Director Spike Lee speaks to Generation Engage members during a Get Engaged Forum.

How do you mobilize young people this election season? We hear it over and over again: “The apathy!” “The sloth!” “The lack of civic engagement!”

Generation Engage wants to tackle these issues from the bottom up. Adrian Talbott and Justin Rockefeller came from high-powered political families and went on to graduate from fancy universities. But, they actually don’t think that’s where the change is going to happen. They are interested in the 51 percent of 18-29-year-olds who are off college campuses or didn’t even go to college.

They started Generation Engage three years ago, before all the hoopla of this historic campaign cycle. By hiring locals to set up satellite community outreach programs, the organization sets up politically non-partisan meetings on topics most appropriate to a particular area. But Talbott and Rockefeller don’t want to dissolve like many “get-out to vote” organizations. They call themselves an initiative for “civic engagement,” and say they want to remind people that democracy will continue well after November’s presidential election.

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The members of S4 hope to educate college students about Social Security.

So maybe it’s not the sexiest issue on the campaign trail. But if it’s up to the founders of Students for Saving Social Security, it will be. The organization, known as S4, sees a chance to make the issue a hot one now.

“Now” is a big thing for the activist group that has a presence on colleges across the country. Its members fear that young people don’t think they have to care about Social Security until it’s too late. According to the Social Security Administration, the system is facing a $13.4 trillion shortfall.

S4 advocates the use of more personal retirement accounts to tighten the gap. It’s a solution conservatives often support. But its members maintain that the group is nonpartisan and that they only want Social Security to have more presence in political dialogue. That way, they hope, when the time comes for them to depend on it, it will be there.

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The 2008 presidential election is the first that superdelegate Jason Rae will be able to vote in.

Not too many kids tell their parents who to vote for when they are 5 years old or ask their fourth-grade teacher to watch the presidential inauguration. But what would you expect from a 21-year-old superdelegate?

Jason Rae went from being a U.S. Senate page to the youngest elected representative of the Democratic National Committee while he was in high school. He actually couldn’t vote when he was first elected because he was six months shy of 18. But he wanted to represent what he calls “America’s next generation.” So, he and his friends hand-painted posters with the slogan “A ray of hope for the future.” It worked.

What about his future? Rae says, “I remember back in kindergarten saying I wanted to run for president, but I’ll settle for an elected office.” These days he is relishing the fact he’s being wooed by both sides for his coveted vote in the close Democratic race for the 2008 presidential nomination — dining with Sen. Hillary Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, meeting with Sen. Barack Obama and chatting with the highest-profile politicians from across the country.

How will he vote? He hasn’t said, but we’ll try to get it out of him.

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Alexander Heffner also hosts a radio show, broadcasting from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

This year, 44 million Americans ages 18 to 29 will be eligible to vote. The youth vote will account for about a quarter of the entire electorate, which means the candidates are focused on getting young people to the polls. So is the founder of Scoop08, Alexander Heffner – but in a different way.

Heffner, an 18-year-old high school senior, organized 300 student volunteers from high schools and colleges from diverse regions and ideological backgrounds to work on what he calls “a new kind of newspaper.” Each student is dispatched on issue-based rather than horse race-focused beats, like “Libertarian Party,” “Rhetoric” and “Social Networking.” The idea behind Scoop08: young people covering the issues in a smart way, but also in a way that they would tell their friends.

Scoop08 is all about young people, but Heffner realized that help from the pros only makes the youth push better. The newspaper’s advisory board is stellar: Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, National Review founder William F. Buckley and Judy Woodruff of PBS, to name a few. At Scoop08, they know and respect the rules and norms of political coverage, and know how to break them.

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