Collaboration Is Practice for Democracy

Individual and Community Thriving are Mutually Reinforcing 

Caroline Klibanoff, Executive Director, Made By Us; Eisenhower USA Fellow and Senior Fellow at New America

In 2016-2017, museum directors recognized converging crises: American democracy seemed fragile, civic education was failing, and museums couldn't get young adults through their doors. The institutions stewarding America's history had become irrelevant to the generation that would determine its future.

Museums designed for their own needs rather than their audience's, creating exhibits curators wanted, promoting events using academic language no 22-year-old would use. There was little  infrastructure for youth input. Museums spent millions on decades-long construction projects without consulting people who would use those spaces longest. And thre are a lot of museums: 35,000—more than there are Starbucks in America. 

Made By Us, which spun out from a working group that included the Smithsonian, Monticello, and the National Archives Foundation, was launched to make museums more resilient by building a broader audience. It does this by extending a better invitation to young people in the form of events, ideas and invitations that might get them in the door. "Instead of making decisions around what the institutions want to see happen, we entirely focus on what the audience wants and needs," says Caroline Klibanoff, a public historian, who co-founded Made by Us and is its executive director. 

The group’s goal: helping museums bring young adults (18-30) into their local museums to learn "the history and historical context and historical skills that they need to understand how we got here, see themselves in the story, and then shape the future." That starts in their own communities.

Every decision starts with centering the user. What does a 20-year-old worry about this week? What's trending? The answer is less likely to be "learn about the New Deal” and more likely to be “what should I do this weekend?” Young people, like most people, need explicit invitations, “and an ad isn't an invitation,” says Klibanoff. Museums wonder why only ten people came to their free event. Maybe because they weren’t asked in a way that made sense to them and their lives (affordability, timing, cohort). 

Made By Us operates in "the currency of youth” by co-designing with them. In the fall of 2025 it finished its fifth year of Civic Season (Juneteenth to July 4), 2,000+ events across 700 museums and 20 million people reached with ideas like “a slice of history” pizza party for which Made by Us co-designs with youth. It provides infrastructure—pizza, open-source materials like graphics and social media assets and logos, along with permission and encouragement to adapt everything locally.

It’s local, but connected to something national, which becomes powerful.

Key to its success wasn’t mandating what to do but offering support and resources for organizations to localize and make relevant for their own audiences. “We can't get too far out ahead of our skis to be like doing the coolest cutting edge stuff on TikTok, because museums can't always follow us there,” Klibanoff says.  

The group always aims to include evaluation alongside an appealing offer for young people. Its Civic Superpowers Quiz (more than 35,000 hits) is a personality test that also reveals interests and uses news patterns. "Quiz-takers want their superpower type, they want info about themselves. But in the process, we are getting info about where they need the most support."

For the US 250th, Made By Us created a “Bureau”—100 young people, deliberately not only "your average civics superstar" and including unemployed youth. They were trained for 20 hours on things like human centered design, history, sourcing, wellness, how to be an effective change maker, how to consult with organizations and work intergenerationally. The organization is  measuring how engaged the bureau members are through pulse surveys. That means Made by Us will be able to share whether the competence built through training and agency afforded through consulting results in higher levels of civic engagement. So far, organizations using the Bureau say they will implement 80%+ of recommendations within a year. Young people  "have fresh eyes to see things that aren't working and to be creative about the solutions,” Klibanoff says. “They aren’t burdened by ‘how we’ve always done it.”

Klibanoff’s biggest lessons learned: training matters, and you have to train young people to be comfortable disagreeing with adults in power. When that power sharing happens locally, it builds not just institutional resilience but also civic thriving because young people are making decisions with real impact. Their input is not tokenistic but deeply insightful - the “canary in the coal mine” often pointing to wider societal trends that affect youth first. 

Youth input isn't charity but rather institutional survival. When museums center youth perspective by collaborating, local relevance drives individual connection which when systematized, can transform institutions. Resilient institutions create space for civic participation. 

"Youth are the largest generation in US history at this juncture.
They should probably be at the center of the conversation."