Youth Power: An Intro, Lesson, and Roadmap
» This blog post is a copy of my piece written for “The Liberated Peep,” a one edition newspaper by Our Time To Act.
What is power? What is youth power? It may be difficult to find a neat answer in a couple hundred words, but these questions are important to our survival. Grasping toward the meaning of power, and our youth power, unlocks the potential for a better future. Here I have broken down my experiences into lessons I’ve learned over my four-year-long journey of youth organizing. This is my offering to you, with the hope that it plants seeds for a modern movement of youth power, a movement of transforming ourselves to transform the future.
When I first began change-making in high school, I wanted to pressure administrators to respond to students’ complaints about abusive teachers, among other things. I understood my role as being an advocate. Youth can advocate for our own needs, or non-youth can advocate for us, but the full extent of an advocate’s power lies in their ability to make convincing arguments to authorities or decision-makers.
Just like me, I believe being an advocate is many youths’ first idea of change-making. A natural alignment of advocacy and youth makes a lot of sense; we are raised to be an advocate for our needs in our family structures—where parents have the ultimate say, including on whether to (illegally and legally) physically or mentally harm you—or our school systems, where teachers and principals exercise near-totalitarian control over our lives from when we can go to the bathroom to how much free time we have outside of school. (By the way, we live in a country where our constitutional rights are immediately limited when we enter school grounds.)
We are conditioned from birth to advocate for ourselves, with varying levels of success and without considering ourselves as decision-makers. Not only is this not the only way to wield power, it is simply the tip of the proverbial youth-power-iceberg. In order to unlock the truer depths of our change-making potential, we must learn:
Lesson #1:
Power is the ability to shape the future.
We shape the future through imagination.
Although it may feel weird at first, someone who can imagine, articulate, and co-create futures with their peers and community is stronger than our traditional idea of advocates and advocacy. Why? Because as an advocate, we can only make adjustments to the reality that is presented to us. As futurists, we can go beyond.
For example, an advocate might ask for or demand ethnic studies in our high school and college curriculum. If we win, we’ve made a difference—but nothing has changed about the ability of youth to control their own curriculum. We are still reliant on authority figures to agree, and we still need to go back to them to modify or change our prior agreements. What about reimagining the role of youth in building educational curriculums by creating a youth majority on the School District’s Board of Education? What would it take to realize that goal? Certainly more than asking politely for non-youth to give up power.
Youth are known to be creative, visionary, and out-of-the-box thinkers. And, in reaction to ideas that would threaten the status quo, we have been labeled ‘ignorant,’ ‘naive,’ or ‘unrealistic.’ But in response I say: who the hell wants to be defeatist, resigned to the present reality, and ignorant to the possibility of more, of better? Youth—and you—aren’t ignorant, naive, or unrealistic any more than anyone else is… instead, these sentiments translate into “you are not well-versed in this status quo, the one that is fucking us over.”
Remember that we have power. We have power when and because we imagine. And when we imagine, we shape futures that center justice, pleasure, and liberation. When we harness power, we take our own futures into our hands. If we fail to imagine a better future, we resign ourselves to asking nicely under the false assumption that we are not decision-makers ourselves.
Lesson #2:
Youth own the future,
we’re shaping it now.
How often have you heard the cliche, “Youth are the future”? It’s usually used after exclaiming how hopeless the present is and how youth will be our saviors. Fuck. That. As an organizer, nonprofit leader, local and state commissioner, and young person, I’ve dedicated a considerable chunk of my life to growth, activism, and Our Time To Act—a youth-led organization organizing powerful youth for an inclusive, equitable, and sustainable future. It took years of grappling with half-baked ideas, mission drift, and superficial intergenerational allyship to come to our mantra, youth own the future, we’re shaping it now. This statement grounds me in the work at every step of the way.
Youth ownership over the future is a stronger statement than anything I’ve heard before, but it most accurately describes an important fact: our leaders today are making decisions for us, for youth, and shaping our futures largely or entirely without our consent. They will not be around to bear the consequences of their decisions. We will be. (And note for us youth: we won’t be around forever, too.) Just take your pick of a range of intergenerational issues, including the climate crisis, housing and homelessness, health and reproductive rights, and racial and social justice. If youth are meaningfully involved, it’s only because we’ve forced our way into it.
And don’t forget that because power is about shaping the future (Lesson #1), thus, “we’re shaping it now.” We’re combatting the performative statement that “we are the future” when it is used to undercut the role youth deserve to play in present decision- and policy-making. In the words of adrienne marie brown, writer, activist, facilitator, and afrofuturist, in Emergent Strategy: “We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.”
Our present was someone’s future, a future they shaped. Clearly not well, with the interests of the few over the many. Now it’s our turn to do better.
Lesson #3:
Take action. Organize.
We discussed how being an advocate is not the peak of our potential. Now, with the power of imagination and the future, we are ready to take action. Transformative organizing is Our Time To Act’s preferred change-making strategy, which involves building deep relationships and uplifting many leaders, not one, in a decentralized push for collective action. Collective action isn’t petitions or social media posts—although these can be helpful tools—but actions that may take immense individual effort or seem scary for many reasons. Labor unions employ strikes, at great potential and real costs for laborers (including getting fired or enduring harassment from employers). The Civil Rights Movement employed large-scale, high-stakes protests where protestors were beaten, humiliated, blasted with water hoses, and killed.
Organizing is a lifelong process. Whether you are an organizer in a formal sense as a part of a labor or nonprofit or volunteer group, or organizing in the informal sense as a friend, colleague, sibling or offspring, student, etc., you have a role in shaping the future. So if you can, join a group or movement, absorb the works of incredible authors (like adrienne marie brown), build liberated relationships, and expand your own relationship with change-making. I humbly offer Our Time To Act, and our community hub for organizing, the Civic Youth Action Network (CYAN), as an opportunity to organize. Find what fits, whatever that may be—just know that a world of possibility and justice is ready for you to shape it.
