It’s become a huge family and we’ve been super collaborative in terms of being able to fundraise and just create this whole project from the ground up. We started with a mind mapping experience and that came all the way from a community garden to a green space and seeing it develop from last year has been an amazing experience.
The Democracy Project
Funded by the Charles Engelhard Foundation
Teen-led Civic Participation
What is the Democracy Project?
The Democracy Project is a teen-led, non-partisan initiative supported by local libraries, community partners, and Humanities Montana. This program gives teens the resources to meet community needs while learning their role in an evolving democracy. Through direct civic engagement, teens work for six months on projects they feel are vital to their community, ending with a public showcase.
Teens build skills like:
Year Four Program Locations:
Open to people 13-19 years old
For the 2024-25 project year, the Democracy Project welcomes 7 sites in the full program and 6 sites in the soft launch option. The soft launch option is for libraries who wish to build a teen audience before joining the full program. This year, the Democracy Project short film premiered. Created to support sites in gathering teen groups, explaining the program to parents, partners, and funders, and generally building excitement about participating, the film is available on the Democracy Project webpage. Participating librarians traveled to Providence, RI to present alongside Humanities Montana program staff at the National Humanities Conference. At the conference, the Democracy Project was awarded a prestigious Schwartz Prize for outstanding public humanities programming from the Federation of State Humanities Councils. As the Montana biennial legislature is now in session, Democracy Project teens have been focused on voter registration, understanding the ballot, and following what their representatives are doing in Helena.
Current and Recent Projects
What Teens are saying:
I think our project will help the community by having a sanctuary that’s safe for people to go when they don’t feel like they have one. It’ll be a fun space to hang out with your friends and it’ll make our community look nicer.
We were able to introduce a bill to the legislature and create a website about mental health and spread this information, and skill sets, and vocabulary surrounding mental health for the teens in our state and that is a very pressing, pertinent, and important issue for us all.
I got involved in Democracy Project is because I wanted to make a difference in my community and that led me to actually being interested in what’s happening at the state level in the state legislature. That’s the reason why I launched a campaign to become a representative.
The Democracy Project kind of just opened our eyes that we could make a change if we wanted to, instead of just waiting around for the next person to do it. We just take the initiative to do it ourselves.