Periclean youth staffers on who gets to write the next 250 years.

This July 4, the United States turns 250. The document at the center of the anniversary, the Declaration of Independence, was in one sense America’s first letter to the world: a written account of who its authors wanted the country to become.

Two and a half centuries later, our partners at Made By Us have invited a new generation to write their own contemporary Letters to America. The campaign asks people under 30 to tell the national story in their own words through essays, reflections, and art.

Today, June 27, 2026, is National Youth Takeover Day when institutional platforms are being turned over to younger voices. We’re pleased to hand over ours to young people on our team.

What follows are three forms circling multiple sides of the question of who gets to write the American story and who gets to claim a voice in it. Jason Vadnos, our Civic Impact Associate and a rising senior at Vanderbilt University, underscores that his generation’s civic energy is alive and that the mechanics of voting keep blocking it from the ballot. Summer Intern Reyhan Sanchez, a rising junior at Tufts, moves from the powerlessness of being a lone citizen to the strength and communion a generation can feel in acting together. Summer Intern Terry Cai, a rising junior at Connecticut College, takes the pencil itself—graphite, pressure, the body pressed to the page—as a way into who gets written into history and who has been sanded out of it.

An essay, a reflection, and a poem are three ways of having voice in a story that’s still being written. This is at the core of work students do on Periclean campuses every year.

Gen Z Cares about Politics, We Just Don’t Believe Politics Cares about Us

By Jason Vadnos, Civic Impact Assistant

This piece was also published in The Fulcrum on May 2, 2026.

We are in a big election year, and people are asking the same tired questions: whether the next generation will show up to repair the broken democracy they’ve inherited or whether apathy will keep them home. I used to believe the apathy myth, but last November proved otherwise. Even in places where youth turnout wasn’t record-breaking, the idea that young people don’t care simply doesn’t match reality. After all, survey data from the 2022 midterms suggests that among young people who didn’t vote in 2022, just 28% of Gen Z said it was because they didn’t think it mattered, compared to 40% of Millennials. This accords with my own experiences: I’ve spent the past two years mobilizing students on dozens of college campuses across the US to register and cast their votes, and I’ve seen firsthand just how deeply my generation cares about the fate of our country—and why their passion so often stops short of the ballot box.

Every day, thousands of my fellow students across the nation are working tirelessly to make their campuses and communities better places. From supporting the operations of local food pantries to administering free flu shots to healthcare workers and providing free income tax assistance, our issue is not indifference. It’s that our preferred forms of engagement often happen outside the orbit of electoral politics. The CIRCLE survey substantiates this: among young people who stayed home in 2022, Gen Z were more likely than Millennials to cite being too busy, and less likely to say their vote didn’t matter.

But this raises an important question: if Gen Z is so invested in social change, why isn’t that energy showing up in voting numbers? The answer is simpler than you may think. For students, casting your ballot is often just plain hard.

I’ve had dormmates from out of state who didn’t have a local driver’s license, meaning they needed to fill out a paper registration form and physically drop it off at the county elections office. Without a car, facing limited public transportation options, and in the middle of a full course load, it was easier for many not to vote. My own voting experience was not without issue. I ordered an absentee ballot to my campus P.O. box, waited weeks for it to arrive, and by the time I filled it out and returned it to my home state, the deadline for acceptance had passed. No matter how engaged college students might be, structural barriers —and often, deliberate disinformation campaigns— pose significant challenges to being able to have a say in our future.

Unfortunately, this leads to a major chicken-and-egg problem. When the existing system prevents young people from voting, candidates and elected officials don’t see young voters as a constituency they must answer to, leaving us feeling unheard and further disengaged. When leaders offer genuine hope, speak to young people’s concerns, and present a future we can imagine ourselves thriving in, something shifts. Just look at Zohran Mamdani’s success in New York City. Rather than demonizing his opponents and painting an apocalyptic picture of the Big Apple if he wasn’t elected, he campaigned on a future that would address issues young people care about, such as affordability and housing.

When young people feel seen, when the system opens space for their voices, and when casting a ballot feels like building something new and better, participation stops being a chore and becomes the natural next step.

So, how do we move towards a world where young people are both deeply engaged in their communities and habitual voters? How do we remove the structural challenges students face while countering the narrative that Gen Z doesn’t care?

For young voters, campus organizers, and other interested parties, the answer is simple: get involved with organizations and people who are passionate about closing the voting gap. Nonpartisan groups like the Fair Elections Center’s Campus Vote Project and Every Vote Counts work directly with colleges and universities nationwide to provide students with the resources, information, and opportunities they need to get to the ballot box. From institutionalizing pro-voting campus reforms to directly challenging legislative barriers, exposing disinformation, and supporting nonpartisan voter registration drives, these nonprofits play a critical role in bringing Gen Z’s civic energy to the polls.

But they can’t do it alone. These groups need student leaders like me to help turn our campus networks into real voting power. If we want a government that reflects our needs and the needs of those who come after us, we have to channel the same energy we bring to every other part of our civic lives into the ballot box. We’ve already seen what our votes can do when we show up, and that momentum is ours to build on. With students stepping forward—and with real support from our institutions and communities—we can make voting a habit and strengthen the civic muscle our generation has already proven it possesses.

Let Us Rise Again

By Reyhan Sanchez, Summer Intern

What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States of America? One could pose this question to a number of individuals and would receive a variety of answers back, although they would all likely share one idea: freedom. That is not quite surprising coming from a country we call the “Land of the Free,” although it has felt as if “We the People” have had little control over the undertakings of our homeland.

Instead, our democracy bends to the will of foreign interest, economic appeal, and hegemonic aspirations more than to the prayers for civilian rights, public infrastructure, and social equality. A democracy that does not focus on those who participate can hardly be seen as one. Participants feel more like audience members, watching as decisions are made for them. It has already demotivated a large part of the population from interacting with the political sphere after being filled with this powerlessness.

To be honest, I have fallen victim to this feeling at times, believing there is no possible way that I, as a singular being, could possibly influence more than myself. But then I realized, it was because of this way of thinking, that this systemic hopelessness sinks in. It takes a collective agreement to fight back and institute change as a people. If we continue to view ourselves as individuals and only individuals, we will forget our capacity to rally and the power that it provides us.

You may not be able to convince everyone to join you, or even capable of ensuring that there will be people supporting you at first. But every movement started with someone who believed that they alone were enough to bring change. So don’t wait for the right time to put yourself out there and take a stand. The right time is now.

Graphite

By Terry Cai, Summer Intern

Let us go then, you and I,

Lines of carbon crystal huddle by each other

Each remarkable,

Every Woman,

Elbow by elbow, let us link together

Floating around

The stratosphere

Navigating loud questions with quiet answers,

May what is within and underneath reflect off of the four walls

Like a rainbow does on bismuth

Or striding through seedy streets

Lonely GPS and me

Acoustic beeps resounding

“Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question …”

Thick black bodies stumbling into line

On pale white pages

Parched and unsettled and unprinted

“When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,”

Say chains and imprison and sanded down

Holes punched thrice through spines

Pulped and pressed

Anarcha and Lucy and Betsey

This is our story, and may I tell you all about love,

Writing and uniting and vying for

And I hold onto your hand tighter still,

Together, one formation,

A sentence, perhaps a book’s binding:

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Lines quoted from T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” first published in Poetry (1915); and from Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” delivered 1979.