Youth Organizing and Activism

Across the United States, youth are working to improve their schools, stop the passage of policies promoting their incarceration, end the dumping of caustic chemicals in their neighborhoods, and make sure that their perspectives are included in decision making that affects their lives. These young people are engaged in youth organizing and activism, methods young people use to create lasting social change. Youth activism is any action or set of actions taken by young people to achieve social, political, or economic transformation. Youth organizing is the process of bringing young people together to collectively analyze and win solutions to problems that affect them and their communities, dismantle structural inequality, and build movements for social justice. In youth organizing, young people hold the authority and power to choose the agenda, design and implement campaigns and programs, and evaluate the effects. Adults play various roles in youth organizing, as coorganizers, administrators, assistants, and allies.

Youth organizing has been a major catalyst for change within social movements in the United States and elsewhere. For example, the Young Lords, an organization of young Puerto Ricans founded by Puerto Rican college students, organized for self-determination and human rights for their communities during the 1960s and 1970s. A new movement of youth-led organizing began in the early 1990s. This period of youth organizing includes aspects of civic engagement, community organizing, positive youth development, and youth empowerment. Most contemporary youth organizing also emphasizes arts and culture, participatory action research, popular education, and grassroots leadership.

As organizers and activists in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, youth are mobilizing for educational equity, environmental justice, and a restructured criminal justice system, among other goals.