National Youth Rights Association
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The National Youth Rights Association is the largest Youth Rights group in the United States, with several thousand members. NYRA proposes lessening and removing various legal restrictions that are imposed on young people but not adults, for example, the voting age, drinking age, curfews, and the like. NYRA also favors easier access to legal emancipation for young people and is generally opposed to compulsory school attendance laws.
NYRA's current Executive Director is Alex Koroknay-Palicz. He has overseen the organization for several years. As its key spokesman he has been featured on CNN, Fox News, PBS, the New York Times, LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, as well as many others, on youth rights issues such as the voting and drinking ages.
Its slogan, in reference to the youth rights movement and its aims to remove the last existing legal causes for discrimination (age), is "the last civil rights movement (http://www.oneandfour.org/archives/2005/04/the_last_civil.html)". The slogan also refers to the theory that removing the first discrimination people experience (age) will reduce or eliminate all other forms.
Background
The youth rights movement first utilized the internet to help the struggle in 1991, with the creation of the Y-Rights listserv mailing list. Two members of that original internet presence, Matthew Walcoff and Matt Herman, began a non-profit organization out of that mailing list known as ASFAR. Not too long after ASFAR was founded, a Rockville, Maryland high school student named Avram Hein began a youth rights group called YouthSpeak. At the same time, a third youth from Canada, Joshua Gilbert, was starting a youth rights organization for his country, CYRA. Walcoff, Hein and Gilbert all met through ASFAR, and decided to start a non-profit corporation to help unify the youth rights movement, which at that point consisted of almost a dozen different groups around North-America and the world. They eventually joined with Herman and created NYRA, the National Youth Rights Association. By June 1998, NYRA was incorporated as a non-profit benefit organization with intention to lead the Youth Rights political movement in the United States.
The National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) was founded in 1998 by the original founders of ASFAR because of the desire to create a moderate, pragmatic organization in the Youth Rights Movement. NYRA is led by Alex Koroknay-Palicz and its significant accomplishments to date include several appearances on CNN, increased awareness of Youth Rights among the youth service field, and its campaign to lower the voting age in Takoma Park, Maryland.
So far 2005 has been a significant year for NYRA. In late March, several NYRA members traveled to Vermont in support of a bill lowering the drinking age to eighteen. They visited numerous colleges and signed up over 2000 new supporters. They participated in a debate at the Vermont state house and were significantly covered by the media. Meanwhile in Washington state, a new NYRA-Olympia chapter testified in support of a constitutional amendment to lower the state's voting age to sixteen.