Rising Urban Leaders Enterprise (RULE) unveiled a student leadership plan to educate high school teens on ways to increase leadership skills while connecting with peers in small groups.

RULE is a New Jersey nonprofit organization that focuses on helping teens set goals and plan relevant action steps.

The idea for launching RULE came from a BBC radio 4 study in 2018.

For decades, researchers have said that older people are lonelier than other age groups.  Apparently, people over 75 years are likely to miss an absent spouse or feel challenged due to higher functional limitations.

In spite of previous surveys, a 2018 study by academics at the University of Manchester, Brunel University, London, and the University Exeter, shows that 16–24-year-olds are the loneliest population worldwide, exceeding the seniors.

RULE aims to create a culture in which teens apply a bottom-up leadership model to lead themselves and others.

The best example is "The Past, Present, and Future of Community Development in the United States" essay by Alexander von Hoffman.  In his essay we learned that the government traditionally organized programs and services to help poor people.  Although this was a meaningful approach, it was a top-down program.  Elected officials made all the decisions while the recipients of the services had no say about their own care.

Hoffman described many types of interventions by officials to help low-income residents live quality lives. These interventions include creating jobs, developing quality education and health care, funding housing, providing food vouchers, and extending transportation.

No doubt these services were carefully established over time to improve economic prosperity and community development, young people did not have a seat at the table.

Grassroots leaders became involved in community organizing which was spreading throughout the low-income communities.  Activists mobilized people in their home communities to get involved in plans that would affect them.

About this time in history, nonprofit organizations emerged to deliver a range of services that would uplift and enrich economically stressed neighborhoods.  The bottom-up approach to community development became alive.  This meant that the nonprofit intervention would offer personalized services for people and neighborhood development and utilize the bottom-up leadership approach to combat poverty.