Less than 12 days after election day, we rapidly convened young civil & voting rights leaders to DC to chart our path forward as a democracy movement.
Together, we laid the groundwork for our plans to organize for our freedoms, resist autocratic attacks like Project 2025, fight to protect DC’s autonomy, and envision an inclusive democracy for a post-Trump era.
Our conclusion was clear — to successfully organize under autocracy, we require a student movement that transcends person and party.
Immediately following Trump’s inauguration in 2025, we helped organize in-person & virtual trainings for hundreds of students and community members to learn the mechanisms of organizing under authoritarianism.
The most significant of these events was Rise for Democracy — an 11-hour anti-authoritarian teach-in which attracted 500 attendees, and included 22 workshops, nearly 50 partner organizations, and culminated in a solidarity sing.
After Rise for Democracy, with youth allies, we organized against attempts to undermine voting rights ahead of the 2026 elections at the state & federal level — such as the SAVE Act. We continued our work preventing corporate-backed state legislatures from calling an Article V convention, and organized against attacks on college education & civil rights.
In summer 2025, our team supported the Democracy in Action (DA) training series for students in DC to hear from democracy champions, and learn how to lead anti-authoritarian campaigns on campus in the fall to resist Trump’s attacks on student rights.
During the training series (which included 6-weekly sessions & a day-long Bootcamp) students developed campaign plans to transform their colleges into pillars of resistance to the Administration — making them safe organizing spaces for a wider pro-democracy youth movement.
At the end of the DA trainings, students voted to unite under “Frontline for Freedom” as the anti-authoritarian campaign name for the fall & beyond.
The past ten months have shown us that although unprecedented, we’re prepared to organize students in the face of autocracy. Signup for updates to keep posted as we continue supporting the student anti-authoritarian movement against Trump & for an inclusive democracy!
