When BUILD talks about youth voice, we mean more than a seat in the audience. For alumni Edgar Suarez (right) and Bjourn Etienne (left), that commitment turned into a paid opportunity to help shape a national conversation about the future of education alongside researchers, practitioners, and other experts.
KnowledgeWorks collaborated with BUILD’s Youth Fellowship Program to invite Edgar and Bjourn to serve as youth advisors on Charting a New Course for Education, KnowledgeWorks’ latest anchor forecast on the future of K–12 learning in the United States. This collaboration grew out of SXSW EDU 2024, where María Crabtree, Director de Proyectos de Prospectiva Stratégica at KnowledgeWorks, attended BUILD’s workshop, “Transforming Education by Elevating Youth in R&D,” and approached BUILD about bringing youth voice and perspective into their future‑of‑learning work. As a senior manager of strategic foresight and a member of the team that created the forecast, Jeremiah‑Anthony Righteous‑Rogers notes that KnowledgeWorks understood from the start that including learners’ voices was vital to ensuring the publication truly centered learners.
As former BUILD Youth Fellows, Edgar and Bjourn came prepared. Through BUILD’s entrepreneurship and fellowship programs, they had already practiced co‑design, human‑centered design, and offering candid feedback on curricula, digital products, and learning environments. In the KnowledgeWorks working sessions, they used those same skills to:
- Name what feels relevant and what doesn’t in today’s learning experiences.
- Share how forces like AI, climate disruption, and social change show up in students’ daily lives.
- Contribute to how “drivers of change” and possible futures were described so they reflected the needs and experiences of learners.
Jeremiah‑Anthony describes them as clear, confident contributors who understood the arc of the project and how to bring their knowledge and expertise to it. Their expertise came not from years in policy, but from the depth of their lived experience - moving from high school to college to early career, and navigating systems that often weren’t designed with them in mind.
In those sessions, Edgar and Bjourn participated as colleagues and co‑authors in a shared thinking space with researchers, practitioners, and others invested in the future of learning. For Edgar, now a UC Berkeley graduate and nonprofit case manager, it was meaningful to see his insights treated as essential to the work, not an add‑on. For Bjourn, a recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a degree in Computer Science, it marked his first opportunity to see his ideas extend beyond BUILD convenings and contribute to a national publication.
Both came away with:
- A published contribution to a widely shared education forecast.
- Stronger confidence in their voices as change‑makers and experts in their own contexts.
- New professional connections and additional opportunities to advise on youth‑centered work.
This is exactly what the BUILD Youth Fellowship Program is designed to do: prepare young people ages 15-22 to step into roles as co‑designers, advisors, and leaders, and to collaborate with organizations like KnowledgeWorks that are ready to center youth expertise. When young people bring their stories, insights, and questions into strategy conversations, forecasts become more grounded, products become more relevant, and the field gets a clearer picture of what it will take to truly support the next generation of learners.
You can explore Charting a New Course for Education and see the work Edgar and Bjourn contributed here.
