other support, these hospitals have become juggernauts, with sprawling medical centers, top pediatric research and training operations, suburban satellites, and well-paid executives.

California’s children’s hospitals have come a long way from their mostly humble origins. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles started in 1902 as a small Chinatown building with 14 patients and one doctor who made house calls on horseback. UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland was founded as a hospital for babies in 1912. Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego and the predecessor hospital of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford both began their lives as convalescent facilities for children crippled by chronic illnesses like polio.

The greater scale of such facilities today reflects changes in the state’s health care and demographics. Even though the number of children in California has stagnated, demand has grown for specialized care for pediatrics, and visits to the hospitals have soared. Technological advances have created new avenues for care, especially for children with rare or difficult-to-treat diseases.

A McKinsey study of children’s hospitals found greater scale—which involves building regional pediatric networks with outlying clinics and partnerships with other institutions—is essential if such institutions are to survive and grow in an era of market consolidation and attempts to cut costs. Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford has been particularly aggressive in expanding its network, and children’s hospitals have supported federal legislation that would allow them to expand their networks across state lines.

Because the populations of California and America are rapidly aging, most traditional hospitals are handling older, Medicare patients. Since Medicare reimburses at higher rates than Medicaid (especially in California, which has some of the country’s lowest reimbursement rates), it’s inefficient for hospitals to accommodate the special needs of children patients, who are overwhelmingly on Medicaid.

The result: California kids are increasingly referred to these specialized children’s hospitals. As a Southern California father of three, I’ve been redirected to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles by my pediatrician, by local after-hours clinics, and by the Huntington Hospital emergency room for my kids’ minor maladies—a broken finger, a small piece of a plastic toy stuck up a nose, a painless bit of swelling in the groin. A generation ago, my two siblings and I never saw the inside of a children’s hospital.

These hospitals are not merely comfortable; they are among the nicest buildings you’ll ever encounter, period. I’ve found the children’s hospitals in both L.A. and Orange counties to be carefully designed for juvenile happiness. My only problem with one visit to a Children’s Hospital Los Angeles outpatient center in Arcadia was tearing my sons away from the most robust entertainment system they had ever encountered.

“The hospital is somewhere you feel safe and have support,” says Max Page, a 13-year-old actor (known best for a Super Bowl car commercial in which he played Darth Vader), who has spent his life in and out of children’s hospitals in Southern California for heart procedures. His mother, Jennifer, told me that Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is reliably “colorful, loud, and fun,” with good food and a farmers market in the hospital. Such additional comfort services are funded by private donations, hospitals officials note.

These comforts also reflect a growing marketplace: As children’s hospitals grow, parents now have choices and can shop among them; competition also comes from lower-cost retail clinics and telehealth services. That’s healthy. So is new pressure for children’s hospitals to produce more data that allows for better evaluation of their quality.

While the hospitals are nice, they aren’t heavens. They face challenges —in the slow growth of the child population, the pressure on Medicaid funding by congressional Republicans (avoid mentioning the name of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who wants to turn Medicaid into block grants, inside any California children’s hospital), and health insurers’ efforts to control costs via narrower provider networks and the tiering of health insurance plans. And as children’s hospitals grow in importance, they will likely face more scrutiny of their operations, their charitable care, and their results in the future.

You probably won’t hear much of this context in the run-up to November voting on Prop 4, the $1.5 billion bond for children’s hospitals. But the measure should spur debate. Should we help fund the children’s hospitals’ capital needs through general obligation bonds? Those bonds must be paid back from the general fund—the repayment for $1.5 billion in bonds is estimated at $2.9 billion over 35 years—which cuts into funds that would go to other programs serving children.

I, for one, would prefer a dedicated stream of tax revenues to avoid the debt service costs, or perhaps even a payment from rainy day fund revenues. But securing either might be politically impossible. And relying on our volatile state budget is dicey. In fact, the children’s hospitals turned to bond measures after a general fund program for hospital infrastructure was eliminated during the 1990s.

And to the children’s hospitals’ credit, spending on previous bonds has been responsible. The new Prop 4 bonds is small, especially compared to November’s $8.9 billion Prop 3 bond for water, which comes on top of another $4 billion water bond passed by voters in June.

So yes, one could ask whether children’s hospitals offer children too much. But the better question is why other programs for California children offer so little compared to our children’s hospitals.

The post Why Are California’s Children’s Hospitals So Much Nicer Than Other Services for Kids? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This should be the summer when the population of California finally surpasses 40 million.

We should celebrate by reflecting on just how small we are.

Of course, we won’t. California, like an insecure male lover, is always bragging about how big it is. And so reaching the 40 million threshold—there is no red-letter date, though, by state figures, it’s likely to happen in late summer—will occasion another round of boasting about our size, not merely in population but in economic output and cultural impact. And this moment is likely to produce new predictions—offered either with pride or fear—about how soon we’ll get to 50 million or even 100 million people.

Such projections of massive growth may be fun, but they will likely prove to be exaggerated. To the contrary, this is the moment to consider the very real possibility that California’s rapid population growth is over—and that shrinkage may be in our future.

The very factors that have produced population declines in other places are now strong trends in California. Our birth rate has fallen to a record low—even lower than during the depths of the Great Depression. Also, we’re now three decades into a serious out-migration of California residents, with the Golden State losing about one million more people per decade than it takes in from the rest of the United States.

International immigration won’t save us—it’s at near-historic lows and is likely to fall further as the federal government continues its systematic harassment and mass deportation of immigrants. And the Trump administration’s destructive trade war is already hurting our globally oriented economy, eliminating jobs that draw and keep people here.

Worse still, our state’s own policy mistakes—underfunding schools and child care; failing to build adequate housing or infrastructure; letting runaway retirement costs for public employees undermine public services—all discourage family creation and add to the high cost of living that drives people out of California.

Which may be by design. The state’s ascendant environmental groups see population control as crucial to reducing pollution and fighting climate change. Indeed, such policies are self-reinforcing, creating a negative population spiral.

As the number of children declines and young people leave California, the state is aging rapidly. San Francisco now has the lowest proportion of children (13 percent) of any major U.S. city. Aging populations tend to be less supportive of the very things that boost population: immigration and taxes to pay for child development. And, economically, aging populations consume less and innovate less (most new things are invented by the young), making their economies smaller and reducing the number of jobs.

Unfortunately, population also could suffer via disasters that no longer seem so unlikely—from nuclear war to huge firestorms fueled by climate change.

If you’re sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405, you may be reading this skeptically, wondering, “Why am I stuck behind all these cars if the population growth is so low?”

My answer is, first, you should put down your phone while you’re driving—it’s not safe, and California can’t afford to lose you. Second, you should consider the numbers: California’s population growth is at record lows—less than 0.8 percent annually—and falling. During the heyday of immigration in the 1980s, annual population growth was 2.5 percent a year.

Indeed, with many other states growing faster than the Golden State, in 2022 California could lose a seat in the House of Representatives for the first time. The likelihood of such a loss increases if the Trump Administration succeeds in politicizing the census and undercounting California’s racial and ethnic minorities.

California would hardly be alone if its population started to decline. Illinois and Pennsylvania have seen their populations drop in some recent years. And the most recent population report from the United Nations says that 51 countries are expected to see population decreases between now and 2050, including European countries that inspire our state’s social policies, like Germany. In Asia, Japan’s population already is in decline; now at 127 million, its government has declared a goal of limiting losses so that the total doesn’t fall below 100 million. Even China, once a feared “population bomb,” and long a source of immigrants to California, is expected to see a 2.5 percent decline in its population by 2050.

Despite the warning signs, the prospect of population loss hasn’t penetrated the California mind. Instead, we remain devoted to the great California pastime of overestimating our own population growth. One big offender, Gov. Jerry Brown, talks about reaching 50 million as a fait accompli that could threaten the environment, urging Californians “to find a more elegant way of relating to material things.”

But, out of sight, number crunchers at the state’s think tanks and government bureaus have been ratcheting down California’s population estimates. As recently as the mid-1990s, the state and federal governments’ official predictions showed California reaching 50 million people by 2020, a year when our real population likely will be fewer than 41 million.

And if we never get much beyond 40 million, will it be a mortal wound to our pride? After all, the United States hasn’t had that low a population since 1872, which was when the newspaper man Horace Greeley, famous for the advice “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country,” ran for president, lost, and promptly dropped dead.

Today’s 40-million-person California, for all its delusions of grandeur, has less than one-eighth the population of the United States, less than one-third the population of Mexico, and not even 1/35th the population of China. If California were a country, we would rank just 35th. Ukraine, Uganda, Argentina, Colombia, Tanzania, and Myanmar all have millions more people than us. Our most populous city, Los Angeles, ranks just 71st on the planet.

This California, of 40 million, faces a choice. Either accept that, instead of the colossus of our boastful imaginings, we’re a small place that’s likely to become smaller—at least compared to a world that is growing faster than we are. Or think more seriously about how to attract more people here from other states and countries, and better nurture and retain the young people we have here now.

If we’re as big as we think we are, this is no time to think small.

The post Could California’s Population Actually Shrink? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I didn’t fear much about the transition. I felt confident that I could find a job in the education world, make new friends, and build a new personal community. My biggest fear: Could I find a place to dance?

Dance has always been my health and wellness strategy. Without regular dance classes, I would go insane. And in online searches before I arrived in New Orleans, I couldn’t find any regular classes in the genres I had studied and loved: hip hop, jazz, modern, and contemporary.

When I arrived, I discovered that adult dance classes were a patchwork—offered in different locations across the city, often inconsistently, and with little information online. But I also found, after eight years of living in tiny New York City apartments, that the living room of my new home felt as big as a dance studio.

I grabbed some mirror pieces from an upcycling center, found an old stereo system at a local thrift store, and … voila! In a matter of days, on a $75 budget, my living room became a dance space. I started teaching one beginner hip-hop class a week to some new friends. My roommate was a great cook. For a $5 donation, we offered dance class and dinner to everyone that walked in the door.

During that time, I got a gig substitute teaching dance at a local after-school program. I started a daily dance party and talent show in my classroom. The energy was infectious. Teachers from all over the building started popping in. I told them about my adult dance classes. They started coming. And they invited their friends. And their friends invited their friends.

Local dancers started showing up to see what on earth this white chick from New York was doing with a dance studio in her living room. We hung out in my kitchen for hours after class, talking about the landscape of dance in New Orleans. They shared. I listened. We dreamed.

The Dancing Grounds studio in New Orleans. Courtesy of Dancing Grounds.

One visionary choreographer, Jessica Donley, and I immediately connected. She had been dreaming of an organization called “Dancing Grounds,” with an image of a footprint as the logo. She was passionate about organizing the local dance community and creating work that represented Louisiana culture. I was passionate about making adult dance classes accessible to everyone. We were both passionate about bringing the joys of dance to kids and providing a space where they could be treated as young artists and innovators. So, we joined forces and started a nonprofit organization.

A hip hop and salsa dancer, Randall Rosenberg, found his way to the space. Two modern dancers from New York, Brieze Levy and Marion Spencer, discovered us too. They became our volunteer marketing, fundraising, and studio-management team. We met Monica Kelly, a visionary creator looking for a platform to gather female visual artists. She turned the kitchen into an art gallery and invited her community. We threw small events that grew into big parties. The deck in my backyard became a stage. We hosted a wide and diverse community of artists, bound together by a common love of dance.

By 2014, our growth was accelerating. We converted an old house into a two-studio facility on the commercial St. Claude Avenue corridor. We created a dance home for kids on Saturdays and during summers. We started applying for grants. We found individual donors. We got paid for our work. We forged partnerships with schools. We became a hub for dancers, a place for fitness lovers, a space for honest conversations.

We created a culture that’s often not found in dance classrooms, one that encourages all people to dance and express themselves, regardless of age, ability level, gender, race, income, and the barriers that typically divide us. We took the vast network of relationships we’d built, combined it with the magic of our dream and some seriously hard work, and forged a reality that has grown to serve over 5,000 students, artists, and audience members over the past five years.

That’s the story people love to hear: An American entrepreneur finds success based on hard work, generous people, and happy accidents! But there’s an important part of that story that’s left out: my privilege. It includes my upper-middle class two-parent Jewish household from Philadelphia; my expensive liberal arts education at Wesleyan University and New York University; and, my 10 previous years of employment in the nonprofit sector. I had the financial security to work part-time while getting the organization off the ground, the training to write persuasive grant proposals, and a network of hundreds of people that would donate to our crowdfunding campaigns.

This story is not new. We see it across the nonprofit arts sector. Organizational leaders do not proportionately reflect the communities they serve. As a multiracial organization with white leadership, we set out to do the difficult work of self-examination.

That started with asking some tough questions about my leadership: Is it my place to do this work? Am I truly sharing leadership with others in the organization? Am I ready to have conversations about my whiteness without being defensive or fragile? I sought out mentors who could help me with these questions. I joined a working group of anti-racist white folks. I internalized the ways that I, along with Dancing Grounds, benefitted from white supremacy.

Students from the Dancing Grounds studio perform as a troupe. Courtesy of Dancing Grounds.

We made sure that, as we grew, our leadership reflected the community we serve at all levels of the organization. We required that all staff and board members take the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism workshop. Now, we make discussions about race and equity a daily practice.

We host youth programs like Dance for Social Change that center the voices of the youth we serve and reflect their lived experiences. We reject the elevation of Western European dance styles above other dance forms.

We operate from an abundance mentality. We believe that the more resources we share, the more there will be for our entire community. We actively support black-owned dance companies and local businesses. And we encourage the hundreds of adult students that come through our space every week to support other organizations working towards racial and economic equity.

We call on our artistic practice. We use the power of dance and physical embodiment to see each other as fully human, build relationships across diverse communities, and create environments that center healing, joy, and love. Through all of this work, we strive to become a truly equitable organization. We will never be perfect, but I think we’re on the right path.

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