Read articles written by youth authors about their experiences in school and the workforce including: first jobs, overcoming disengagement and succeeding at being young in an adult world.
Youth Voice Articles
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Press Releases, Youth VoiceICE Operation “Metro Surge” Increase Disconnected Youth In Minnesota
Reaching At Promise Association (RAPSA) launches campaign to support disconnected students in Minnesota due to recent ICE Raids. As ICE unleashes terror in Minnesota, students throughout the state are avoiding school—severely accelerating disconnection rates. In response to this turmoil, RAPSA has launched a national campaign to provide the following essentials so that students can engage…
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Youth VoiceHow A Chronic Illness Impacted My Success At My First Job
While having a chronic illness creates additional levels of stress for employees and responsibilities for employers, it also creates unique opportunities to connect with coworkers and customers. Explore this story of resilience as New Ways to Work spotlights Oliver Peyser-Thomas—a high school senior in Columbus, GA who battles Type 1 Diabetes while working his very…
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Youth VoiceFrom Greenhouse Trainee to Agripreneur: How Soilless Farming and CSS Farms Laid the Foundation for Neso Farms
Being a student agripreneur means learning to juggle lecture halls with planting beds. In 2024, I found myself waking at dawn to tend nutrient solutions and checking textbooks by moonlight. I still picture the day I stood in a sudden downpour, water cascading over me while I adjusted drip lines wet, shivering, but determined. That moment…
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Youth VoiceBreaking The Pay-Check To Pay-Check Cycle
How JobCorps helped me transition from dead-end jobs to a career path. I have a money-making mindset. I’m great at problem-solving, and I excel in organization. Although I learned these positive traits via so much work experience in my teenage years, I struggled with time and money management as well as keeping a job. When…
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Youth VoiceWhat Makes A Job Truly Valuable
Defining Value The kindness and respect shown to me at my current job has made me understand that it is not the glittery associations or false promises but rather the place and people that make a job valuable. I began my first job at age 19 as an intern for a creative space non-profit, working in the…
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Youth VoiceDefining Success
Lessons, Resilience & Character My success is not determined by where I am today, but by how far I have come on the journey. Real success isn’t about avoiding failure, it’s about persevering even when things don’t go as planned. There is no single event that leads to success; it is the product of lessons…
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Youth Voice9-5 Isn’t The Only Way To Work
How Flexible Work Options Create Success For Younger Workers When I was under 18 I thought work had to be a 9-5 activity that you are either okay with at best, or that you deeply despised at worst. This caused my first job to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that made me depressed about the future.…
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Youth VoiceYoungest in the Room: Making Friends with Adults as the Token Twenty-Something
Interacting With Adults Is A Skillset Much of what I know about interacting with “adults”, or older professionals who seem to have so much more experience and knowledge than I do, was learned firsthand. In sharing these lessons I hope that they will help other young people make friends with adults, increasing achievement and success. About Me…
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Youth VoiceA Foundation To Hold Up The Road Forward
A Career Is A Journey For one to embark on a journey you must plant your feet down and look firmly toward the destination. The destination for me was to have a fully fledged career advocating for issues that mattered to my community, creating a movement for justice and equity as well as leaving a…
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Youth VoiceFrom Aimless to Passion to Purpose
Foster Care Did Not Provide Me A Sense of Security At the age of fourteen, I was placed into foster care, and at fifteen, I realized I’d spend the rest of my childhood in foster care due to my mother’s incarceration. It’s a broken system regardless of CPS’s mission to save children. I struggled to…