A GREAT deal of Andrea Batista Schlesinger's working hours are spent trying to insert the voices of young people in the fervent debate over Social Security's financial future. Ms. Schlesinger, the executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, doesn't think it should be that tough of a sale.

"It's more interesting when we connect it to the larger economic discussions going on," says Ms. Schlesinger, who is 28. "We talk about these issues in these silos, this is an education issue or this is a health care issue or a social issue but really this is a more fundamental question about the prospect for young Americans."

Ms. Schlesinger has been speaking up for young people's interests since she was a loud-mouth, straight-A student at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and the student representative on the New York City Board of Education, chiding officials for ignoring children and lecturing classmates on how the school system works.

Now she heads a tiny nonprofit organization with a storied past. It was established in 1961 as the Drum Major Foundation by Harry Wachtel, a lawyer and adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and was revived by Martin Luther King III, Andrew Young, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, and William B. Wachtel, the son of the original founder. The institute occupies a corner suite in Mr. Wachtel's law office in a modern Midtown high-rise building.

Ms. Schlesinger became the public face of the institute in December when its president, Fernando Ferrer, the former Bronx borough president, resigned to begin his mayoral bid. The other day, she sat behind a cluttered desk as Charles Mingus wafted from a boom box on the windowsill. Her head, a cloud of tight brown curls, was lowered as she spoke. She fiddled with a paper clip. But she has no trouble expressing herself. She is extremely articulate, her hand slicing through the air.

She was saying that though her peers are facing a rockier start to their working lives than their parents, they have been all but ignored in the debate over President Bush's proposal to shift Social Security into personal investment accounts.

"What Social Security did was guarantee that people wouldn't have to grow old in poverty and now young people need to be involved in a conversation about whether that safety net will exist for us," she says. "Nobody is talking to young people."

Ms. Schlesinger is spreading her message by speaking on college panels, writing college newspaper editorials and preparing fact sheets for campus groups. "They need information in order to have an informed conversation," she says. "We are going to have to do the slow patient work to reach out to a population that is not automatically included in this discussion in order to engage them. It's going to take time."

Ms. Schlesinger knew nothing about Social Security's problems in 1998 when she was recruited as a recent graduate from the University of Chicago by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a private foundation, to talk to thousands of students on campuses about the entitlement program. She engaged them in forums.

She is certainly good at the engaging part. "This has been my whole life, to figure out how to get the voice of young people into debates, even though we were the ones who live with the impacts of the decision being made," she says.

Ms. Schlesinger, who is of Dominican and Jewish heritage, grew up in the southern tip of Brooklyn in Sea Gate, where her father ran a computer consulting business out of the family's home. She is single and has settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

When she held the student representative's nonvoting seat on the school board, she relished shooting off at the mouth on issues like school safety, something that made her a media darling. "I used to say, 'If young people can analyze Shakespeare, we can analyze these policies.' "

She admits that she is more careful with her words these days. She explains that the stakes are much higher. "I was never nervous before; now I'm always nervous."

MS. SCHLESINGER runs the institute's day-to-day operations and its fund-raising. She was Mr. Ferrer's educational policy analyst when he was borough president and joined him at the institute as chief policy analyst when he and Mr. Wachtel helped rescue the organization from dormancy in 2002. She was named the institute's executive director in 2003.

"It's a dream job for me," says Ms. Schlesinger, who has led an effort to turn the institute into one with a national impact by releasing reports on issues such as the increasing fragility of the middle class.

She wants the institute to be the progressive counterpoint to the Manhattan Institute, the conservative policy research group. With speakers that have included Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Howard Dean and Eliot Spitzer, she thinks the institute has not done too shabbily with a $700,000 budget and four employees.

Now, with the debate on Social Security growing, Ms. Schlesinger sees a chance to call attention to an overlooked population.

"Let's not just talk about Social Security," she says, "Let's talk about what the economy looks like for young people. Almost 6 out of 10 college graduates are moving home to live with parents after graduating. You have the average college graduate leaving school with over $19,000 in student loan debt, $4,000 with credit card debt. The question we ask is, 'What has the market done for us lately?' "