At just 17 years old, Audrey Samora wants to make a difference in her community by influencing public policy, and a local nonprofit is now paying her to do so. 

A senior at Young Women’s Leadership Academy in San Antonio ISD, Samora is part of an inaugural class of the Leaders of Tomorrow, a new program for young people between ages 16 and 24 who are paid $2,500 stipends to support their advocacy efforts. 

“I think young people are tired of feeling like they can’t do anything,” Samora said.

That’s why young people like her are “coming to the front.” 

Youth advocacy group UP Partnership created the fellowship program through a grant from national nonprofit Strive Together. The goal is to “elevate youth voices, specifically around policy work,” said Christina Martinez, managing director of public engagement for UP.  

UP — which stands for “unlocking potential” — often works informally with youth. The new fellowship program will help “formalize training” for young people who want to get civically engaged with the city, county, local schools and colleges, Martinez added. 

Fellows will learn how to interpret data and public policy, and are required to dedicate at least 10 hours each month of the program for training and advocacy. 

“We are asking for a lot of time from them,” Martinez, a current school board member for San Antonio ISD, said. “We want them to be comfortable showing up to a city council meeting, or a county commissioners’ meeting and stand up and give public comments … We want them engaged even in their local school boards.” 

Most of the fellows are no stranger to community advocacy, most are already part of groups around the city dedicated to community service. 

Samora, for example, is part of Project WORTH, a teen development program within the city’s health department focused on mental health, which is where she first heard about the UP Partnership fellowship. 

The inaugural cohort is made up of 20 young people who were selected from more than 100 applicants from all over the Bexar County region, and represent several public school districts and higher education institutions. Two of the group’s members are recent college graduates. 

Leona Daniel-Fletcher, 18, is a marketing and management freshman at Texas A&M University-San Antonio who joined Leaders of Tomorrow because she’s passionate about giving young people a larger platform and equity in education. 

Leona Daniel-Fletcher (second from the left) is part of a fellowship of young people getting paid for civic engagement, an initiative from UP Partnership meant to influence local leaders into investing more in youth and education services. Credit: Courtesy / UP Partnership

“[The program] gives us the opportunity to talk about different things, and decrease the fear of stepping into different rooms with different people of different ages and say what’s on our minds,” she said. 

UP Partnership expects the fellows to create policy recommendations and plans to put those recommendations in front of the public by the end of the year-long program. 

The fellowship is not the first time UP Partnership has tried to influence elected officials in hopes of diverting more public funds and resources for youth services. 

During the city’s charter review last year, UP Partnership tried to get a proposal in front of voters that would’ve asked them if they wanted to reserve 20% of the city’s budget for youth services.  

City leaders didn’t go for it, but that hasn’t dampened the nonprofit’s resolve. 

“I think one of the things that we learned [during the charter review] was how important it is to really bring the people that are most impacted by the challenges we seek to address to the table,” Martinez said. 

Using a “civic influencer model” through the fellowship program, UP Partnership hopes it can inch closer to its ultimate goal: unlocking $330 million in public funding for youth services and increasing post-secondary enrollment in the region to 70% by 2030. 

While UP focuses on preserving current youth services given recent budget cut discussions at the city, there are some signs residents are paying more attention to youth and education issues. 

Earlier this week, Samora went to a county commissioners’ meeting in support of a proclamation by County Judge Peter Sakai recognizing Sept. 22-26 as “High School Voter Registration Week” in Bexar County. 

A recent survey asking San Antonio residents to rank where they’d like public dollars to go for the 2026 fiscal year puts youth services as 12th out of a list of 20. For the 2025 fiscal year survey, youth services ranked 18th. 

Hand drawn signs from the ‘Youth Voice Panel’, created during UP Partnership’s Future Ready Practitioner Conference in 2024, lines the outside of the UP conference room. Credit: Amber Esparza for the San Antonio Report

During recent city elections, candidates faced more questions about education and youth issues than usual.

Political science experts also point to a trend of young people caring more about community issues over partisan politics, meaning UP Partnership’s fellowship program may be striking while the iron is hot. 

Jon Taylor, chair of the political science and geography department at University of Texas at San Antonio, said that while young people are not going to vote in droves, there is data suggesting younger generations are driving nonpartisan civic engagement. 

“That’s somewhere where UP Partnership might actually be effective,” Taylor said. “By encouraging younger members of the community to engage in activities that really do make a difference in the community.” 

Using a civic engagement model with young people is also not unique: San Antonio is home to several youth organizations at the city, county and community level, though these are unpaid. 

Daniel-Fletcher will use her stipend to help with family costs and traveling to and from her home in Schertz to TAMU-SA. Samora, who’s still in high school, plans to use her stipend for college, where she’ll most likely study public policy or law. 

Both say they plan to take the local government scene by storm.

Samora wants lawmakers to know this: “We are going to be taking your job someday, and so our voice matters just as much as anybody else.”