Many young people — like most adults — spend a lot of time glued to their phones, and schools are trying to figure out how to deal with this reality.
Over half of school leaders say that phone use has a negative impact on academic performance, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and 72% of high school teachers say that “students being distracted by their cellphones in the classroom is a major problem,” according to Pew. Schools and school districts are moving fast to address the problem: As of last month, nine states have enacted policies restricting cell phone use in schools or banning it outright, according to KFF, and more states are likely to do so in the near future.
The nonprofit Young Futures believes school phone policies need to be implemented thoughtfully, with input from everyone involved — including young people. The group’s new “Call Me Maybe” funding challenge aims to generate strategies for parents, educators and schools to help teens and preteens manage phone use at school. For the challenge, Young Futures will award a total of $500,000 in one-year grants of from $25,000 to $100,000 to up to 10 organizations. Nonprofits as well as schools and districts with 501c3 status are eligible to apply. (Applications to the Call Me Maybe Challenge will be accepted through April 9).
Young Futures was founded just one year ago, and as Executive Director Katya Hancock told IP at the time, “We really have one goal, and that is to make it easier to grow up in the digital age.” Young Futures’ founding funders include Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, the Susan Crown Exchange and The Goodness Web. So far, organizations that have collaborated with Young Futures on specific challenges include the Foundation for Social Connection, the Center for Digital Thriving (which has also received funding from Pivotal and Susan Crown) and YR Media.
There’s a corporate philanthropy involved in this latest effort. The social media platform Pinterest partnered with Young Futures on the Call Me Maybe Challenge, with Pivotal Ventures and the Susan Crown Exchange also providing support. Pinterest’s corporate giving emphasizes emotional wellbeing and youth mental health, among other causes. As CEO Bill Ready wrote in the company’s 2024 ESG Impact Report. “We reached a milestone of $20 million invested to date in more than 60 nonprofit organizations around the world that are working to advance youth mental health and emotional wellbeing.” Meanwhile, as IP’s Philip Rojc and Ade Adeniji have both reported, Pinterest’s billionaire cofounder Ben Silbermann and his wife Divya have signed the Giving Pledge.
According to Hancock, Pinterest is particularly interested in helping young people be less distracted in schools, and introduced the idea of partnering on the challenge.
“At Pinterest, we believe that in the hands of students, smartphones should be tools, not distractions,” wrote Alise Marshall, Pinterest’s senior director of corporate affairs, in an emailed statement. “As phones grow more prevalent in our nation, we have an opportunity to proactively shape a future where young people learn to engage with technology in safe, responsible ways. This challenge empowers students and schools to find solutions that work for them.”
How Young Futures is meeting the moment with a “rapid response challenge”
Young Futures offers two $1 million funding challenges a year to help nonprofits develop and grow good ideas. Previous challenges include Lonely Hearts Club, which supported organizations working to encourage youth connection and belonging, and Under Pressure, which focused on ways to alleviate the pressure and stress young people face. Another challenge, Here Comes the Fun, which will explore safe digital play and gaming, will be unveiled later this month.
Grant recipients through the challenges, which Young Futures calls “YF Innovators,” participate in a five-month “Young Futures Academy,” which provides mentorship and resources to help participants develop organizational and leadership skills, and scale their ideas. Hancock said that the YF Innovators develop a tightly knit community, and the organization convenes periodic gatherings to bring them together. “Once a YF Innovator, always a YF Innovator,” she said.
According to Hancock, Call Me Maybe is a little different from the organization’s other challenges because of its short timeline. It came together and was launched quickly based on the urgency and timeliness of the issue.
“We’re calling it a rapid-response funding challenge,” she said. “We wanted to launch this one quickly, because we want to fund some solutions and get money in the hands of nonprofits and schools so that we can help support some solutions that can be tested. Because right now, there’s a real window of time where schools are putting policies in place, and we want to make sure those policies are effective.”
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In fact, many students don’t consider current school phone policies effective, according to research that Young Futures conducted in collaboration with the organization In Tandem. Eighty-eight percent of teens surveyed attended schools with phone policies, and rated them just 5.7 out of 10 for effectiveness.
These young people didn’t object to having policies restricting phone use in school, but they wanted the policies to strike a balance. Overall, most young people viewed phones as both a distraction and a necessity, and believed that “an ‘ideal solution’ would bar them from their phones during instructional time, while still allowing them to hold onto and access their devices outside of learning spaces — whether to complete schoolwork, listen to music or to stay connected with family and friends,” according to challenge materials.
Young Futures insists that students need a voice in developing school phone policies — and found that this isn’t often the case. Only four of 42 teen survey respondents were included in discussions of their schools’ phone policies; three of those four rated their schools’ policy highly effective, according to challenge materials. Youth engagement in the “design, execution and evaluation” of proposed solutions is one of the requirements for participation in the challenge.
“What’s consistent across the board is that educators need support in shaping and enforcing policies, and young people need a seat at the table in designing them,” Hancock said when the challenge was announced. “When students are involved, policies are more practical, more effective, and more likely to be followed. This challenge is about helping schools create solutions that actually work.”
Incorporating digital literacy education into school phone policies
Young Futures is also convinced that to be effective, school phone policies need to include a proactive digital literacy education component. “One thing that we’re really adamant about is that you can’t just either ban phones or strongly restrict them without helping young people develop a healthy relationship with technology, as well,” Hancock said. “If there’s a ban or a restriction policy, it should come with digital literacy education, so that we’re taking advantage of this window of time with teens and preparing them for adulthood. Because there isn’t going to be a ban when they’re freshmen in their dorm room in college.”
One educator the Young Futures team consulted when they were developing the challenge believed that while phone restrictions in some form are needed, he wasn’t sure how they could be effectively implemented at a school like the Brooklyn high school, where he teaches, which has 4,000 students. In the meantime, he has taken it upon himself to offer digital literacy education in his classroom.
“He’s a biology teacher, and he talks to his students about what’s going on in their brains when they are on their phones,” Hancock said. “He talks to them about technology and the science of dopamine crashes, etc. He said, ‘It really lands with my students.’ Because teens are super smart and they deserve to have this information about what’s going on in their brains when they’re using tech, and how to use it in a healthy manner. So we believe that digital literacy is a very big part of the puzzle, and it isn’t being addressed when folks are just saying, ‘Ban the phones! Ban the phones!’”
