More and more, young people want to participate in civic spaces—including spaces that are online. Allen suggests that when people choose to take action to strengthen their communities, they should consider ten important questions. She and her colleagues write: “Whether you’re creating your first Facebook page to support a cause you care about, or seeking to engage your friends, associates, and even strangers in a new platform aimed to achieve civic ends, these ten questions will help frame your decisions. Use them to shape your strategy and to check whether you’re doing everything in your power to achieve maximum impact.” I myself answered these questions and it helped me out a bunch.
These ten questions are called the Youth Participatory Politics (or YPP) Framework.
Why does it matter to me?
How much [about myself] should I share?
How do I make it about more than myself?
Where do we start?
How can we make it easy and engaging?
How do [we] get wisdom from crowds?
How do [we] handle the downside of crowds?
Does raising voices count as [civic and] political action?
How do we get from voice to change?
How can we find allies?
One way to help you answer these questions is by observing how others have answered. You might want to consider how these could strengthen democracy. Choose one or more of the following readings from Chapter 12: Choosing to Participate from Holocaust and Human Behavior, you can observe and analyse how these individuals featured in each reading might have answered Allen’s ten questions: