Action civics is a model for civic education that offers youth opportunities to participate in authentic democratic activities. In this chapter, we trace the origins of action civics and explore the field’s defining features, strengths, and challenges. We frame our analysis through two case descriptions of action civics intermediary organizations: Generation Citizen and Design Your Neighborhood. We discuss action civics education as a psychologically empowering process, and we illustrate tensions that arise as youth develop psychological empowerment. Through these examples, we reveal features of the action civics process model that support community power in the situational, institutional, and systemic domains. We explore empowering characteristics of empowering settings that are present in Design Your Neighborhood and Generation Citizen. These include common belief systems, a relational environment that supports intergenerational partnerships, opportunity role structures, opportunities to develop local leadership, and external linkages to community stakeholders. Our chapter concludes with recommendations for practitioners, researchers, and other stakeholders to consider as the field of action civics expands.

This chapter presents school-based action civics interventions as a setting for critical consciousness (CC) development. Action civics programs guide students to take collective action to address locally relevant civic issues within a context that promotes reflection and skills development. We highlight one action civics program, Generation Citizen (GC), and overlay programmatic components with the core elements of CC to elucidate how action civics may support CC development and where the constraints may be. The features of GC that we propose align with CC development are: placing action at the center of the program; fostering critical social analysis and reflection; valuing children’s right to participation; and focusing on skill-building. Images of youth-generated action civics presentation posters are used to illustrate aspects of CC. Finally, this chapter offers next steps to bridge across CC and action civics theory, research, and practice.