A new credit-bearing global experiential learning program designed to build the civic capacities the next generation needs, validated by Harvard and UC Berkeley. Applications open now for August 2026.
Every generation inherits the world it gets. This one is inheriting ours: more complex, more uncertain, and more in need of people who know how to build trust, collaborate, and solve problems across the full complexity of human difference. Tilting Futures has spent 15 years figuring out how to develop those leaders.
Now we have the proof, and we’re building on it.
Beginning August 2026, we are launching Take Action Lab: Civic Innovation, a four-month, credit-bearing global immersion program set in Cape Town, South Africa. It is built on a decade of evidence, refined through years of learning and adaptation, and designed to give young people what it actually takes to act with courage and build something better together.
THE PROBLEM
Polarization is not a problem of ignorance. It is a problem of conditions. The conditions required to interrupt it are very specific: sustained contact across difference, equal status among participants, shared goals, and cooperative work over time. Those conditions are extraordinarily difficult to engineer at home because the familiar fault lines, partisan identities, and status structures that drive polarization are woven into the fabric of everyday life.
THE MODEL
Take Action Lab: Civic Innovation is a structured civic immersion experience with four unique features:
1. Intentionally diverse global cohorts. Each cohort brings together students from the U.S. and 30+ countries working, living, and learning side by side. They navigate unfamiliar terrain together, sharing the same curriculum, the same standards, and the same accountability to each other. The cohort reflects the world’s complexity, and teaches through it.
2. Real-world apprenticeships. Students work alongside community leaders at civil society organizations. They develop the adaptive, human-centered capacities that matter most in an AI-reshaped economy: navigating ambiguity, building trust across difference, and solving problems without clear answers. For many students, this is their first professional apprenticeship, and the skills they build here are what employers increasingly value and what societies urgently need.
3. Shared living and learning. Students are immersed in a curriculum built on more than a decade of experience and evidence, covering power, identity, trust, systems thinking, asset-based design, and civic engagement. And then they live it. In house meetings, around the dinner table, and at their apprenticeships. The possibility for polarization shows up in everyday decisions: how to handle conflict, how to make group choices, how to navigate completely different values about time, money, and responsibility. This is where the daily work of navigating difference happens, and where students build the civic muscle memory that matters most.
4. Credit-bearing and institutionally adoptable. In partnership with the University of Pittsburgh, students are eligible to earn up to a semesters’ worth of academic credits. We are working with a growing coalition of philanthropists and universities to build the credentialing infrastructure that makes this model replicable at scale, so that global civic immersion becomes a standard feature of an undergraduate education.
THE OPPORTUNITY
We are at an inflection point. The demand for evidence-based approaches to trust-building, belonging, pluralism, and civic development has never been higher, and the urgency of investing in the next generation of young people equipped to lead across difference has never been more acute.
Take Action Lab: Civic Innovation is both a programmatic expansion and a systems-change bet. The goal is to serve more students and to make credit-bearing global experiential learning a standard feature of an undergraduate education, not a privilege reserved for the few.
Young people are inheriting fractures they are being asked to navigate without the tools to do so. That is in part the legacy of underinvestment across an entire ecosystem of work. Sustained, globally immersive, cross-difference experience is an essential and chronically underfunded part of the solution. That is the gap philanthropy can close.
Start a Conversation
Aziza Musa, MSW | Chief External Affairs Officer
amusa@tiltingfutures.org | tiltingfutures.org
Read our 2025 Annual Report:
Ready to Apply?
Applications for August 2026 are open now.
About Tilting Futures
Tilting Futures is a nonprofit organization building a worldwide coalition of young people with the skills and networks to solve our most complex global challenges. Our flagship program, Take Action Lab, immerses students ages 17–22 in hands-on apprenticeships and global immersion, blending real-world experience with self-discovery and civic orientation. With 3,000+ alumni from 100+ countries, 80+ university partners and growing, research partnerships with Harvard and UC Berkeley validating our outcomes, and as a founding member of the Peace Corps’ Circle of Service, we are at the forefront of the movement to make credit-bearing global experiential learning a standard part of every undergraduate education in America. Read our 2025 Annual Report.
