ABOVE: Summer ’22 Youth Council Meeting with Town of Taos Council Member Corilia Ortega.

Recognizing that the Youth Council is a new entity that will routinely learn in order to better sharpen its activities, we nonetheless will focus on the following four set of intertwined activities in our first year (2022-23) of operations.

I. We will provide demand-based feedback for government, business, agencies etc. to better incorporate youth opinions and perspectives into wider decisions and programs. This includes:

• Providing written or verbal feedback on specific demands and requests
• Creating presentations for Town Council, County Commission as needed
• Creating a Youth Council “Stamp of Approval” to approve of specific activities performed by government, businesses, agencies, etc.
• Using surveys and interviews to capture wider youth feedback and opinions; performing web-based research to inform Youth Council responses.

II. We will convene youth-led dialogues focused on big topics shaping our future, with an emphasis on discussing big, positive, and solutions-oriented ideas, using media as a key tool to advance collective understandings. This includes:

• Planning, organizing, and convening two Future Dialogues. The first is The Future of our Water on December 9 2022, and the second is The Future of our Food in May 2023.

III. We will lead awareness- and consciousness-raising activities designed by, led by, and for youth, using media as an innovative supporting mechanism. This includes:

• Running workshops designed to help youth on any given issue (e.g. mental health, college preparations)
• Leading composting, recycling, gardening efforts
• Organizing concerts and special events
• Making videos or other media on important local careers and opportunities
• Making videos to advance specific issues, including challenges, common understandings etc.
• Using media to advance or perform an accountability/ombudsman function (e.g. tracking decisions, processes of elected officials).

IV. We will actively design, collect, synthesize, and contextualize youth perspectives using youth-driven data and evidence. This includes:

• Using online surveys (disseminated in classrooms) to solicit youth opinion on specific issues
• Using video to educate youth on issues, and then capturing immediate feedback to help create representative decisions
• Creating Reflection Papers to summarize and synthesize youth perspectives on big issues
• Performing web-based research to learn from other contexts and create lessons for the Youth Council to understand and potentially adapt.

Funding

We recognize with enormous gratitude the LOR Foundation as the major seed funder of the Youth Council, ensuring we can meet regularly and can stage both of our Future Dialogues over 2022-23. We also recognize with great gratitude the New Mexico Humanities Council for support through its Democracy and the Informed Citizen partnership program.