Our Story

On February 7, 2008, Youth Re:Action Corps  and Youth Philanthropy Worldwide merged to create New Global Citizens with a mission to educate, equip, and mobilize young people to help solve the greatest challenges faced by communities around the world.

Youth Philanthropy Worldwide (YPW) was founded on the concept that young people can have direct and lasting influence in addressing even the most complex global problems. 
YPW was born out of a “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” at the Global Fund for Women in San Francisco in the Spring of 2000.  Mock grantmaking activities, led by former GFW staff member Anne McCarten-Gibbs and former GFW board member Esther Hewlett, sparked an interest in young people to take action and become part of solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.   The girls who attended that day asked for more, so a handful of people in the global grant-making community decided to create Youth Philanthropy Worldwide.

YPW was built with the intellectual assets of our leadership committee, international partners and investors.  Staff and leadership committee realized that when young people were demanding “more” they meant more opportunities to participate in grassroots solutions around the globe, more ways to apply their talents, and more tangible outcomes as a result of their participation.  As a result, the biggest contributor to this organization has been the creativity, passion and commitment of young people throughout the United States who pushed the adults around them to build a structure in which they could thrive and make a real, lasting difference on a wide range of issues.

YPW began by engaging individual high school students through conferences, trainings and a fellowship program that grew into clubs in the fall of 2006. The first YPW clubs were launched in high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, but quickly spread to Los Angeles, Minnesota and New York, which launched the national program of bringing opportunities for global action to high schools around the country.

Youth Re:Action Corps (YRC) was built on the concept that the world lies in the hands of the young people who will inherit it and in order to create sustainable change an entire generation must be engaged to take action towards solving the world’s greatest challenges.

At the age of eighteen, Courtney Klein, the founder of YRC traveled with a group of eleven college students to volunteer in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico side-by-side with community members who sought to create sustainable change in the rural area of Akil. From this experience, the realization surfaced that with the breadth of problems facing communities around the world, we, as a society, could not afford to raise a generation that was either unaware of what was happening in the world or felt incapable of changing issues they felt passionately about. The impetus was to launch an organization that would engage an entire generation of young people in a movement; a national movement that would educate young people about issues afflicting communities around the world, empower them to create change, and provide them with the tools and resources necessary to take action.

The Arizona State University undergraduate returned home and drafted a business plan for Youth Re:Action Corps. In January 2005, with the support of three college peers, the business plan for Youth Re:Action Corps received $1,000 in startup support  from Arizona State University’s Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative. 
In January of 2006, Youth Re:Action Corps launched its pilot program for 85 students across four high school campuses in the largest school district in Arizona.  In May of 2006, upon receiving significant investments from local corporations and national foundations, YRC expanded to San Jose, California.

New Global Citizens

In April of 2007, both Youth Philanthropy Worldwide and Youth Re:Action Corps were profiled in the Almaden Times newspaper in San Jose for the work of their high school teams at Leland High School. Upon reading the article and realizing a common vision to build a national movement of young people to help solve the greatest challenges faced by communities around the world, the two organizations met to discuss potential collaboration opportunities and on February 7, 2008, the two organizations merged!