America at 250:  This is one of a trio of stories published in Summer 2026 about three of the Foundation’s civic learning grantees. These organizations are finding new ways to work toward a common goal: preparing young people to be informed, engaged citizens in our democracy. Our other two stories focus on Common Sense Media’s digital literacy curriculum, and iCivics’ Civic Star Challenge.

The Commonwealth Club World Affairs (CCWA) was founded in San Francisco in 1903, and is the oldest and largest public forum in the country. It is also one of the Koret Foundation’s longest standing community grantees. We have supported the Club’s activities for over forty years, and the Foundation is proud to help launch its newest program, Creating Citizens. 

Creating Citizens is CCWA’s civics education initiative. Youth-centric activities include school field trips, intergenerational dialogues, and a Meet the Speaker program that gives students and their teachers a chance to interact with civic leaders, lawmakers, and public figures from around the world. In 2025, Creating Citizens held its first Youth Agenda Conference. The daylong event was spearheaded by the program’s Youth Advisory Committee, with all facets of the program being planned, implemented, and led by youth, for their peers.

We recently had an opportunity to ask Lauren Silver, who developed and leads Creating Citizens, questions about bringing high school students and teachers into the compelling conversations for which CCWA is widely renowned.

Koret Foundation: How do you represent the importance of civic life to students and educators?

Lauren Silver: Broadly speaking, we see civic life as the activities we engage in to ensure a fair, equitable, and just society for everyone in a community. It is both aspirational and transactional, involving a set of shared democratic values and a commitment to seeing and thinking beyond one’s own self-interest—to living and acting for the common good. This comes with the opportunity and the obligation for every person to engage actively in that governance, even at the most local level, and to make room for others to do so as well. Civic health, for individuals and for society as a whole, relies on healthy civil dialogue.

In conversations, what aspects of civic life do you tend to highlight?

That it is a lifelong pursuit, something that should be integrated into the fabric of our everyday lives from a very young age. We point out that civic life begins before we are old enough to vote: any time a child is encouraged to consider alternate points of view or to participate in making decisions that affect a group, they are building the skills to engage in the kind of collective problem solving that forms the core of civic life. Staying informed and welcoming opportunities to meet, talk to, and learn from people we disagree with—rather than fearing, denigrating, or dismissing them—is key to civic life. Crucially, civic life is not partisan: it is a commitment that we all share, no matter what our political or ideological views.

What are the practical applications of civics education in a school setting? 

We work hard to clarify that civics is as much a disposition as a subject area, and that it is relevant across the curriculum and in all facets of student life, in and out of school. A few years ago, we hosted a program called ‘Civics Across the Curriculum: Educating for Democracy,’ in which educators discussed how they infused a democratic sensibility into their classrooms, using disciplines as diverse as math, literature, and gender studies to teach students how to investigate and reason about real-world civic issues. By providing a safe space in which students can practice their civil dialogue skills, Creating Citizens supports not only the students themselves, but their teachers as well.

These are challenging times for teachers, and administrators, and school librarians. How does Creating Citizens support the teaching of civics?

We believe it is our responsibility as educators to ensure that students learn how to think, reason, and communicate beyond the simplistic, often divisive messages that are so prevalent in today’s popular culture. In this fractious political climate, many teachers are afraid to risk the personal and professional consequences of allowing their students to discuss controversial civic issues. We often reference Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy’s explanation that, rather than being partisan or political in nature, civic life is, quite simply, an expression of the question, ‘How should we live together?’ By modeling respect, empathy, and goodwill, and by allowing students to experience these with each other, we plant seeds of political friendship.

 How does your program help students understand—and express—what civic life encompasses, and can encompass, for them?

Young people are often much more awake to the challenges and realities of the world in which we live than we realize. They care about injustice and have strong opinions about the changes they want to see. Many are already very civically active, but relatively few feel they have been empowered to create positive change in their communities. In every program, we ask speakers to share insights and tips that can support students’ civic engagement; their comments often speak directly to students’ ambitions and quell doubts about the civic lives they can aspire to. We want to help young people understand not only that their voices and actions matter, but that multiple pathways towards civic engagement are available to them, and they can participate in civic life any time, anywhere, no matter who they are or where they come from.

Given the importance for students of engaging with people they might not otherwise encounter, how do you facilitate this?

All of our programs are designed to bridge differences by setting up environments and curating participant groups so that people from different communities, with different backgrounds, life experiences, opinions, and goals will meet, talk to, and collaborate with each other. Our large-group activities often involve directives that take some form of ‘Talk with someone you’ve never met before.’ We maximize diversity by drawing students from multiple schools and capping the number who can attend from any single school. And we look for as broad a demographic range as possible, reserving at least one-third of the available slots for schools with a high proportion of underserved students, and mixing public and private schools when possible.

 We’re eager to hear how the 2026 Youth Agenda Conference went.

This year’s conference filled to capacity, drawing more than 120 students and teachers from schools around the Bay Area, reaching from Sonoma County to San Jose, the East Bay and San Francisco, and beyond. The content was built from a survey of more than 100 students from 29 high schools in 15 districts across California, which identified three issues that young people consider most pressing for our world today: immigration, international conflict, and youth mental health. Among our strategic priorities for Creating Citizens are goals both to grow and diversify our school networks and to deepen the relationships we have already established—a somewhat challenging balance to achieve. This year, we were pleased that, of the four schools with the largest student representation, two were completely new to us (both Title 1), and two had attended multiple programs in the past. Looking ahead, we are developing—based on evaluations— an enhanced curriculum for our Youth Advisory Committee, to provide them with additional skill-building opportunities that can make the conference even more meaningful, both for the students who attend and for the youth advisors themselves. 

 What are you thinking about the future of the conference?

We are confident that the conference is sustainable, with the potential for even deeper impact. One student wrote in their evaluation,  ‘I learned more about conversing with people that have a different view from me! I’m usually surrounded by friends and family that agree and believe in what I do but … during the discussions I had, I heard some things I didn’t agree with but I still had a lot of respect for their opinions.’ Perhaps the most gratifying feedback we received came via a teacher, who told us that one of his students confided, ‘I feel like I learned more, and more important, stuff today than on any regular day of school.’ Comments such as these tell us that young people are eager to challenge themselves and to embrace the values that underlie our democratic society. As we celebrate America 250, the urgency of our work as educators couldn’t be clearer; Creating Citizens will continue to inspire young people and provide them with the tools they need to become active, informed citizens who will ensure that our nation lives up to its promise, now and in the future. 

In their own words: hear from attendees of this year’s Youth Agenda Conference