About the Youth Civic Engagement Project & Website
The Civics Youth Engagement Program (CYE) is an initiative started by Shared Vision with the assistance of funding from Intel and Lockheed Martin Foundation, aimed at getting high school students in Albuquerque High schools more involved and interested in the local government processes that affect their and their family and friend's lives.
In 2003, when the City of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County announced that a joint effort was going to begin to draft a new government charter that would combine and restructure the two governments, and ultimately be up to a public vote to pass, Shared Vision recognized a profound opportunity to extend its mission to bring diverse members of the community together with government to create democratic and viable solutions. Recognizing that the ideas, skills, and habits of democracy and community participation must be cultivated in young people, and taught in the schools, the CYE began doing outreach to teachers in Albuquerque High schools to get them interested and involved in the charter-drafting process.
Along the way, we realized that although every high school student in New Mexico is required to take a government class in order to graduate, there are few easily accessible resources or activities available to help teachers to fit LOCAL civics into their already busy civics curriculum.
Shared Vision has created a website dedicated to providing curricula relevant classroom materials and resources to both teachers and students concerning local government issues in the Albuquerque Area, and in particular on the Unification issue. This website contains materials about how the current local governments are structured, lesson plans and classroom activities, reference materials and links about local issues, articles and editorials.
In the future, we hope to add an opportunity for civics teachers in the Albuquerque area to have an active, supportive online forum to shared classroom materials, educational ideas, find resources, direct their students to, and to discuss amongst themselves what local government issues are important and relevant, and what teaching methods and materials are effective.
We are very excited about this project for these reasons, as well as the possibility of creating a more communicative, sharing educational community in partnership with government.
Albuquerque Political Structure & History
• Albuquerque's Government
• Albuquerque's Public Officers
• Laws That Govern Albuquerque
• History of Albuquerque's Neighborhoods
• Public Resources
Bernalillo County
Political Structure
• The
County's Government
• The County's Public Officers
• Laws That Govern Counties
• Public Resources
