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Public Achievement was created in 1990 as a partnership between
the City of St. Paul, Minnesota and the Center for Democracy & Citizenship
at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. It grew out of
a series of focus groups involving over two hundred young people
in a variety of settings. The youth were asked about problems
in their schools and communities and about their views on politics
and public life. They listed many problems, but saw themselves
outside of the solutions and outside of politics and public
life.
Nobody had ever asked them what they could do about the problems
that mattered to them.
Public Achievement was designed to give
young people the opportunity to be producers and creators
of their communities, not simply
customers or clients. The initial goals were to integrate
civic education into institutions that work with young people
and
test whether young people could have an impact on problems
in their
schools and neighborhoods in a serious way and define this
work in political terms. Indeed these goals have been met.
In
1997, the expansion of Public Achievement beyond Minneapolis
and St. Paul, Minnesota had begun. Working in partnership
with people in Kansas City, rural Northwestern Missouri,
Milwaukee,
and later in other parts of the country, provided the opportunity
to develop and test practices of civic engagement. Public
Achievement sites were (and continue to be) learning laboratories
to discover
what works in engaging young people in public life. Many
of the lessons learned from these efforts are compiled
as tools and
resources on this site.
Public Achievement has been recognized
nationally as a promising model of youth civic engagement
by the National Commission
on Civic Renewal and in The Civic Mission of Schools report
by the
Carnegie Corporation of New York and CIRCLE (Center for
Information & Research
on Civic Learning & Engagement).
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