Executive Summary
With the right tools, young women can change America. Women's political leadership efforts typically focus on immediate electoral outcomes. But if we don't engage the youngest generation of women, the fight for parity will never end. IGNITE builds a sense of duty for young women to become politically active, vote, run and serve. Young women may not perceive government as a potential solution to anything. Poor civic education exacerbates this, as girls rarely learn how government works or why it matters. IGNITE leads with issues young women care about, connects them to elected women making decisions around those issues, then trains them to run and lead. If just .1% of Gen Z women ran, the trajectory of women's political representation would change within a decade. Expanding IGNITE's reach to 350,000 young women by 2026 will yield a generation of women who hold office at higher rates than ever before.
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2022 Swift Grants Awardee
Using the expertise of Caring Across Generations, IGNITE and Caring Across Generations will create systems, structures, and supportive culture for IGNITE’s staff and program participants who are caregivers. The team will also use storytelling to highlight the challenges of working while being a caregiver with the intention of influencing policy and best practices in the nonprofit sector.
Accomplishments
Over the last year, IGNITE doubled down on efforts to ensure young women have the tools, networks and mentorship to own their political power. We also strengthened the foundation for expanding our work shifting power to young women and catalyzing their journey toward political leadership.
Our 2021-2022 impact includes:
- 20 young women trained and running for office in upcoming elections.
- 897 young women trained to advocate who took 2,890 legislative actions.
- 40% of the young women who participated in our Advocacy Boot Camp secured internships/jobs with their state legislature.
- 50% of program participants participated in a march/rally.
We also strengthened our thought leadership and expanded our culture shift work to normalize young women’s political ambition in the media and beyond. Efforts included partnering with Snapchat on the Run Now Mini tool and with the Broadway play POTUS to build a national conversation around women in politics.
