Youth Rising: Fellows & Future Architects of Equity (Vol. 2, No. 5)
-03.png/v1/fill/w_320,h_320/file.jpg)
By Dr. Shane Nelson
The Shift | Vol. 2, No. 5 — Same Campus, Different World
Same Campus, Different World
Flourish Fest, PolicyLink, and the Fellows Carrying the Work Forward
This is the summer LeadersUp Fellows stopped measuring success by survival and started measuring it by flourishing. We listened to our Equity Unleashed Fellows during a planning session last year and built a way to drive new connections across our fellowship programming. This summer, our Evolve and Equity Unleashed Fellows moved through three connected moments: a virtual kickoff, a beach retreat, and a national policy summit. Each one sharpened how they define flourishing and how much power they already hold to build it.
College is a different world for today's students, even on a campus their parents would recognize. A degree is still the goal, but students now ask what it leads to: a job, an income, a way to build a life. Roughly nine in 10 associate and bachelor's students say they are confident their education will help them get a job, and 75% of current students say their degree is worth the cost, according to a 2026 Gallup study. California is asking the same question of its colleges. The state now publishes earnings outcomes for college students, and its Master Plan for Career Education calls for stronger career pathways. Fellows are stepping onto campus in the middle of that shift.
Flourish Fest: Building the Foundation, On Screen and On Sand
This July, we opened Flourish Fest with a virtual kickoff for our growing base of 90 young adult Fellows. Before each Fellow could reimagine success, they needed a shared answer to one question: what does flourishing actually look like on campus and beyond? The two-day event built that shared language first, connecting our program priorities to each Fellow's coaching domain.
From there, Fellows moved from defining flourishing to practicing it. Together, they co-designed solutions aligned with their economic, professional, social, and academic goals: building community, setting future goals, and shaping how decisions get made on their own campuses.
The sessions were a direct response to what our baseline survey told us. Financial precariousness and a gap in key resources, not a lack of drive or capability, are driving the academic and well-being struggles we see. When 78% of a cohort feel unprepared for the job market, and 84% must live at home to make ends meet, that points to a systemic readiness gap, not an individual one. Tuition is only part of the bill. Cal Grant awards generally cover systemwide CSU tuition, a maximum of $6,838 in 2026-27, yet CSUN estimates a year of college costs $23,978 for a student living with family. About half of California's public college students work while they study. As an Evolve Fellow, participants decide how to use their stipends, and basic needs, including groceries, are where much of it goes. We built Flourish Fest to close that gap directly: sharpening career skills, strengthening academic confidence, building financial safety, and deepening community connection.
Evolve Fellows is one of the demonstration projects under the Los Angeles Economic Empowerment Alliance (LAEEA), a coalition built on a simple, radical premise: young people help make the rules, and the rules make it possible to learn, earn, and build a life that lasts. The insights Fellows generate here inform how higher education leaders across our six partner campuses rethink support for first-generation students. Students now expect more from their schools: career support, help with basic needs, and a say in decisions. One of those campuses, Cal Poly Pomona, launched an on-campus staffing team this spring that offers paid work-based learning to students who work while enrolled.
That same foundation moved from the screen to the sand when Flourish Fest went in-person on the beach this summer.
We brought all of our Fellows together for an in-person convening directly on the beach. Each Fellow who participated got room to breathe in the fresh air, connect with peers across our six campuses, and start building a strong foundation for their careers. Our team wanted to create space for our Fellows to ground themselves in nature and tap into their radical imagination.
PolicyLink: Testing What Power Feels Like Outside Our Walls
Flourish Fest built the foundation. PolicyLink tested it against the outside world. This summer, two Equity Unleashed Fellows attended the PolicyLink Summit, a national convening on racial and economic equity, and came back with a sharper sense of what interdependence and power actually require.
Students have always organized, and they still do. In March, more than 250 University of California students held more than 100 meetings at the State Capitol on food access, housing, and student representation. Our Equity Unleashed Fellows took the same instinct to a national stage.
A few ideas surfaced again and again. Change has to be built from the ground up, with the people experiencing the problem at the center, not around them. Interdependence means recognizing that our fates, and our land, are connected, even to the people we'd call our opposition. And progress doesn't require perfection on the first try. It requires being willing to imagine something better and build it in public, mistakes included.
Fatima Rivera, one of the two Fellows, described a shift in how she thinks about economic equity. She'd grown up hearing it framed as a money question. The summit reframed it as a room question: which rooms have people from underrepresented communities been able to enter, and which doors are still closed. That reframe is personal for her. She's a first-generation UCSD student who has fielded identity questions on internship applications that claimed not to discriminate. Her takeaway wasn't resignation; it was a plan: teach the next generation of Fellows to find the door, knock, and if it doesn't open, find the way around it.
Her fellow Equity Unleashed peer arrived at something similar from a different angle: economic power. Janai Valentine described realizing, mid-summit, that young people and taxpayers aren't waiting for permission; they're already the founders of the system everyone's negotiating over. That reframe changed how she talks to her own brother, who doesn't vote. It also sharpened a harder point: opening a door isn't enough if the person on the other side doesn't feel they belong there. She pointed to nonprofit resource distributions in her own community that go underused, not from lack of access, but from lack of belonging. Equity, in her framing, is as much about who feels invited in as who's technically allowed.
Closing out the fellowship's time at the summit, we returned to a line from Ruha Benjamin's Imagination: A Manifesto, borrowed from James Baldwin: imagination creates the situation, and the situation creates the imagination. It can be, and it must be. Fellows carry that phrase in both directions, backward to the leaders who came before them, forward to the ones who'll follow.
Equity Unleashed Fellows: Preparing for What's Next
The current Equity Unleashed cohort's fellowship arc concluded this fall. What they're carrying out the door says as much about the program's impact as any metric could.
Both Fellows described the same shift in different words: from seeing themselves as recipients of whatever the system hands down, to seeing themselves as founders and change-makers with a legitimate claim on how decisions get made. Fatima put it plainly: she used to feel powerless, and now she doesn't tolerate what she used to. Janai described it as gaining permission to exist in spaces that weren't built with her in mind, and choosing to occupy them anyway.
Neither of them is keeping that shift to themselves. Both named the same commitment going forward: opening doors for the first-generation students who come after them, and making sure the difficulty of that path doesn't stay invisible.
Beyond the two Fellows who joined us at the PolicyLink Summit, every Equity Unleashed Fellow shared the same commitment: to pay it forward in their community and find space to mentor our Evolve Fellows. That is how these lessons reach Evolve Fellows, through peers who have already been in the rooms. The connections they form will certainly last beyond their time on campus.
Lead The Shift
Engineering the Conditions to Flourish
Flourishing cannot be the exception. It must become the standard we collectively build. In this edition of Lead The Shift, Jeffery Wallace is joined by Fatima Rivera, a LeadersUp Equity Unleashed Fellow, trained engineer, and emerging leader in the collective work to build a future-proof economy. Their conversation begins with a simple but powerful truth: our conditions are not our destiny. Systems are designed, which means they can be redesigned. Together, Fatima and Jeffery explore what becomes possible when we transform conditions into environments where people are seen, heard, respected, and celebrated rather than merely tolerated. They also wrestle with our responsibility in that transformation, because the journey toward flourishing is not a straight road leading to some distant destination. It is a practice. We build it through the decisions we make, the behaviors we normalize, the values we embody, the systems we challenge, and the power we choose to share. A future where we all flourish will not simply arrive. We must engineer it together, day by day, choice by choice, until flourishing is no longer something reserved for the fortunate few, but a condition of life available to us all.
Dr. Shane Nelson is the Director of Youth Engagement and Economic Empowerment at LeadersUp, merging critical research with practical actions for our portfolio of young adult programming.
Comments