c&S

growing a network of youth civic leaders across the U.S.

Services: Program Recruitment | Paid Media Strategy | Creative Development

Leading marketing and recruitment for a second year, DSS drove a 30 percent increase in applications for C&S’s Carnegie Young Leaders fellowship, building a diverse, national cohort of civic problem-solving teams.

THE REALITY

In 2025, C&S conducted a Gen Z Vibe Check to gauge youth civic habits. The study revealed that 90% of young people ages 14-22 care about their communities. While 37 percent said they didn’t know where to start to create the change they wanted to see, 49 percent were motivated to take action alongside their friends. Building on this insight, C&S set out to expand its network of Carnegie Young Leaders (CYL), a fellowship program to mobilize young people across the country to plan and implement community projects together in teams of five.

Now in its second year, C&S had an ambitious yet clear goal: reach youth with diverse perspectives in every state in the U.S., especially the 24 states not represented in the inaugural 2025 fellowship class. This meant focusing our strategy and messaging on the hardest to reach applicants – youth in civic deserts and those who might not yet see themselves as equipped to lead changer.

OUR APPROACH

In our second year leading recruitment, we leveraged learnings to make the application process more accessible and highlighted stories of fellows to more effectively reach applicants in our remaining states. Key to our success was:

• Developing and delivering custom toolkits to 1,800 high schools, colleges and youth-serving organizations, 85 percent of which were in our priority states 

• Creating a recommendation process for adult allies to nominate youth, providing the encouragement emerging leaders often need

• Hosting multiple info sessions with targeted tracks for applicants to opt into based on their progress

• Co-developing a robust suite of multimedia assets to connect the shared challenges of current fellows with applicants in more remote communities

• Mounting an expanded social and paid media strategy including targeted messaging and ads in rural states

THE IMPACT

Over the next year, teams will connect with expert mentors and share learnings through communities of practice to support their projects and create a swell of youth-led civic action across the country. From the foundation DSS laid with our four-month campaign, C&S gained:

• 395 applications - 30 percent more than year one

• 250,000 visits to the Carnegie Young Leaders website - more than double the previous year

• A diverse applicant pool - 87 percent identify as BIPOC,  64 percent indicated being early in their civic journey and the average age was 17, reflecting successful reach to a younger audience

• A new fellowship class of 71 teams representing 46 U.S. states leading projects tackling voting and healthcare access, literacy, social isolation, environmental sustainability, cross-cultural conflict resolution, food and housing insecurity, and so much more

Explore the full list of teams and their projects here.

Interested in how to cultivate relationships with young leaders in your organization?