Sophomore with Super PAC

From these discussions, Hwang launched the National Youth Association in 2010. Hwang was elected president when the association was founded and has held the reins ever since.

The NYA is composed of 90 volunteers that represent over 750,000 youths across the nation, with the goal of influencing federal policy in three main domains: youth unemployment, the environment and college affordability. In late 2010, Hwang’s group created a super political action committee.

“Our idea was to fight fire with fire and create our own super PAC so that all these youth issues can be at the forefront of the election,” Hwang said.

Hwang explained that the creation of the independent expenditure committee is a reflective, realistic worldview of the political process.

“In America, politics is run by elections, and elections are run by money,” Hwang said. He explained that the NYA plans to choose specific elections where its resources can make the most difference.

Through the super PAC, the NYA plans to pay for television ads and direct mail campaigns spreading awareness about its core issues. If the voters’ concerns are made public, Hwang said, candidates will be forced to make public pledges about these issues. “This is really the only way for us to create change,” he explained.

The NYA plans to spend money in the 2012 presidential campaign and several congressional races. Hwang said these efforts will lay the groundwork for future change once NYA-supported candidates are elected to public office.

To promote the group’s interests, Hwang has taken both grassroots and top-down approaches to advocacy. He has met personally with policy officials and administrative officials from the White House’s Department of Education in order to discuss the NYA’s policy platform and has also spent his weekends attending fundraisers and giving talks at conferences. Recently, he was invited to University of California at Berkeley to discuss college affordability — one of the hot topics in both the 2010 and 2012 elections — given the campus protests against high college tuition.

“The funny thing that we found is that [the politicians] are talking about the future, but you don’t have a single [youth] in the room,” he said. “How can you write the opinions of our futures without asking us? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Hwang said that the group will spend most of its time and effort over the next few months raising as much money as possible in order to call attention to the issues the group represents.

According to Zhan Okuda-Lim ’15, a member of the board of directors, the NYA has also organized several local-level roundtable meetings between public leaders and youth stakeholders.

“Tim Hwang has taken the time to establish networks with youth organizations, youth leaders and other stakeholders throughout the country through various venues, and under his leadership, the NYA has grown substantially since August 2010,” Okuda-Lin said in an email.

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Erich Reimer, chairman of the Board of Directors of NYA and a junior at Penn, praised Hwang.

“There could be no one better to lead NYA than Tim,” Reimer said in an email. “He has been involved as a leader for young people for so many years — he has both the credentials and experience to get the job done as well as the vision to see the potential of how things can become.”