A teenager scrolls through their phone at the dinner table, barely looks up and answers questions with one-word replies. For many adults, that image has come to stand for a larger fear: that today’s young people are disconnected from others and may be uninterested in the world around them. Concerns about declining civic participation often deepen that worry.

As researchers who study adolescent development, we believe this picture is incomplete. Adults help shape the environments in which young people learn to contribute, or learn not to. In worrying that young people are disengaged from participating in civic society, adults may overlook both their own role in fostering engagement and the many ways young people are already contributing.

Youth civic and community engagement matters because it helps build skills, relationships and habits of participation that carry into adulthood. How do teens actually express their care for the world around them, and what helps them to do so?

What does engagement really look like?

When adults talk about “engaged” teens, they often picture a narrow set of activities: volunteering, joining clubs, leading student government, maybe attending a rally or organizing a fundraiser. Those forms of contribution to society matter. But they are not the whole story.

In two recent studies, we surveyed 723 American adolescents, with an average age of 15, to understand what predicts whether teens will contribute to society and what their contribution looks like.

In the first study, we identified four distinct patterns: Some teens were generally less engaged; this group represented 21% of our sample. Another 19% we called “Digital Advocates,” highly active online but less involved in face-to-face settings. A third group, 33% of our sample, we termed “Local Helpers,” more engaged in interpersonal and community-based helping. “Contributors” were our fourth profile type, making up 26% of our sample; they reported high engagement across all domains.

Our finding pushes back against a common adult assumption that “real” engagement has to look a certain way. It doesn’t. A teen sharing information online about where local families can access food assistance and a teen quietly checking in on a struggling friend are both contributing – just differently. Digital participation is not automatically shallow; for many young people, online spaces are where they learn about issues, form opinions and connect with others who share their concerns.

Crucially, these profiles were shaped less by demographics – age, gender or race and ethnicity – and more by whether our teen respondents had the personal and contextual supports that helped them act on what they cared about.

What supports adolescent contribution?

In our second study, we found that more-engaged young people reported higher levels of hope, purpose and critical consciousness, which together help explain why some adolescents are more likely to act on what they care about. Hope is the sense that the future can be better and that you can help make it better. Purpose is a stable sense of direction. Critical consciousness is a teen’s ability to notice and think critically about the social dynamics around them.

We were especially interested to see that purpose mattered not only when it was self-focused – wanting to succeed, build a career and so on – but also when it extended beyond the self, such as wanting to help others or contribute to something larger than one’s own interests.

That may sound obvious, but it has real implications. Adults often tell teens to “get involved” without helping them connect that involvement to a meaningful why. Our findings suggest young people are more likely to contribute when they feel hopeful about the future and when they see their lives as connected to others.

What adults can do

To help young people make a difference, first broaden your definition of contribution. The teenager organizing a school drive, the one helping a neighbor and the one making informative videos about a community issue are all contributing in real ways. Notice these efforts and support them in their chosen contribution.

You can also support adolescents in building the traits that make it easier for them to get involved and make a difference:

• Help young people develop a sense of purpose that goes beyond themselves. Ask questions like: What do you care about? What kind of difference do you want to make? Purpose-driven engagement tends to be more durable than participation that’s driven by obligation.

• Nurture hope. Young people are less likely to act when they feel that nothing will change. Adults can support hope by helping teens see realistic pathways for success and giving them opportunities to speak up or solve real problems in their schools and communities.

• Make space for critical consciousness. After-school programs, classrooms and youth groups can create environments where conversations about social issues are taken seriously and connected to real action. Young people need chances to talk about the world they see – and the world they want.

Teens often make a difference in ways that reflect both what they care about and how they are beginning to understand the world around them. Contributing is about more than just involvement in civic institutions; it can also look like helping a neighbor, speaking up for others or creating social media content that raises awareness about an issue. Instead of expecting teens to be checked out, caring adults can help them develop the skills and resources to contribute in any and all of these meaningful ways.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The United States is experiencing one of the steepest declines in violent crime in modern history, including a murder rate at its lowest point in more than a century.

Homicides across 35 major American cities fell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies dropped 23%. Gun assaults declined 22%. Carjackings plummeted 43%.

Yet the Trump administration has yanked hundreds of millions of dollars from the programs that helped make those numbers possible.

As a scholar focused on how policy decisions and structural conditions shape crime in marginalized communities, I see a pattern forming that could put these historic gains at serious risk.

‘Wasteful grants’

In April 2025, the Department of Justice terminated 365 previously awarded grants. About US$500 million in promised funds evaporated, affecting more than 550 organizations across 48 states.

The cuts stretched across the public safety landscape: community violence intervention, victim services, law enforcement training, juvenile justice, offender reentry and criminal justice research.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi described the cancellations as eliminating “wasteful grants.” The White House argued that the grant programs had been “funding DEI and cultural Marxism” rather than helping to keep Americans safe.

The DOJ’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal reduces the pool of funds for public safety and justice programs by an additional $850 million – about a 15% decrease from the prior year.

Bipartisan programs

On the ground, the effects of the cancellations were immediate.

Initiatives implementing a federal law to support ex-inmates with temporary housing, job training and healthcare lost $40 million in funding, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York Unversity.

Many of the terminated programs had deep bipartisan roots.

Project Safe Neighborhoods, a crime-reduction initiative launched in 2001 under President George W. Bush, lost its training funds, the Council on Criminal Justice found. Also axed was an anti-terrorism program that had trained more than 430,000 state and local law enforcement officers and other partners since 1996.

More modest programs were targeted as well.

In rural Oregon, a DOJ grant had allowed the Union County district attorney to hire an investigator who, after a few years of probing a 43-year-old cold case involving the killing of a 21-year-old woman, finally developed some leads. When the money was cut, the investigation stopped.

Funding cliffs

The funding cuts couldn’t have come at a worse time. States and local jurisdictions were already facing looming cuts, as billions of dollars provided by President Joe Biden’s COVID recovery plan run out on Dec. 31, 2026.

Many local governments had used that money to build violence prevention programs from the ground up: employing community-based mediators, launching youth employment initiatives and expanding behavioral health teams.

And now? A double funding cliff with the sudden cancellation of DOJ grants, paired with the expiration of COVID recovery money.

In Chicago, this cliff has already forced a 43% cut to the city’s domestic violence prevention budget for 2026 – even as its share of domestic-related homicides rose 13% over the previous year.

Larger and more targeted

Criminology research helps explain the particular risks of abrupt disinvestment. Emory sociology professor Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory identifies a direct relationship between increased strain – economic pressure, blocked opportunities, the withdrawal of institutional support – and higher risks of criminal behavior.

Historical precedent reinforces the concern. In 2013, federal across-the-board spending cuts eliminated services for more than 955,000 crime victims in a single year. The capacity of the FBI and related agencies was slashed by the equivalent of more than 1,000 agents.

Between 2014 and 2016, the violent crime rate climbed 7%.

The 2025 cuts are substantially larger and more targeted, and have devastated some groups.

Equal Justice USA, a national organization working to end the death penalty and reduce violence through community-based interventions, shut down in August 2025 after losing more than $3 million in DOJ grants.

Local programs like Baltimore’s LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope lost $1.2 million to provide therapy for gun violence survivors.

“What shocked me the most … was what feels like the utter cruelty of it,” said Adam Rosenberg, who runs the center, referring to the cancellation of the funds.

As of April 2026, the DOJ has not paid out $200 million in approved grants to assist victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

This comes after the department last year allowed more than 100 grants for human trafficking survivors to expire, affecting more than 5,000 victims, despite Congress allocating $88 million for these services.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania warn that cuts to violence prevention programs are likely to lead to increases in gun crime.

What happens next

The initiatives now losing funding are the ones that helped drive crime down in many American cities.

Community members trained in conflict mediation help extinguish tensions before they turn lethal. Youth programs provide alternatives to street economies. Forensic labs process the evidence that solves cases. Reentry programs keep people from cycling back through the system. With each serving a distinct function, together they form the infrastructure of public safety.

As funding for crime prevention from two main sources runs out, whether progress continues depends on what happens next.

Andrea Hagan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It may sound hard to believe, but the almost trillion-dollar U.S. military is struggling to fight cheap drones in its war with Iran.

Iran has built a simple drone, the Shahed, with a motorcycle-type engine, loaded it with explosives and successfully targeted its neighbors’ cities and power plants.

Iran has also hit U.S. military bases with these drones, including an early April 2026 attack on the U.S. Victory Base Complex in Baghdad.

The drones cost between US$20,000 and $50,000 to build. In response, the U.S. military sometimes fires missiles worth more than $1 million to shoot one down.

As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now national security scholar, I believe that math is a problem: The U.S. military for now has a $1 million answer to a $20,000 question. This math tells you almost everything you need to know about one of America’s biggest national security headaches.

And the frustrating part is that the U.S. military watched this happen in Ukraine for years. It knew the threat was coming.

The weapon that changed modern war

The Shahed isn’t impressive because it’s high-tech. It’s impressive because it isn’t.

Inspection of captured Shahed drones has found that many of their parts are made by ordinary commercial companies. That includes processors from a U.S. manufacturer, fuel pumps from a U.K. company and converters from China.

These military components aren’t hard to get. You could find similar parts in factories or farm machinery. That’s exactly what makes the Shahed so tough to deal with.

Russia, which also produces the drone, tolerates losing more than 75% of its Shahed stock because even at those loss rates, it’s winning the math battle against Ukraine. Russia or Iran don’t need every drone to hit its target. They just need to keep sending waves of them until their opponent runs out of expensive missiles to shoot back.

Ukraine, which had no choice but to learn fast, eventually figured out a better answer. Ukraine developed cheap interceptor drones that could slam into Shahed drones before they reached their targets. Each interceptor costs about $1,000 to $2,000, and Ukrainian manufacturers are producing thousands of them per month. That’s better math: a $2,000 interceptor against a $20,000 attacker.

Ukraine’s battlefield experience, as a result, has become one of the most valuable resources in the world, with American and allied forces asking Ukrainian drone experts to share their knowledge.

Why can’t the U.S. churn out a solution of its own? Because the U.S. military doesn’t have a technology problem but a bureaucracy problem.

The Pentagon’s three-legged slowdown

The U.S. Department of Defense typically can’t just buy things. It follows a long, complicated process that can take a decade or more to go from “we need something” to “here it is.” That process runs through three separate bureaucratic systems, each of which can cause years of delay.

First, someone must write a formal document, known as a requirement, that explains exactly what they need and why. A military service, such as the Air Force, for example, drafts up a requirement and routes it through an internal service review within only their branch.

Until recently, this service-vetted requirement went through a Pentagon review process, the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, where all joint services took a look. This process, which the Department of Defense ended in 2025, required approval from military officials.

Even though the joint requirements process was ended, implementation of a new system is far from complete, and the existing culture potentially remains. Under the old requirements process, it took over 800 days to get a requirement approved.

Second, any new program then needs money. This is handled through the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process, a budget cycle designed in 1961. Getting a new program into the budget typically takes more than two years after the requirement is approved, because the military must submit its budget request years in advance. By then, the threat has potentially already moved on.

Third, once a requirement is approved and money allocated, the program then must be developed and built. The average major defense acquisition program now takes almost 12 years from program start just to deliver an initial capability to troops in the field, according to a 2025 Government Accountability Office report.

Add it up and you get a system where the military sees a threat, begs for a solution, argues for money and waits a decade.

Why the system is built this way

The Shahed drone exposed a gap that defense experts have been warning about for years: The U.S. military is very good at building the most advanced, most expensive weapons in the world, but it struggles to build cheap, simple things fast. That is the opposite of what this new kind of warfare demands.

It would be easy, but inaccurate, to blame the military for the decade-long contract process. The real answer is more complicated.

The Pentagon’s lengthy process was designed by the Department of Defense and Congress for a reason. Policymakers created the current system during the Cold War to combat excessive and redundant spending by the separate service branches. The system is built with checkpoints, reviews and approvals to make sure taxpayer money isn’t wasted.

Legacy military contractors also benefit from this dysfunctional process and resist change. They have the capital and know-how to wait out the predictable and stable existing contracts, while vying for new ones. These military contractors rarely need to worry about upstart contractors because they know small companies cannot survive waiting for a decade to secure funding for their prototypes.

The problem is that those rules were built for a world where the biggest threat was another superpower’s expensive jets and missiles. It wasn’t built to fight a flying bomb made from tractor parts. This type of threat requires fast innovation from lean companies, the exact companies that struggle in the current budget process.

What’s changing

There are signs of movement. In August 2025, the Pentagon killed its old requirements process entirely and replaced it with a faster, more flexible system.

However, killing the requirements process dealt with only one leg of the three-legged monster. The 1960s-era budget process that determines how money flows remains largely intact.

The most important reforms still need Congress to act, and Congress moves slowly, too. Congress has launched studies into reforming this system numerous times, with the answers being too politically difficult to implement.

Officials are expanding the use of flexible contracting tools, such as Other Transaction Authority, that let the military skip some traditional rules to get anti-drone technology faster. Yet these flexible contracting tools still represent a small slice of the Defense budget, and their effectiveness is unclear.

Ultimately, instead of using flexible contracting tools to quickly buy new prototypes, the bureaucratically easier solution could be to buy more of the expensive, already approved missiles.

This quick fix would reload the military’s stock of interceptors with existing weapons systems, which is the source of the bad math. The math would get worse and at the same time the operational imperative to find cheaper and better solutions might disappear.

So, as the Shahed keeps flying, the most powerful military in the world is still figuring out the paperwork and looking to other countries for help.

Aaron Brynildson served in the U.S. Air Force from 2016-2025.