We are living in an age of American gerontocracy.
With an average age of 58.9 years as of the start of the session last year, this Congress is the third-oldest in United States history. Twenty four members of Congress — more than half of whom are running for reelection in 2026 — are 80 or older. At seventy-nine, Trump is the oldest president to be sworn into office, having broken Biden’s previous record of 78.
As octogenarians hold on to power, adults often tell children that they will change the world — once they grow up, that is. Yet in a small, rural town off of the 101 in California’s Salinas Valley, teens aren’t waiting for adulthood to get started.
That town is Gonzales, and those teens are the members of the Gonzales Youth Council, a group of high school students with a unique ability to make policy and spearhead public projects.
On January 10, on a large lot between the middle and high schools, the council opened the first phase of the Gonzales Community Center Complex. The community center includes a teen center, courtyard, amphitheater, and library, which will provide students access to the internet, printers, and computers. The city will now continue with the second phase of constructing the 23,314-square-foot complex, which will add a community hall, meeting rooms, fitness center, and kitchen.
Former youth council members developed the idea for a community center in response to Gonzales’ lack of a dedicated space for teens to work on homework and group projects after school. Students had been relying on studying in fast food restaurants and were staying out late at night, sparking safety concerns.
“I’m happy that students now have a place where they can feel safe or free at the community center, without relying on going to McDonald’s or going to a Taco Bell or going to any fast food places,” said Ricardo Rodriguez-Perez, a current youth commissioner.
Funding for the community center includes millions from a voter-approved sales tax passed in 2020, donations from local families and businesses, $5 million in state funding from State Senator Anna Caballero, federal grants, and a $9.8 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
With a total of $28 million in funding, the community center is the largest public project in Gonzales’ 152-year history, and the youth council proposed the project initially to the city council, contributed to its design, and raised millions for its funding.
Such a feat might appear surprising in a town of 9,000 people, where the average income falls below the state and national averages, and less than 10 percent of residents 25 years or older have a college degree. Yet, Michelle Slade, a consultant who serves as an advisor to the Gonzales Youth Council, pointed to the town’s small population as a reason for the council’s creation and its success.
“Whenever I look back and think about what’s so special, I do think it’s such a tight-knit, small community that really cares,” Slade said.
Youth commissioners and council members met with elected officials to request the funding. City manager Carmen Gil spoke to the importance of their direct involvement.
“A lot of times, city officials can go and say, this is what we want, and we’re speaking on behalf of the people,” Gil said. “But when the people and especially young people speak for themselves and say, this is what we want, and here’s why we need it, and here’s my personal story as to why it would make a difference, that speaks louder.”
The community center is the culmination of over a decade of youth leadership in Gonzales. In 2013, seeking to promote youth voices in a town where over 40 percent of residents are 18 years old or younger, the city council appointed two youth commissioners. The youth commissioner role was itself a youth idea, proposed to the city government by Jeffrey Alvarez and Yesenia Camacho, who served as founding commissioners. Alvarez and Camacho subsequently advocated for the city council to create a youth council, which launched in 2015.
“I saw that decisions were being made about the youth in our community without young people in the room, and a lot of times the decisions that were made around programming would all happen behind closed doors,” Alvarez said. “I felt like we didn’t just need programs, we needed representation on the programming and the planning around youth activities in the city.”
Alvarez identified “earning credibility as young people” to be the largest challenge for early members of the council.
“The adults in the city, although they’re giving us a platform to listen to our ideas, we needed to come up with something — not only an idea, but how we were gonna accomplish that,” Alvarez said. “We had to prove that youth participation was valuable and not just symbolic.”
Today, the Gonzales Youth Council consists of three youth commissioners and six council members. The city selects the youth commissioners, who in turn selects the council members from an open application. Although the council’s adult advisors and city officials provide guidance and support, the youth council has the ability to make its own decisions about what policies to propose or projects to initiate.
From there, the youth commissioners serve as a bridge between the youth council and the city council. City council meetings include built-in time for the commissioners to present the youth council’s ideas to the city council as formal agenda items, which then enter the local judicial process to be approved by the city council.
Far from a hindrance, the age of the youth council members has proven to be an advantage. In 2017, after residents largely failed to respond to a mail survey on the police’s relationship with the community, the youth council conducted the survey in person, with the idea that residents, especially immigrants, were more comfortable speaking with teens.
The success of the Gonzales Youth Council has already inspired the creation of other similar councils in the neighboring cities of Greenfield, Salinas, and Soledad. Now, the youth council ought to serve as a model for more local governments to give youth a voice statewide. It is crucial that seats on these councils are not merely symbolic leadership positions — instead, they must provide opportunities for the youth to contribute directly to the policymaking process.
In a society that equates seniority with ethos, leaders across California should look to Gonzales as an example of what can be accomplished when local governments view youth not merely as future leaders, but as current stakeholders whose lived experience enables them to understand and address the issues facing their generation.
Featured Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
