Ask Will Dry what made him vote leave in the EU referendum, and he offers a string of reasons: talk of Turkish membership, promises of £350m for the NHS, the idea that it would be easy to negotiate trade deals with the rest of the world. “Every one of those things was a lie,” he says.

Embarrassed by his mistake, but not by changing his mind – “there is always more passion in a convert” – he is one of four young people to found a youth campaign, Our Future Our Choice (Ofoc), which aims to put young people at the forefront of stopping Brexit. Next month, he will take a year out from studying PPE at Oxford to devote himself full time to the campaign.

Ofoc already has representatives in about 50 universities and an email list of more than 500 supporters. This week, the team and a broadcast crew are in Hull, where 66% voted leave, to talk to students. But Dry, 20, insists they are not only targeting students. “This is for every young person who gives a shit about Brexit – as long as they don’t like it.”

The campaign has been building, and has taken off in the past week with an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn from Femi Oluwole, another founder, published in the Guardian, and an interview on Sky News. A crowdfunding page has rapidly raised more than £3,000.

In his letter, Oluwole called on Corbyn to “fight for a referendum on the withdrawal deal, then join us in persuading our parents and grandparents to choose a constructive, not destructive, legacy”. The campaign argues that the UK population will soon consist of remain voters, given that the older – more leave-voting – generation will die off. What is the point of going ahead with something that will take decades to complete, when it is only likely to be reversed? Oluwole says it is not enough to hit people with facts: “The strongest emotional argument is that your kids don’t want what’s being forced on them.”

Oluwole, 27, a graduate in law with French from Nottingham University, has given up a placement with the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in Vienna to campaign for Ofoc from his parents’ loft in Sheffield.

But he has been fighting Brexit for much longer. His first tweet against Brexit, he says, was in February 2016, and his videos on YouTube explaining the workings of the EU have achieved a following.

One of his aims has been to publicise a straightforward definition of the single market – “a system that lets you make a single version of what you want to sell and which is legal anywhere in Europe, which means you can buy and sell your products a hell of a lot cheaper”. This is something, he says, David Cameron, and others, never bothered to explain. Leaving the single market, he says, will increase inequality, as only the biggest companies will be able to afford to trade, and the poorest areas will be hardest hit by Britain’s lack of global competitiveness. For him, it is a human rights issue.

Oluwole campaigning at Durham university Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Yet it is complicated. People did not vote Brexit because they were stupid, he says – “both my parents are doctors and they had no idea” – and he only knows what he’s talking about because “I just happen to have studied the right topic”.

He has already employed this knowledge in encounters (which he filmed and put up on social media) with Nigel Farage, through Farage’s phone-in on LBC. He was also part of a campaign, backed by the Labour peer Andrew Adonis, to get young people to persuade older relatives to oppose Brexit. The initiative was inspired by the Ring Your Granny strategy, thought to have helped build cross-generational support for same-sex marriage in Ireland’s 2015 referendum.

One influence has been La République En Marche, the pro-European centrist party founded by Emmanuel Macron in France in April 2016. According to Lara Spirit, 21, a third-year student in politics and international relations at Cambridge, and another Ofoc founder, it inspired them to build support by going out and listening to people. The team plans a national listening tour over the next few months.

This is where the fourth member of the team comes in: Calum Millbank, 25, an ex-apprentice, now a third-year engineering student at City, University of London, who spent part of a tough childhood with his family in women’s refuges.

“My role is really being open to understanding people from all walks of life,” he says. “It’s also understanding that if you voted leave it doesn’t mean you’re a xenophobic racist, it’s that you want change.”

He was brought on board by Felix Marquardt, founder of the thinktank Youthonomics, which recently joined up with Ofoc to commission a survey from YouGov. This showed that more than half of 18- to 24-year-olds expected withdrawal from the European Union to have a negative effect on them.

Dry says it has taken 18 months to get out of the mourning and resignation periods, and now young people are starting to ask “why the hell it’s happening?”. “You only realise the value of things once you have lost them,” he says.