The kids are all right: Gen Z, civics, and technology. - Incite at Columbia University

I met Arpan Somani, who leads strategic partnership at the Obama Foundation and is active across several civics-focused boards and special initiatives in New York and beyond, a few years back at a conference. I thought his nose ring was cool and we got to talking about his work at the Obama Foundation and my work at IDEO. He was thinking through difficult issues, like how to incorporate technology, and engaging youth in the service of building a more resilient civic ecosystem. We stayed in touch, and after seeing the swath of subpar content about Gen Z and community in which no one actually spoke to Gen Z in their musings on the future of the generation, I begged him to let me interview him because, if anyone knew the nuances of the issue, it would be him.

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AS: Over the last year I've been speaking with a group called the Library Newsroom Project, which is happening in Sunset Park in Brooklyn as a pilot program with the Brooklyn Library. A journalist, Terry Parris Jr., started this project, looking to come up with a new model for what community journalism looks like. He asked, "How do we enable people in this neighborhood to go out and ask questions about their neighborhood?" 

You can just go out and email your city council person, or your city’s equivalent, to say, “I have a question about this thing." That is your right. And yet, we don't often feel like we have the authority or that we're going to be taken seriously. But all of a sudden you have this Library Newsroom Project. Through a series of workshops, library-goers investigated their relationship with their own communities and with each other, and built confidence in civic inquiry, eventually publishing a print newspaper that was written by and for local community members. So now you have community members of all ages deciding what questions are important to them and going out and doing the work to find the answers themselves. And they're using the Library Newsroom Project as their cover. 

Read more at IDEO.