WE ARE NO LONGER ACCEPTING GRANT APPLICATIONS FOR THIS PROGRAM

While the Make It Your Own Awards grants were awarded in May 2008, the projects live on. Read more about the Top 100 projects, or see what made the MIYO Awards novel. This site has been archived to serve as a resource for anyone wishing to create a similar project in their community.

Project Summary

The Youth Policy Action Center (an online community of 30,000 young people) is coming together to identify and develop tools to allow people to use Facebook to contact their elected officials -- thus transforming a social-networking site into a critical component of our democracy!

About me

I have been working to improve the lives of young people all my life -- since I was a young person myself! I have worked for non-profits both in the United States and overseas, ranging from research to advocacy. The last several years have marked a shift for me -- a shift from attempting to make positive change by focusing on developing organizations, to a citizen-centered approach of attempting to empower citizens to be the drivers of change themselves. I worked with a number of highly committed individuals to develop the Youth Policy Action Center, which empowers citizens by helping them contact their elected officials. I was pleased to see this rapidly grow into a vibrant community of 30,000 vocal citizens working in ways big and small to drive change in their communities, state and nation. The key members of the team will be drawn from those 30,000 people. Most of them will be ordinary citizens who you will not have heard of before, but will include people who have expertise in youth organizing, online organizing, online communities, and techology.