My name is Cade Kriscunas. For years, I had a front-row seat to how much responsibility can change a young person. That's because it changed me.

I entered high school expecting to stay mostly uninvolved. I imagined it as somewhere I would go, do what I needed to do, and leave. Long story short, over the next four years, I became increasingly involved in student life.

More important than any position, though, was what that involvement required of me. I was trusted with responsibility. I had opportunities to try ideas that worked and plenty that didn't. I learned how difficult it can be to get people involved, how much culture affects what people are willing to do, and how differently you see a community when you begin to feel some ownership over it.

My experiences in athletics, entrepreneurship, and leadership have taught me a great deal about myself. More importantly, they gave me questions worth asking. Those questions eventually became The Standard Project.

TSP is still developing. That's intentional. I am a young person myself. I don't have all the answers about how young people should live, nor does this project exist to provide them. What I do have is proximity to many of the experiences TSP explores and a growing conviction that young people are capable of far more than is sometimes asked of them.

The project continues to be shaped through research, conversations, and feedback from students, educators, and people with far more experience in youth development than I have. As TSP grows, that process will continue. The people who participate in these experiences should have a meaningful role in determining what they become.

Because the idea at the center of it all is ultimately quite simple:

Young people have more influence than they think, more responsibility than they realize, and a greater ability to create change than they have been led to believe.