The Civic Empowerment Zone is the Center’s hands-on youth civic education program that addresses the current weakness in youth understanding of and participation in civic engagement and promotes the idea that civic education is a learned skill. Just like other subjects such as reading, math, art, and science, civic skills must be practiced regularly in order to develop proficiency and confidence.

Our hands-on program provides a multitude of resources to teachers that can be easily integrated into current curriculum and works to transform the communities in which youth live and interact with into a“civic laboratory” where youth learn how to effectively address issues important to them and harness their civic power to affect change. The Civic Empowerment Zone also provides an avenue for community institutions to play an active role in building youth civic engagement.

Successes of the Center’s Civic Empowerment Zone include: 
  • The development of over 40 hands-on, cross curricular civic lesson plans that meet current Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) standards and goals that teachers can immediately integrate into their daily classroom activities. In addition to our website, our civic lesson plans have been posted on the Illinois State Board of Education, the DuPage County Regional Superintendent of Schools, and the Northwestern Collaboratory Project websites. In addition to the high school teachers, locally and nationally, who have used our lesson plans, college teachers and law students who participate in high school outreach programs have used them as well. 
Advocacy 101
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  • Educating more than 3,500 middle and high school youth in what their civic rights and responsibilities are when living in a democracy and how they can make a difference in their community;
  • Facilitating or participating in more than ten (10) teacher in-service trainings and resources fairs that have educated hundreds of teachers about the Center’s hands-on civic education project;
  • Working with teachers from more than fifteen (15) middle and high schools to help them integrate hands-on civic education into the classroom;
  • Working with the DuPage County Regional Superintendent of Schools to organize a landmark Youth Civic Education Summit that seeks to make civic education a priority in DuPage County;
Civic Education Summit
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  • Building an informal network of teachers, public officials, civic organizations, judges, and community leaders who are committed to improving civic education in the western suburbs;
  • Helping three schools build civic programs;
  • Hosting more than sixty (60) high school, college, and law student interns who have worked under the supervision of Center community lawyers and increased their capacity to participate in community affairs;
  • Facilitating six (6) student-driven local government surveys that help students understand the operations of local government. Students distributed their survey findings to the press and government officials. As a result, students have impacted how public bodies operate. Several public bodies reformed their practices or procedures to comply with Center recommendations for reform. Students have facilitated the following surveys:
o  Analyzing the types of Freedom of Information Act requests public bodies receive; 
o  Analyzing townships’ policies related to distribution of meeting minutes; 
o  Analyzing how public bodies use their websites to inform the public about how to access public information; 
o  Investigating how many public bodies made their government budgets available through their websites; 
o  Auditing public body compliance with responding to Freedom of Information Act request for public salary information; and 
o  Documenting how much public bodies charge citizens for making copies of public documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
  • Completing a survey of more than 1,200 high school students that documented the lack of student understanding regarding basic civic knowledge. Our survey has gained the attention of the DuPage County Regional Superintendent of Schools who is working with the Center to revise and implement our survey county-wide in preparation for a Youth Civic Education Summit;
  • The creation and distribution of four open government tapes that were widely distributed throughout the County highlighting several student interns and volunteers.