ExploraVision competition gives students in grades K– 12 the chance to create their own visions of the future. Student teams select and research a current technology and then explore what it could be like 20 years from now. Members of the four first-place teams will each receive a $10,000 US Savings Bond and an expenses-paid trip to Washington, DC to be recognized for their achievements.

This report provides critical information on the costs, funding sources, financing
strategies and sustainability of youth engagement. Included are also several profiles of
youth engagement programs that have implemented various promising strategies to finance
and sustain their work.

The Arts Action Center has a range of resources to take action on behalf of the arts. You can check the latest arts policy issues and find tools to identify and communicate
effectively with local, state, and federal elected representatives and media outlets.

The Health Resources and Services Administration has a new funding opportunity. Up to
$375,000 will be awarded for demonstration projects to improve health care access in
rural areas. RFP deadline: October 16. For more program information, click here.

This program awards up to $10,000 for collaborative initiatives that support the vision
objectives in Healthy People 2010, which address examinations and prevention, eye
diseases, injury and safety and vision rehabilitation. Deadline: August 29, 2008.

This National Council on Aging program is offering funds to help multigenerational and
civic engagement projects document effective local approaches and impact. Deadline for
concept paper: August 1, 2008.

Schools can be more than vibrant places for learning, they can also be year-round hubs
that connect families and communities to resources and services. This brief from the
National Human Services Assembly looks at schools that doing just that and outlines
what it would take to make school-linked services available in a greater number of
communities. For more great tools, check out the National Assembly's Family
Strengthening Center.

How can we improve the odds for young people? This Forum for Youth Investment Ready by
21 webinar examined the major child and youth development frameworks and offered
real-world experiences of how a coordinating a framework can improve youth programs and
policies -- and outcomes for children and youth.

This toolkit from Next Gen toolkit is designed to help organizations collect and use
local survey and focus group data about frontline youth workers to make the case for
investing in workforce development. The tools include a guide, survey and focus group
instruments, data entry and analysis worksheet and a sample presentation. (Find more
resources in the July 2008 Next Gen Bulletin, now online.)

Run to Vote combines the sport of track and field with your pledge to vote in 2008. A nonpartisan voting drive led by students and teachers from Granville Central High School in Stem, North Carolina, the Run to Vote team is traveling through 48 states to register people to vote, and collecting pledges to participate in the election this November. For every person that registers to vote or pledges to vote, one of the teachers, or volunteers from the team, will run the equivalent lap on a quarter mile track. Through July 5, 2008, the team has run 814 laps, registered 153 people in 18 states and collected more than a thousand citizen pledges to vote.