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| About Roosevelt Challenges
Roosevelt Challenges
Each summer, the national student membership of the Roosevelt Institution meets to select three pressing policy challenges. In the inaugural 2006-2007 school year, the student membership chose the Energy Challenge of reducing fossil fuel use, the Higher Education Challenge addressing the lack of socioeconomic diversity in higher education, and the Working Families Challenge aimed at the incompatibility of many jobs with a sustainable family life. Over the sixteen months following the challenge selection, students work to solve these three challenges through a series of research projects, conferences, publications, and presentations. As a first step, students in the Roosevelt Summer Research College prepare background research on the three new challenge areas. This research introduces students to the various dimensions of the problem, its sources, barriers to the implementation of currently proposed solutions, and promising approaches. In the Energy Challenge, for example, the background research described current and future trends in American and global fossil fuel use, the problems fossil fuel use creates, the breakdown of fossil fuel energy uses, and strategies for mitigation, conservation, and switching to renewable energy sources. The Summer Research College presents this research to the conference of chapter leaders in Hyde Park, NY at the end of the summer, allowing the leaders to plan their chapters’ response to the challenges in the coming year. During the fall, students use the Summer Research College background to find good ideas for solving a challenge. The search takes them to classes and extracurricular activities like the Stanford Green Dorm project, the Middlebury conference on green buildings, or the Yale Higher Education conference. Students hold hundreds of brainstorming meetings, like the one at the University of Georgia chapter to find ideas to relieve local poverty. The search takes Roosevelt members to the offices of state legislators and local experts. Last year, students involved with the Working Families challenge met with union officials, healthcare experts, New Orleans reconstruction planners, California state assembly members, and activists with the Moms Rising coalition. During the winter and spring, students come together for a series of regional policy conferences. Students present their proposed solutions, and those presentations are rated by a panel of policy experts, professors, and elected officials. As the spring comes to a close, Roosevelt’s editorial board collects the best ideas developed over the course of the year and publishes them in three issues, which together form the 25 Ideas volume. 25 Ideas is distributed through a variety of venues: in one-on-one meetings with state legislators and members of Congress, to advocacy groups, to Roosevelt’s advisors and donors, and to the chapters, which distribute to their partners and local representatives. The goal of Roosevelt publications is to spark new ideas, discussions, and legislative projects around the country as a result of student work. Over the summer, even as the Summer Research College prepares next year’s background research, promotion of the ideas continues with legislative meetings and presentations at Roosevelt’s annual Policy Expo in DC. Students also present longer, in-depth research in Roosevelt’s annual research journal, the Roosevelt Review, which is released at the end of the summer. |
The Roosevelt Institution is a nonpartisan, nonprofit national think tank devoted to bringing students' policy ideas to the policy process. The opinions expressed on this site are exclusively those of its members. DC Headquarters: Roosevelt Institution / 2100 M St NW Suite 610 / Washington, DC 20037 || (202) 833-1359 |