Youth Organizing

The motivation behind this project is to guide youth of color to foster creativity within community engagement. Youth Organizing is a youth civic engagement initiative based on the principles of community organizing, equity, and social justice. YO draws on talents of marginalized students of color who are exploring the dynamics of using their voice to organize for social change. In YO, we work closely with youth in the Socially Just Education class at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Early College (DMLK) to identify, research, and act on issues that directly impact the youth in their communities. We visit the class weekly and facilitate this process for students based on the YO curriculum that draws on the traditions and diversities of youth organizing and youth participatory action research.

DU Teams also engage in research on the impacts of this process and action on youth and community members. We will facilitate and support youth participatory action research, in which youth will select an issue, research the issue, design a plan to address the issue, and act on the issue. To facilitate these actions, we will facilitate class sessions utilizing a youth organizing curriculum. As the process is emergent, the issue, research questions and methods of the research phase, and action plan details are determined later on. The expected results are to be the following: to facilitate and support youth to take action and to reflect on that action, its impact, and its future in order for youth to enact public work and assess the extent to which it improved their communities; engage in quantitative and qualitative analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data to assess the impact of the YO showcase event on the community.