University of Chicago, Department of Political Science

The Black Youth Project (BYP), housed at the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, is a research, education, and advocacy organization that examines the attitudes, resources, and culture of Millennials and GenZers of color, with a special focus on African American youth. The centerpiece of its work is GenForward, a nationally representative survey that pays special attention to how race and ethnicity shape how young adults, both Millennials and Gen Z-ers, experience and think about the world. This project grant provides flexible support to BYP to administer GenForward, analyze findings, and share them with relevant media, policy stakeholders, and activists and advocates. It also supports BYP’s new digital magazine, Black Life Everywhere (BLE), which works with creators to preserve and present nuanced representations that are expressive of Black life. The goal of this grant is to ensure that the attitudes and concerns of young people of color are discussed and included in media and policy circles, and to provide an online space for this group to celebrate their diverse cultures and debate solutions to political issues that directly and disproportionately impact their lives.

The Black Youth Project (BYP), housed at the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, is a research, education and advocacy organization that examines the attitudes, resources, and culture of millennials and GenZers of color, with a special focus on African American youth. It hosts an online news and commentary site run by and for young Black Americans, and it developed and now operates GenForward, the first-ever custom survey panel designed to gather data about the opinions and policy preferences of youth of color. This project grant provides flexible support to BYP to operate its online news and commentary site, blackyouthproject.com, a platform that enables young African Americans to discuss and debate solutions to political issues that directly and disproportionately impact their lives. The grant also supports BYP to conduct its bi-monthly GenForward survey, share analysis of findings with relevant media, policy stakeholders, and activists and advocates, with the goal of diversifying who counts as public and whose attitudes and concerns are discussed in the media and policy circles.

The Black Youth Project (BYP), housed at the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, is a research and education organization that examines the attitudes, perspectives, and culture of young, urban people of color and helps to amplify them in the media and in policy discussions. Its goal is to engage African-American, Latino-American and Asian-American Millennials in meaningful political and civic activity, helping them to raise their voices and define and enact civic and political agendas as a means of fully participating in public life. This grant provides BYP with flexible support to strengthen, and help disseminate findings from, its GenForward survey, the first-ever custom survey panel designed to gather data about the opinions and policy preferences of youth of color.  BYP is using the resources to expand its online news and commentary site, a training ground for young journalists of color that reports on and reflects the lived experiences of young Black Americans, and to carry out a pilot research effort in Chicago, similar to GenForward, designed to gather data about the ideas, attitudes, decision-making, and lived experiences of young people of color at the city level. 

The University of Chicago Department of Political Science is the home of the Black Youth Project (BYP), a research, education, and advocacy organization focused on amplifying the voices of underrepresented youth. In 2015, MacArthur supported BYP to design and launch the first-ever custom survey panel to gather data about opinions and policy preferences of youth of color. This grant provides general support to BYP to integrate the work of the survey into the organization's programming and increase its capacity to ensure the perspectives of youth of color are well represented in public dialogue. This includes strengthening the organization's online presence, expanding the capacity of its reporting staff to use data from the survey, and carrying out programming to increase the media literacy, research, and data reporting skills of teens.

The University of Chicago Department of Political Science is the home of the Black Youth Project (BYP), a research, education and advocacy organization focused on amplifying the voices of underrepresented youth. Dr. Cathy Cohen, a leading scholar on race, politics and culture and a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics, founded BYP in 2005 to examine and highlight the attitudes, resources, and culture of African-American youth. Under her direction, BYP has grown into one of the leading research entities studying the political attitudes and actions of young people. This grant will support BYP to develop a custom survey panel of next generation American citizens, ages 18 to 30. The custom panel will oversample Black, Latino and Asian-American respondents to generate data that can be used to amplify the voices of young people of color. BYP will analyze and repackage the data for the media, policymakers, advocates, and academics.