About Leaders 4SC
Training the next generation of civic leaders
Young people who know how to understand an issue, care about its impact, and act to make change.
Our mission
Leaders 4SC exists to train the next generation of civic leaders. We do it by teaching the skills that make change possible: clear thinking, persuasive speaking, argumentative writing, collaboration, and creative problem-solving.
Our story
Leaders 4SC (Leaders 4 Social Civics) began as a summer workshop to give students something their schools rarely offer: a real, rigorous, hands-on civics and leadership experience. It grew out of the organization that Priten and Chandani Shah co-founded in 2013 — now Academy 4 Social Civics — and has run in Boston, fully online during the pandemic (reaching students nationwide), and in New York, before returning home to Cambridge in 2026. Leaders 4SC is hosted by Academy 4 Social Civics, a nonprofit devoted to interdisciplinary civic education.
What we believe
Middle schoolers can handle the big questions.
Hand a ten-year-old a real question — should phones be allowed in class? who decides what's true online? — and they'll argue it with more energy than most adults. Leaders 4SC is built on that belief. Leadership is a set of skills that can be practiced like any other, and middle school is not too early to start. We're non-partisan on purpose: we don't tell students what to conclude about an issue. We teach them how to reason about it, and how to listen to someone who disagrees.
Our approach
The Know–Care–Act model
Know
Students gain real understanding of how societal systems work, what today's pressing challenges are, and where their community fits into the bigger picture. Each day opens with a topic discussion that draws on history, economics, psychology, philosophy, civics, and science.
- →What are the pressing challenges of our time?
- →How do they affect my community and the world?
- →Where can I find reliable information and go deeper?
Care
Knowledge alone doesn't move anyone. Students connect each issue to their own values and lived experience, and learn why others should care too. This is where a topic stops being an assignment and becomes theirs.
- →Why does this issue matter to me?
- →How does it affect the people around me?
- →Why should others care, and how do I bring them along?
Act
Students turn understanding and conviction into a concrete piece of advocacy — a speech, an op-ed, a pitch, a plan. They practice the real skills of change-making: research, argument, persuasion, negotiation, collaboration, and presentation.
- →What specific action can I take to make a difference?
- →How do I work with others for greater impact?
- →What tools, people, and organizations can I draw on?
What we mean by “civic leader”
A civic leader has curiosity, a sense of justice, intellectual humility, and compassion; recognizes the equality of every person; acts with responsibility, self-respect, and trustworthiness; and is visionary and action-oriented — able to imagine a better future and take the first step toward it. Everything we teach is in service of these habits of mind.
Our pedagogical approach
We treat our role as one of care. We respect students' full personhood and lives outside the program; we build a genuinely safe space for disagreement; and we prize skills over memorized content, because the specific facts matter far less to long-term growth than the ability to engage with new ideas for the rest of one's life. We stay neutral about what students should conclude, and rigorous about how they get there.
Meet the people behind the program.
Or see what this summer looks like — Summer 2027 applications are open, and registering by April 1 saves 10%.