Youth Organizing:
An Emerging Model for Working with Youth

    “We jail the poor in their multitudes, abandon the dream of equality, cede more and more of public life to private interests, let lobbyists run the government. Those who can afford to do so lock themselves inside gated communities and send their children to private schools. And then we wonder why the world at large has become harsher and more cynical, why our kids are strange to us. What young people show us is simply the world we have made for them.” — William Finnegan, social journalist

    “If you had a problem in the black community, and you brought together a group of white people to discuss how to solve it, almost nobody would take that panel seriously. There’d probably be a public outcry. It would be the same thing for women’s issues or gay issues. Can you imagine a bunch of men sitting on the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Women? But every day, in local arenas all the way to the White House, adults sit around and decide what problems youth have and what youth need, without ever consulting us.” — Jason Warwin, 17

he burgeoning field of youth organizing rests on the powerful union of grassroots community organizing with positive youth development. Based in respect for the intelligence, passion, and leadership abilities of young people, this hybrid form of community-based youth work makes explicit commitments to social change and political action. Young people from all walks of life develop and practice new skills as they work to transform their communities.

The following are just a few of the successes youth organizing groups across the country have tallied in recent years:


Released in February 2003, the Occasional Papers Series on Youth Organizing was created by the Funders Collaborative on Youth Organizing, a collective of local, regional, and national foundations and youth organizing practitioners dedicated to advancing youth organizing as a strategy for youth development and social change.
  • In Portland, OR, Oakland, CA, and Boston, MA, student activists persuaded transit authorities to provide free or discounted bus passes to public school students.
  • In Ohio, young people organized in support of a first-ever state law guaranteeing educational access to homeless children and youth.
  • In Indianola, MS, student and parent activists won a new science lab for an all black school, had an abusive principal and teacher removed, and prevented a farmer from spraying pesticides across the street from a middle school.
  • In New York City’s South Bronx neighborhood, youth activists secured over $31 million for the clean-up, restoration, and development of park lands along a polluted stretch of the Bronx River.
  • In Oakland, a landmark ballot initiative set aside an additional $72 million over 12 years for youth development programs, with the funds to be administered by a committee of youth and adults.
It is “wins” like these that inspire the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing (FCYO), launched in 2000 by a group of foundations and practitioners to increase understanding and support of youth organizing. For youth organizers on the ground, FCYO provides much-needed capital through direct grants, along with training and networking opportunities. As a leader in a new field, FCYO pushes for answers to important questions: What is youth organizing and how does it work? Does youth organizing really deliver youth development outcomes? Can it create lasting social change? What would our communities and our society look like if the collective vision, leadership, energy, and talents of even a small percentage of all young people were directed toward community transformation?
See also two early papers that laid the groundwork for the FCYO:

Funding Youth Organizing: Strategies for Building Power and Youth Leadership (1997)

Youth Organizing: Notes From the Field (1998)

Aiming to answer these and other questions, the FCYO recently began an Occasional Paper Series. The first installment—three articles and an annotated bibliography released in February 2003—provides a comprehensive look at the growing field of youth organizing, presenting the history of the movement, profiles of current groups, and its impacts on youth.

Below we offer brief summaries from each paper, along with the full paper in PDF format. For hard copies of the series or for more information, go to www.fcyo.org.

Occasional Paper No. 01    [Click here for full paper in PDF format]
An Emerging Model for Working with Youth

Prepared by the training and support organization LISTEN, Inc., this paper traces the influences of community organizing and youth development on youth organizing; describes a continuum that identifies different levels of youth engagement; and outlines the fundamentals of youth organizing: its processes, principles, practices, and impacts.

    “What keeps diverse groups of young people together is the realization that they have common experiences caused by the failure of certain social and political ideals—justice, equality, democracy—to be fully realized.”
The Processes of Youth Organizing occur in four overlapping circles:

  • development and skill training
  • outreach and new member recruitment
  • community assessment and issue identification
  • campaign development and implementation.
The Guiding Principles of Youth Organizing evolved from the best practices of youth development and community organizing:
  • reinvestment in all youth
  • constituency building and collective action
  • respect for youth culture
  • political education
  • youth-adult partnerships.
Three main Organizing Models reflect the emergence of young people as participants, decision-makers, and leaders:
  • participation in adult-led organizing groups
  • intergenerational organizations
  • youth-led organizations.
Sustaining Youth Organizing requires commitment in four main areas:
  • creating youth development infrastructure
  • building networks to collaborate on campaigns
  • supporting intermediary training and support organizations
  • leveraging additional resources.
Occasional Paper No. 02    [Click here for full paper in PDF format]

Youth and Community Organizing Today

This paper, prepared by journalist Daniel HoSang, traces the history of youth involvement in 20th- and 21st-century social change efforts and examines some of the major organizations, themes, and trends in this nascent field.

    “Cleaner bathrooms, new textbooks, free bus passes and the like are meaningful and tangible improvements, but most organizers hold these reforms to be short-term measures within a larger process of institutional transformation.”
Common Organizing Issues fall into three main areas:

  • Public Education
    • progressive positions against punitive and discriminatory school policies
    • frequent emphasis on small-scale, school-based campaigns to lay groundwork for wider institutional change

  • Criminal Justice
    • police accountability, alternatives to incarceration

  • Environmental Justice
Common Characteristics of youth organizing practices:
  • integrated approach to social change
    • combines issue-based organizing with leadership development, service learning, cultural enrichment, and academic and/or personal support

  • primary value of political education
    • training programs to help understand issues of racism, sexism, homophobia

  • central role of staff organizers
    • unusually heavy reliance on core staff in 20s, early 30s, who juggle a range of roles and duties.

Integrating Youth Development and Social Change requires:
  • replicable campaign models
  • strategic collaborations
  • negotiating adult respect.
Inside Paper No. 2

When 17-year-old Sadeelah Muhyee walked into an Oakland radio station for a field trip last fall, a slickly designed brochure promoting new low-cost youth bus passes called out to her from the station’s lobby. “Our youth group made that happen,” Muhyee told the middle-aged man guiding the station tour as she pointed to the newly printed brochure. “We organized to make them do it.” Her skeptical host smiled politely and continued with the tour. “He definitely didn’t believe me,” Muhyee said later.

Occasional Paper No. 03    [Click here for full paper in PDF format]

Youth Organizing: Expanding Possibilities for Youth Development

Prepared by scholar-activist Shawn Ginwright, this paper examines how youth organizing yields both positive youth development and social change.

    “Solid youth development programming [must] address young people’s need for meaningful social engagement with the injustices and inequalities that circumscribe their lives while at the same time meeting their developmental needs.”
Three main categories of Youth Organizing Strategies:
  • Analysis: research, planning, debate, identity politics
  • Action: recruiting members, coalition building, direct action, political education
  • Reflection: journaling, debriefing, group discussion.
Three kinds of Youth Organizing Outcomes:
  • Interpersonal Capacity
    • critical thinking, oral and written communication, public speaking
    • relationship building, conflict resolution, problem-solving, leadership skills
    • identity development, confidence, sense of purpose, connection and agency.

  • Socio-Political Capacity
    • understanding of root causes of community and social problems
    • awareness of how power can change or sustain social conditions
    • shifts toward positive public perceptions of youth.
Inside Paper No. 3

Andi Perez recalled a recent listening campaign initiated by Youth United for Change. “Students identify issues that are important to them,” Perez says. “I often talk about curriculum changes and getting ethnic studies into the schools. But they told me before we can learn we need heat in our classrooms. In some classrooms we would need coats, gloves, and hats.” In group discussions, Perez encouraged students to ask questions. Why was it always city schools that went without heat? Why could suburban schools depend on heated classrooms?

  • Community Capacity
    • youth-adult partnerships strengthened
    • youth issues more central to community change
    • greater civic participation among disconnected youth.

Annotated Bibliography on Youth Organizing
 [Click here for full paper in PDF format]

Prepared by Social Policy Research Associates, this appendix presents a digest of research and reports, reflections from the field, and toolkits and curriculum.

 

Back to>> Youth Organizing Introduction

See also:

Sistas and Brothas United (Bronx, NY)

Youth Organizing Communities (East Los Angeles, CA)

Interview with veteran youth organizer Kim McGillicuddy

Directory of youth organizing groups