Our vision: Every young person in the United States exercises their power to bring about a peaceful, healthy, just and sustainable world.
Our mission: We educate, cultivate and mobilize a network of young people in the US to take informed action around our individual and collective roles as global citizens.
Our story
AIDemocracy was founded by a group of American students who studied abroad just after the September 11th attacks. The students were traumatized by 9-11 and wary of being overseas so soon after the tragedy. But to their surprise, they were met with intense sympathy and solidarity from people from around the world. For them, the tragedy seemed to reveal the possibility for a global community of shared values.
But when these young Americans came back to the U.S., they were often greeted with questions about why people around the world hated America and our values. The students realized that the picture of the rest of the world that Americans were seeing in the media was very different from the experience of the world that they were living abroad. The media presented only the extremists and the threats from around the world. Americans did not have the chance to see the moderates around the world or the global partners that the U.S. could work with to overcome common threats such as climate change, terrorism, and disease.
These students set up Americans for Informed Democracy to bring the world home to Americans and to showcase the opportunities for the U.S. to play a more collaborative role in the world. They began hosting town hall forums and videoconferences to bring the stories of the world that they saw and experienced to their peers and the broader public. Based on their own experiences abroad, they believed that if Americans had new ways to connect with the rest of the world, they would see new opportunities for the U.S. to work with other countries to solve global problems. In other words, they sought to inspire a more informed democracy.
In 2008, AIDemocracy merged with Our Voices Together, a non-partisan group of families and friends who lost loved ones to terrorism.
