From Constitutional Knowledge to Civic Agency: Lessons from Street Civics
Joshua Skrzypczak
UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
Street Civics grew out of a simple idea: young people should understand the constitutional rights and civic institutions that shape their lives. But after nearly two years of community-based civic education with over 100 teens in East Bay California, I came away with a more complicated question:
What happens after a young person learns that they have a constitutional right?
Teaching young people what the Fourth and Fifth Amendments protect is one challenge. Helping them develop the confidence to recognize when those protections matter, ask questions, seek assistance, engage institutions, or advocate for themselves and others is another.
My experience with Street Civics led me to think more carefully about the distance between constitutional knowledge and civic agency. I describe that distance as the civic-legal knowledge gap: the potential gap between knowing one’s rights and possessing the confidence, practical understanding, resources, and sense of agency necessary to exercise them.
This distinction has also changed how I think about the role of community-based nonprofit organizations in civic education. Nonprofits cannot replace schools, courts, government agencies, or other public institutions. But they may be able to help young people make the difficult transition from learning about rights to understanding how those rights operate in everyday civic life.
From Teaching Constitutional Rights to Asking a Different Question
My involvement in community-based civic education began through Light the Candle for Kids, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit I founded. Beginning in 2023, I delivered a series of lessons about American government, constitutional principles, and civic institutions to young people in underserved communities.
Through community-based civic education, I worked with underserved youth to make topics such as constitutional rights, government, voting, and civic participation more accessible and relevant to everyday life. Over the past two years, my experience developing and facilitating Street Civics programs helped me identify a potential gap between constitutional knowledge and the practical ability to exercise one’s rights. This experience prompted me to formulate a broader research question: Does understanding one’s constitutional rights necessarily translate into the confidence, civic agency, and institutional knowledge needed to exercise those rights in everyday life?
The engagement I received encouraged me to continue developing the program. Participants encountered subjects that can otherwise seem distant from everyday experience: the structure of government, constitutional protections, due process, and the rights individuals possess when interacting with public institutions. Based on a limited nymber of programatic comments, I was encouraged to continue my work and my civics nonprofit to another level when starting UCLA https://www.lightthecandleforkids.org/testimonials.
That experience eventually helped inspire a more focused effort through Street Civics.
Street Civics emphasizes making constitutional rights understandable and relevant to situations young people might encounter. Among the subjects I taught were the Fourth Amendment’s protections involving searches and seizures and the Fifth Amendment’s protections involving due process and self-incrimination.
Initially, I thought primarily about whether civic education could improve understanding of these principles.
Over time, I became increasingly interested in a different problem.
A young person might learn what the Fourth Amendment protects. But would that student know when the protection applies? Would the student know where to turn with a question? Would they feel confident asking an authority figure about their rights? Would they feel capable of advocating for themselves or another person?
Likewise, a student might understand the basic meaning of due process without necessarily knowing how to navigate an institution when they believe they have been treated unfairly.
These experiences led me to distinguish between learning a right and developing confidence in one’s ability to exercise it.
As part of developing and improving the program, I gathered participant feedback and program evaluations. Those materials were collected for programmatic purposes and were not gathered under a prospective human-subjects research protocol. I therefore do not present participant-level results, statistical analyses, or causal conclusions from them here.
Instead, I treat my experience administering Street Civics as the source of a question for future study.
The lesson I took from the program was not that Street Civics had scientifically demonstrated a particular effect. It was that rights knowledge and rights confidence should not automatically be assumed to develop together.
Beyond Knowing the Law
Civic education appropriately emphasizes knowledge.
Students should understand the Constitution. They should know how government is structured, which institutions exercise public authority, what protections the Constitution provides, and what opportunities exist for civic participation.
Knowledge is indispensable. It is difficult to exercise a right one does not know exists.
But legal scholarship provides reasons to distinguish knowing law from experiencing law.
In The Common Place of Law, Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey examine what they call legal consciousness—the ways ordinary people understand and experience law in everyday life. Law is encountered not simply as a collection of formal rules but through institutions, relationships, experiences, expectations, and perceptions of authority.
That distinction is particularly relevant to civic education.
A student may know that the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures while still asking:
● When does this protection apply to me?
● How do I recognize when a constitutional issue has arisen?
● Which institution is responsible for protecting this right?
● What should I do if I think the right has been violated?
● Where can I seek reliable assistance?
● Will an institution take my concern seriously?
● Do I feel confident enough to speak?
These are not merely questions about constitutional knowledge. They are questions about capability, institutions, and agency.
The Civic–Legal Knowledge Gap
I use the term civic–legal knowledge gap to describe the potential distance between knowing one’s legal or constitutional rights and possessing the practical understanding, confidence, resources, and sense of agency necessary to exercise them.
The concept is informed by existing scholarship rather than presented here as an empirically established result of Street Civics.
Pascoe Pleasence and Nigel Balmer’s work on legal capability is particularly useful in thinking about this problem. Their scholarship directs attention beyond the possession of legal information toward the broader capabilities people need to recognize and respond to legal problems and access civil justice.
Kathryne Young and Heidi Liu similarly examine the relationship between legal knowledge and access to justice in their article, “What Can Legal Knowledge Do for Access to Justice?” Their work provides a useful framework for asking when legal knowledge affects people’s willingness or ability to pursue legal responses while recognizing that information exists within a larger environment of barriers, resources, and institutions.
For civic education, this suggests that we should ask more than:
Do young people know their rights?
We should also ask:
Do young people understand how those rights operate, how to navigate the institutions responsible for protecting them, and whether they see themselves as capable of acting when those rights are implicated?
Those are related questions, but they are not identical.
Rights Knowledge, Rights Confidence, and Civic Agency
One way of conceptualizing the challenge is as a progression:
Rights Knowledge → Rights Understanding → Rights Confidence → Civic Agency → Civic Participation
The first stage is constitutional literacy. A young person needs to know that a right exists.
The second is understanding. The student needs to grasp what the right means and recognize situations in which it may become relevant.
The third is what I call rights confidence: the belief that one’s rights have practical meaning and that there are actions, resources, or institutions available when those rights are implicated.
From there, civic education may contribute to civic agency—a person’s capacity to see themselves as someone who can ask questions, communicate concerns, advocate for themselves or others, participate in public discussions, or engage civic institutions.
Ultimately, those capacities may support broader forms of civic participation.
This progression should not be understood as an established causal model. It is a conceptual framework generated by my experience with Street Civics and by scholarship on legal consciousness and legal capability. It identifies relationships that I believe deserve more rigorous future study.
The distinction nevertheless matters for how we think about civic education.
A program can successfully explain the Bill of Rights without necessarily teaching a young person what to do when those rights become relevant to their own life.
Institutions Matter Too
The civic–legal knowledge gap cannot be understood entirely from the perspective of the individual.
Rights are exercised through institutions.
Michael Lipsky’s Street-Level Bureaucracy provides an important perspective on this institutional dimension. Public policy is often experienced through encounters with frontline public-service workers and institutions. The implementation of formal rules therefore occurs within real organizational settings characterized by discretion, limited resources, administrative pressures, and human judgment.
For civic education, this creates an important complication.
A textbook can explain what government is formally required to do. But a young person’s understanding of government may also be shaped by what happens when they encounter a school system, police department, court, public agency, or other institution.
This means that the transition from constitutional knowledge to civic agency depends partly on more than what the student knows.
It may also depend on whether institutions appear understandable and accessible; whether young people know how to navigate them; whether they believe questions will be taken seriously; and whether meaningful avenues for participation actually exist.
Civic education therefore sits at the intersection of two responsibilities.
Individuals need knowledge and capabilities to participate.
Institutions need processes through which participation and rights can meaningfully be exercised.
From Civic Knowledge to Civic Voice
This distinction becomes especially important if civic education is understood not merely as the transmission of information but as preparation for democratic participation.
Learning about constitutional rights gives young people a vocabulary for understanding liberty, fairness, governmental authority, due process, and individual rights.
But vocabulary is not the same as voice.
A student can recognize an injustice without knowing how to respond to it. A student can understand the structure of government without knowing how to approach a public institution. And a student can know that citizens possess a voice in a democracy without believing that their own voice will matter.
If civic education is intended to strengthen young people’s capacity to become advocates for themselves, their communities, and principles of justice, then it may need to connect constitutional knowledge with opportunities to practice civic participation.
That could include discussing realistic civic situations, learning where reliable assistance can be found, understanding how public processes operate, practicing communication with institutions, deliberating with peers, meeting community leaders, participating in service, or developing community projects.
The goal should not be to tell young people what political positions to hold.
It should be to help them develop the knowledge and capabilities necessary to formulate their own views, understand their rights and responsibilities, engage institutions, and participate meaningfully in civic life.
Why Community-Based Nonprofits Matter
This is also where Street Civics changed how I understand the role of nonprofit organizations.
Schools remain central to civic education, and community organizations should not attempt to replace them. Government institutions likewise possess responsibilities and authority that nonprofits do not.
But community-based nonprofits can occupy an important space between individuals and formal institutions.
Schools necessarily operate within curriculum requirements, instructional schedules, staffing constraints, administrative responsibilities, and other institutional demands. Community organizations can sometimes complement their work through smaller settings, sustained relationships, and programs responsive to particular communities.
For civic education, that can mean more than offering another lesson about the Constitution.
A community organization can create a setting where young people ask questions. It can connect abstract constitutional principles to situations they recognize. It can introduce students to civic institutions and community resources. It can create opportunities for discussion, leadership, service, and advocacy.
Most importantly, it can provide opportunities to practice having a civic voice.
The distinctive contribution of nonprofits is therefore not that they are inherently more effective than schools or government institutions. It is that their proximity to communities can sometimes give them flexibility to build relationships and connect formal civic knowledge with lived experience.
In this sense, community organizations may help address the space between rights knowledge and rights exercise.
Nonprofits as Civic Bridges
Community-based organizations can also help information travel in both directions.
Formal institutions provide education, legal protections, public services, and opportunities for participation:
Public institutions → communities
But community organizations can also listen to the people they serve and communicate recurring questions, experiences, and barriers:
Communities → public institutions
That second relationship deserves greater attention.
A nonprofit working consistently with young people may encounter questions that are difficult to capture through a conventional measure of civic knowledge. Students may understand a constitutional concept while remaining uncertain about which institution to approach, how to communicate a concern, or whether their participation can make a difference.
A responsible nonprofit should not interpret these experiences as permission to claim that it speaks for an entire community. Nor should programmatic feedback automatically be transformed into research evidence.
But sustained community engagement can reveal questions worth asking.
Community organizations can bring those questions into conversations with educators, policymakers, public institutions, families, and other nonprofits. They can convene stakeholders, build partnerships, connect young people with resources, and advocate for additional opportunities for civic learning and participation.
A nonprofit can therefore serve not only as a provider of civic education but as a potential bridge connecting constitutional principles, community experience, and public institutions.
From a Community Program to a Research Question
One of the most important lessons I learned from Street Civics is methodological as well as substantive.
Community work can generate important research questions without the community program itself being retroactively presented as formal research.
Street Civics began as a civic-education initiative, not as a prospective human-subjects research study. The feedback I encountered through that work helped me recognize questions that I had not fully appreciated when I began.
Why might constitutional knowledge develop more readily than rights confidence?
What additional experiences help young people develop civic voice?
What makes someone feel capable of approaching an institution?
Can community organizations help connect constitutional literacy with legal capability?
What role does institutional responsiveness play?
And under what circumstances does knowledge eventually become civic participation?
Those questions can become the basis of future research conducted prospectively, with an appropriate research design and institutional oversight.
A future study might separately examine constitutional knowledge, rights confidence, individual and collective efficacy, perceptions of institutional responsiveness, and opportunities for civic participation. It could ask which forms of civic education influence each component and investigate where the transition from knowledge to agency becomes difficult.
That would be a different undertaking from the programmatic evaluation that helped inspire these questions.
From Constitutional Knowledge to Civic Agency
Street Civics began for me as an effort to help young people understand the Constitution.
It ultimately led me to a more difficult problem.
Teaching rights is necessary, but knowledge alone may not be sufficient to produce civic agency.
If civic education aims to prepare young people for democratic life, constitutional literacy should be understood as a foundation rather than an endpoint.
The deeper challenge is helping people move from knowing their rights to understanding how those rights operate; from understanding institutions to knowing how to approach them; from recognizing a potential injustice to possessing the confidence to speak; and from possessing civic knowledge to seeing themselves as capable participants in their communities.
Community-based nonprofits cannot accomplish that transformation alone. They cannot substitute for schools, government agencies, courts, or other public institutions.
But they can contribute to the civic infrastructure surrounding those institutions.
They can teach. They can listen. They can connect people with resources. They can create opportunities for participation. They can provide spaces where young people practice using their voices. And they can bring community-informed questions back into conversations about education and public policy.
For me, the experience of Street Civics ultimately produced a research question larger than the program itself:
How do we move from constitutional knowledge to rights confidence- and from rights confidence to meaningful civic agency?
That is the question I hope to continue exploring through law, public policy, history, and social science while here at UCLA.
Selected References
Ewick, Patricia, and Susan S. Silbey. The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Lipsky, Michael. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. 30th Anniversary Expanded Edition. Russell Sage Foundation, 2010.
Pleasence, Pascoe, and Nigel J. Balmer. “Legal Capability and Access to Civil Justice.” In Research Handbook on Civil Justice. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025.
Young, Kathryne M., and Heidi H. Liu. “What Can Legal Knowledge Do for Access to Justice?” Duke Law Journal 75, no. 4 (2026): 643–706.
Author’s Note: This article presents my reflections on developing and facilitating Street Civics, a community-based civic education initiative. It draws on my practical experience and published scholarship to explore questions about constitutional knowledge, civic agency, and the role of local nonprofit organizations. It does not report or analyze participant survey data or make empirical claims about program outcomes.