2026 Award Recipient
EmmieWolf-Dubin
Project State of the Students TN
Project State of the Students TN
Emmie is the founder of State of the Students TN (SotS), an organization dedicated to making grassroots civic organizing accessible to students across Middle Tennessee.
Emmie planned her first rally as a high school sophomore. The crowd was small, but the lesson was big: breaking into the organizing space takes years of relationship building and hard-won contacts that most students simply don’t have. She decided to change that. State of the Students was built to give any student the resources, mentorship, and connections to make their voice heard.
SotS operates in two ways: the organizing team rallies students around issues affecting Tennessee youth, and students can tap into SotS’s library of guides, press release templates, media contacts, and micro-grants to take action themselves.
Since its founding, SotS has hosted seven major rallies drawing roughly 2,000 attendees, circulated open letters with hundreds of signatories, and reached thousands of students across Tennessee.
A student-led platform that provides resources, mentorship, and organizing support to empower youth civic engagement across Middle Tennessee.
