by Kohei Ishihara

In 2004, D.C. organizers called into question the practices of an unjust juvenile justice system. Not only did the nation’s capital host the only juvenile justice system where 100% of its inmates were youth of color, it also was notorious for its rundown facilities and overcrowded rooms. Within a year of launching the “Stop the War on Young People” campaign, organizers convinced the City Council to pass the Juvenile Justice Omnibus Bill. The juvenile detention center is now being permanently closed.

In Greenwich Village in New York City in 2005, organizers built a popular anti-gentrification campaign that directly confronted the intersection of homophobia, trans-phobia, racism, and classism. Organizers turned out hundreds of constituents to Community Board meetings to challenge elite business owners’ attempts to pass curfew laws and anti-loitering ordinances that would have intensified the excessive policing of homeless and poor, transgender and queer youth of color. In a direct confrontation between people power and financial power, the youth who have claimed Christopher Street Pier since the Stonewall Riots of 1969 prevailed by defeating the ordinances, one after another.

It was young people, ages 14-18, who made up the rank, file and leadership of the Justice for D.C. Youth Coalition that shut down the juvenile detention center in Washington. It was young people, ages 12-21, who challenged the business sector of New York’s Village and fought to reclaim space for the young queer and transgender youth who make up Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (FIERCE).

From the nation’s political capital to the nation’s financial capital, from the urban streets of the West Coast to the rural indigenous communities of the Southwest, youth have been waging successful community organizing campaigns, building on the momentum of concrete victories, and joining adults at the forefront of social justice movements.

Young adult staff, a 501(c)3 non-profit structure, an expanding financial base of private philanthropy, intermediary and technical assistance organizations assisting youth in the development and management of non-profits, and resources from the fields of community organizing and youth development have supported this momentum in youth work. Over the last 10-15 years the interplay between these parties has created a new field of social justice work called Youth Organizing.

As a youth organizer at the Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) and a collaborator with the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FCYO), a collective of foundations and youth organizing practitioners dedicated to advancing youth organizing as a strategy for youth development and social justice, I have been able to study and experience the rise of Youth Organizing from a ground-level view and an academic one.

The rise of youth organizing
While youth have always been organizing, the abundance of youth-run or youth-led nonprofit organizations engaged in social justice work is relatively new. Many youth organizing groups started in the mid-1990s, and there has been a continuous pace of emerging youth organizing groups popping up into the millennium. The growth of this field has been enabled by several trends:

• The rise of the non-profit industry (often in response to government cutbacks and the dismantling of social services) following the increase of private philanthropic groups expanding their funding because of economic prosperity in the 1990s,
• The emergence of the Youth Development field within this industry,
• The internet and its enabling of communication and information sharing between and among youth organizing groups, and
• The saturation of negative views on youth in the media, specifically the framing of youth of color as gang bangers, delinquents, and “super-predators,” coupled with new tough-on-crime policies and initiatives targeting youth.

By the mid-1990s conditions were ripe for the rise of youth organizing, and, more importantly, youth began to inherit a political identity. Youth were being attacked as a group, and they chose to fight back as a group. Moreover, progressive sectors of civil society began to identify youth as a viable partner in social change work, and many recognized the necessity to organize a youth voice. The rise of the field was also made possible by advocacy in the funding world. One such initiative was the creation of the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing, which defined youth organizing this way:

“Youth organizing is an innovative youth development and social justice strategy that trains young people in community organizing and advocacy, and assists them in employing these skills to alter power relations and create meaningful institutional change in their communities.”

Re-defining & de-identifying
Because the field and name are new, most youth organizing groups never identified as such. Rather, groups formed out of other identities, fields, and movements, such as immigrant rights, racial justice, environmental justice, youth development and civic engagement, and criminal/juvenile justice.

As I met with youth organizing focus groups in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Boston, there was a strong reluctance to identify with the term “youth organizing,” and youth activists offered some critical feedback:

“Youth have always been organizing, so how can youth organizing be new?”

“Isn’t the labeling of youth organizing just a way of segregating our struggles, separating youth from other struggles and movements?”

“Youth is just one of our identities. We are also poor, we are homeless, we are queer, we are immigrants, and we are people of color.”

“You can say we are youth, but where do you draw the line between a youth and an adult? Some of us are mothers and parents, some of us are workers, and some of us live on our own!”

Resistance to being categorized as “youth organizers” is inspired by three great political aspirations. First, it’s a desire to build social justice agendas that unite oppressed communities. Youth do not want to be separated from LGBT, racial justice, immigrant rights, environmental justice, union and labor, education reform organizing, or organizing work that is adult-led. Second, it’s a rejection of the notion that youth is a singular identity and a desire for youth to be viewed in a holistic, multi-layered, and contextual framework. Youth are immigrants and refugees and have engaged in anti-deportation rallies and immigrant rights organizing. Youth are people of color and have been vocal in demanding that cities implement external civilian review boards to monitor police misconduct and racial profiling. Youth are workers, and are concerned about worker’s rights and the attack on organized labor. Youth are parents, and concerned about the dismantling of the welfare state. Third, youth disdain the idea that their organizations are viewed and commodified as niche markets or field-driven practices.

Refusing to be classified as a new form of social work, the vast majority of youth I met with saw themselves as part of a legacy of social justice organizing. Rather than something new and separate, most of the youth spoke about their struggles as connected to others across space and time. While local organizing work was prioritized, it was often done under a national or international framework, with site visits, gatherings, and conferences in between to talk about networking and coalition building. While many of these youth were not related to movement builders of the past, most made poignant connections to organizations such as the Young Lords, the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets.

Positive visions of youth organizing
In fighting for a hopeful vision for youth organizing, we can hold on to some promising developments and changes in the upcoming years as we see the impact that youth organizing groups are having on other social justice organizing agendas. Many see youth organizing as building the next generation of organizers and leaders and turning the tide against young people’s apathy towards government and civic engagement. Others maintain that youth organizing is the key to organizing any mass-based movement. The following three stories illustrate the potential of youth organizing to strengthen movements for social justice.

In March of 2002, the United States pressured the Cambodian government to sign a repatriation agreement, forcing over 1,500 Cambodian American refugees into deportation proceedings. In an unprecedented show of national coalition building between different Southeast Asian ethnic groups, youth-led organizations from around the U.S. gathered at a Freedom Training organized by the Youth Leadership Project at the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence in New York and brainstormed a national strategy to stop the deportations.

What resulted was the creation of the Southeast Asian Freedom Network (SEAFN), which coordinated simultaneous demonstrations and actions at Immigration and Customs Enforecment offices (then known as the INS) across the nation. SEAFN also set up a deportation hotline, connected clients to attorneys, and launched multiple awareness campaigns. In 2003 SEAFN leaders held a working conference with members of national Asian-American policy and advocacy groups to put together a national legislative strategy to stop the deportations. SEAFN youth organizers rejected a legislative solution that made a special case for Southeast Asian refugees, fearing that it would position Southeast Asian refugees in opposition to other immigrants and communities of color. The formation of SEAFN was a testament to the maturation of strong youth-led organizations with the capacity to build nationally. SEAFN was also an example of the power of youth organizing, particularly in immigrant and refugee communities where youth have become bilingual and bi-cultural agents, navigating and communicating between elders and the system.

In 2005, a group of youth representing an impressive array of powerful direct-action youth organizing groups from across the country banded together as North Americans in Solidarity to raise funds and coordinate logistics for youth to attend the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The delegation was strategically designed for youth of color from the United States to learn from and build connections with anti-imperialist social justice movements and organizations from the Global South. Youth learned about the devastating effects of Neoliberalism, in particular the North American Free Trade Agreement, as youth from New York, Boston, and Los Angeles connected with youth involved in Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement.

After a short stop in São Paolo, youth from the Bronx, the birthplace of hip hop, connected with youth in Samba schools and learned about the influence of the indigenous Brazilian hip hop movement and black cultural revolution spreading across the streets of São Paolo. Most of these were grassroots groups, not non-governmental or non-profit based organizations. Building on this experience at the World Social Forum, youth organizing groups made one of the strongest presences at the first United States Social Forum, held in Atlanta, Georgia in 2007.

In 2001, a group of youth and students gathered together to do something about a series of fatal shootings of several young Cambodian men in Providence, Rhode Island. At the same time, the U.S. government had recently pressured the Cambodian government to sign a “repatriation agreement” allowing for the forced removal, or deportation, of Cambodian refugees back to the country from which they fled a genocide and civil war.

Southeast Asian youth organized three community marches and demonstrations in front of the Providence INS office to protest the deportations, and they mobilized resources and groups on the national level in a coordinated advocacy campaign. It was the first Cambodian youth protest in Providence, and at the first rally, 15 year-old Theary Voeul echoed the sentiments and hearts of the crowd when he said, “For the first time in my life, I felt proud to be Cambodian.”

Meetings poured out into the streets. House parties continued all night. Graffiti artists tagged our new organization’s name on brick walls and buildings. Before long, an unlikely alliance of queer men, women, gang leaders, and youth came together to reject 30 years of violence, neglect, and apathy that has been strangling the Southeast Asian community in Providence ever since the mid-1980s when Southeast Asian refugees began arriving.

We called ourselves PrYSM, the Providence Youth Student Movement, and we believed in the power of love, the intention of connecting social justice work to healing and love; the power of movement, of connecting gangs, cities, and regions; the power of family, helping each other and sticking together even through tough times; and the power of empowering the most oppressed and disenfranchised members of society.

Collective youth vision for justice
Youth organizers face the constant pressure to make our strategies more mainstream, to shape our vision statements as more “marketable,” to provide social services, and to collaborate with other youth development agencies. Like other registered 501(c)(3) organizations, PrYSM faces the pressure of the non-profit industry to adopt hierarchical and corporate structures of governance and accountability. And like the hundreds of youth organizing groups in the country struggling to find definition, we face the lure and pull of the market to talk about our social justice work in “youth development” and “youth civic engagement” frameworks.

The rise and flourishing of youth organizing groups over the past 15 years has shown a sense of defiance and a strong process of self-definition. Their success has demonstrated a collective vision that sees youth as today’s leaders, and their continued growth teaches all of us working for a more just world that youth shouldn’t be limited to organizing only a youth voice, but that youth need to take leadership and stand with adults in all social justice movements.

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Kohei Ishihara currently serves as Executive Director of the Providence Youth and Student Movement (PrYSM), which he co-founded in 2002 to end violence and discrimination affecting Southeast Asian youth. PrYSM is a RESIST multi-year grant recipient.