About
We are not preparing young people for someday.
Virtutem Populo is a student led 501(c)(3) nonprofit cultivating civic engagement, leadership, economic understanding and community participation among young people, primarily across Miami-Dade County.
Maurits Acosta founded the organization in June 2022 as a high school freshman. It ran on monthly meetings and a newsletter. It now runs nine programs, works with twenty three municipalities, fills a college auditorium every February, and is led day to day by Clint John, Jr., who took over as Executive Director while still in high school himself.
We create opportunities for students to learn how institutions work, enter the spaces where decisions are made, ask questions on the record, build solutions and be held to a real standard once they get there.
Young people already have opinions about their communities. We give those opinions an agenda item, a deadline and an audience.
The name, honestly
Virtutem Populo
Tap a word.
Here is the honest version, since we run a civics organization and someone was always going to check.
Virtutem is the accusative of virtus, which Romans used for strength, courage, excellence and moral worth all at once. Populo is the dative of populus, meaning to or for the people. Read strictly, the name is closer to strength to the people or virtue for the people.
The tagline we carry, power to the people, is the spirit of it rather than a word for word translation. We keep both because the Roman idea of virtus was never abstract goodness. It was the capacity to act well in public. Which is more or less the whole organization in one word.
Founded by a high school freshman, named in a language nobody at the meeting spoke fluently. The Latin has been checked since.
Civic knowledge cannot be assumed.
The case for the work is measured, and the measurements are public.
22%
of eighth graders performed at or above NAEP Proficient in civics in 2022.
Source: NAEP, 2022
9%
of adults surveyed in 2025 could name all five First Amendment rights.
Source: Annenberg Public Policy Center, 2025
14%
of young people had been contacted by any community group or organization ahead of the 2024 election.
Source: CIRCLE, Tufts University
Young people are already talking about public life. Too few institutions are inviting them into it.
What we are not
This is not a club, a council or an event company.
Traditional civic education explains what government is. We give students practice entering it, questioning it and communicating with it.
Youth councils typically give a handful of students an advisory role. We run twenty three municipal placements, a twenty one school competition and a thirty session fellowship.
Internships tend to reward students who already have access. We build the earlier entry point, for students who do not yet have a network, a resume, transportation or institutional knowledge.
