Executive Summary

With the right tools, young women can change America. Women's political leadership efforts typically focus on immediate electoral outcomes. But if we don't engage the youngest generation of women, the fight for parity will never end. IGNITE builds a sense of duty for young women to become politically active, vote, run and serve. Young women may not perceive government as a potential solution to anything. Poor civic education exacerbates this, as girls rarely learn how government works or why it matters. IGNITE leads with issues young women care about, connects them to elected women making decisions around those issues, then trains them to run and lead. If just .1% of Gen Z women ran, the trajectory of women's political representation would change within a decade. Expanding IGNITE's reach to 70,000+ young women by 2026 will yield a generation of women who hold office at higher rates than ever before.

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2022 Swift Grant Awardee

Using the expertise of Caring Across Generations, IGNITE and Caring Across Generations will create systems, structures, and supportive culture for IGNITE’s staff and program participants who are caregivers. The team will also use storytelling to highlight the challenges of working while being a caregiver with the intention of influencing policy and best practices in the nonprofit sector.

2022 Swift Grants Awardee

Using the expertise of Caring Across Generations, IGNITE and Caring Across Generations will create systems, structures, and supportive culture for IGNITE’s staff and program participants who are caregivers. The team will also use storytelling to highlight the challenges of working while being a caregiver with the intention of influencing policy and best practices in the nonprofit sector.

Accomplishments

**Gen Z women are energized to make lasting changes for our democracy. IGNITE accelerates their leadership by training them to be the voters, activists, commissioners, policymakers and electeds who will solve our most challenging issues. During the 2022-2023 fiscal year IGNITE trained 6,000 new young women across 30 states. Thirteen alumni ran for office in the 2022 election cycle and seven won their seats. 600+ young women advocated on national and statewide policies with 60% visiting their state capitols this year. We reached 1M+ people with our #IGNITEtheVote campaign and 96% of IGNITE women voted in the midterm elections. IGNITE leveraged an op-ed strategy to teach young women to persuasively articulate their policy perspectives and center Gen Z in national policy conversations. _This strategy yielded 75 press placements in national outlets like Forbes, The Hill, CBS News, Univision, Yahoo and USA Today, and equally important state and local outlets._**