National Youth Rights Association
NYRA logo
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| Formation | 1998 |
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| Headquarters | Washington, D.C., U.S. |
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Membership
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10,000 members |
| Website | www |
The National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) is a youth-led civil rights organization in the United States promoting youth rights, with approximately ten thousand members. The NYRA promotes the lessening or removing of various legal restrictions that are imposed on young people but not adults, for example, the drinking age,voting age, and the imposition of youth curfew laws.
The youth rights movement first utilized the Internet in 1991, with the creation of the Y-Rights listserv mailing list. Two members of that original Internet presence, Matthew Walcoff and Matt Herman, began a non-profit organization out of that mailing list known as ASFAR. Not too long after ASFAR was founded, a Rockville, Maryland high school student began a youth rights group called YouthSpeak. At the same time, a third youth from Canada, Joshua Gilbert, was starting a youth rights organization for his country, the Canadian Youth Rights Association (CYRA). Walcoff, Hein and Gilbert all met through ASFAR, and decided to start a non-profit corporation to help unify the youth rights movement, which at that point consisted of almost a dozen different groups around North America and the world.
By June 1998, NYRA was incorporated as a Maryland non-profit public-benefit corporation with intention to lead the Youth Rights political movement in the United States. It was formed by the original founders of ASFAR because of the desire to create a moderate, pragmatic organization in the Youth Rights Movement.
NYRA's Executive Director from 2000 to 2012 was Alex Koroknay-Palicz. As its key spokesman, he was featured on CNN, Fox News, PBS, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, as well as many others, on youth rights issues such as the voting and drinking ages. In 2012, Koroknay-Palicz stepped down before reemerging in 2015.
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