C-YAC · cyberyac.comWhat C-YAC is, where it came from, why it works.
The Cyber Youth Advisory Council. A working council of students aged 12–17 who train as digital protectors, run workshops for younger students and parents, build public portfolios, and feed into an internship pathway.
C-YAC is not a club. It’s an engine — a way for the cybersecurity community to compound its reach into the next generation, and a way for that generation to find a community that takes them seriously.
C-YAC grew out of a parent-facing cybersecurity programme that ran into a recurring pattern: the students were teaching their parents more effectively than the curriculum was. That insight became the seed: if students are the most credible educators in their families, what happens if you give them training, a peer cohort, and a stage?
C-YAC is what happens.
Every chapter has:
Sessions are weekly or fortnightly for a school year. Phones away. Paper and sticky notes. Discovery before labels. See the pedagogy.
A C-YAC student trained today is the volunteer expert who teaches the year-below-them next year — and, five years from now, one of the cybersecurity practitioners who returns to mentor the next cohort.
That’s the loop. C-YAC is the engine that closes it.
Every C-YAC session has a designated adult present. Volunteer specialists are background-checked and operate under our published safeguarding policy. We share the policy in full with parents before a student joins. No exceptions.