Sam Hiner ’25 advocates for young people

Sam Hiner ’25 sees his nonprofit, the Young People’s Alliance, becoming “the AARP for young people.”

“That’s our long-term goal,” Hiner said.

The Tar Heel and his childhood friend Mick Tobin, a Duke University graduate, have already earned a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Social Impact list for their bipartisan social change organization.

They co-founded YPA in May 2020. “I was seeing all these things happening in the state legislatures and frankly felt like we had no control as young people of our democracy,” said Hiner, a native of Mooresville, North Carolina.

He and Tobin began emailing politicians about issues negatively impacting their generation: social media addiction, manipulative algorithms, child marriage, road safety and access to education, careers and housing.

“Even though it sounds like a number of different things, I think it all is interconnected because it’s all about access to the American dream,” said Hiner, who studied economics and sociology at Carolina. “We don’t have access to opportunity, affordability and community.”

Once Hiner and Tobin headed to the Triangle for college, YPA took off. They established YPA chapters at Carolina and Duke, organizing and mobilizing their contemporaries through student conversations, events and meetings with legislators.

YPA’s reach quickly grew, with 65 chapters and 1,800 members on campuses throughout North Carolina and gradually nationwide.

The people they reached saw the work being done by Hiner and his collaborators — YPA has five full-time employees and 70-plus part-time workers — as valid because they were the same age.

“Being students ourselves gave us better insights into the challenges our generation was facing,” Hiner said. “We saw that disconnect between what was happening on campus and the policy that needed to be made.”

It helped that YPA got results. The group contributed to existing efforts in North Carolina to pass legislation ending child marriage and protecting teen drivers. Work done as part of the group’s Human-Like Artificial Intelligence Coalition recently led to the introduction of bills in several states providing protections to children using AI.

YPA has also found success, Hiner said, because it prioritizes issues older adults aren’t considering.

For example, YPA met with North Carolina state legislators and drafted a bill on social media algorithm issues. “They understood that kids were stuck on their phones, but they didn’t really know why,” Hiner said. “Us being able to come in and say, ‘No, there are actually manipulative design features keeping us online even when we don’t want to be online. We want social media as a place where we can connect, but we don’t need it to be designed to be addictive.’”

While that specific bill — and similar legislation at the federal level — died, Hiner said the effort represented the power young people can have with politicians. “These are regular people, and you can actually change their minds,” Hiner said.

Now based in Washington, D.C., Hiner continues to lobby and meet with politicians. He’s also in charge of YPA’s strategy and is working on its upcoming campaign, “Declaration for the American Dream.”

He’s learned that young people are not monolithic. Nor are their opinions “defined by what youth activists think.”

“Getting to go to UNC, where folks are from North Carolina and it’s not just elites from across the country, was really important for me,” Hiner said.

The AARP has been around since 1958, and Hiner wants YPA to have similar longevity. When he gets older, he plans to hand the keys to somebody new and young.

But for now, the 22-year-old is hard at work.