Think back to the first time you witnessed or experienced injustice. Remember that heart-racing, fire-in-the-belly fury that left you determined to make a difference.
Now, recall the first time you found yourself among others who shared your passionate belief in justice — how the spirit, camaraderie, and power of community so quickly shifted that fury to a feeling of real possibility.
Maybe a family member joined the Freedom Riders or burned a draft card. Or perhaps you read about the Stonewall Rebellion or saw a news segment on a local march for abortion rights. You might have taken to the streets after the Rodney King verdict, walked out of class to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq or apartheid in South Africa, or marched alongside your undocumented immigrant classmates facing deportation.
Like us, you were probably young.
Young people possess an inherent belief that freedom and justice are the only acceptable outcomes. Yet as we age, the world gradually beats that conviction out of us, shrouding us in cynicism as we move further away from the core power of our innate freedom.
Fed up with the empty promises of gradual change, young people fight for justice like their lives depend on it because they know that their lives — and our lives —do, in fact, depend on it. Young organizers are at the forefront of social movements not because they have spare time but because they have been raised in an era of active-shooter drills, a countdown to climate crisis, deep racial and economic inequities exacerbated by a global pandemic, and critically, growing threats to their right to vote.
But youth organizers aren’t just fighting — they’re winning. And they are doing so despite minimal funding from the so-called adults in the room — the philanthropic leaders who insist on treating young people as beneficiaries of services rather than powerful agents of change.
The effectiveness of youth organizing should be obvious to all donors committed to creating a just and equitable democracy.
Look no further than the nationwide demonstrations this past weekend in response to the Uvalde, Tex., and Buffalo, N.Y., mass shootings. Those protests flowed from the unrelenting work of young people, especially youth of color, working to address incessant gun violence in their communities. March for Our Lives, launched by student survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Fla., high-school shooting, has drawn on this legacy and made it impossible for elected leaders to turn away.
Consider also the role of youth organizing coalitions in pushing for fair elections. Across the country, young people are orchestrating wide-reaching voter engagement efforts to contest an onslaught of restrictive voting laws. They are registering hundreds of thousands of young voters and securing vital protections such as automatic voter registration.
And recall that in the last few years, amid historic protests against police violence, impassioned student organizers across dozens of school districts drove successful campaigns to end their schools’ contracts with local law-enforcement agencies — a critical step in shutting down school-to-prison pipelines that disproportionately criminalize children of color.
These wins and so many others aren’t driven by some innate magic. Youth organizing is a disciplined, time-honored strategy for social change. It isn’t just about empowering individual youth or winning individual campaigns. It’s about cultivating lifelong leaders with the skills and support to mobilize their communities toward a shared vision of liberation.
To meet today’s challenges, the youth organizing field will need to build an unprecedented level of power capable of both sustaining a long-term vision and addressing daily attacks in areas such as voting rights, gun violence, climate change, and more. This sort of power won’t come easily. It will require youth organizers to come together in the thousands to build coalitions, develop alliances, and elevate public narratives that promote their vision of social justice and true democracy.
Change Giving Approach
An expansion of this scale cannot be achieved without a corresponding expansion of resources.
Yet we in philanthropy still seem to be operating from an outdated playbook. We continue to separate our youth-development programs from those focused on systemic change and justice. We require grantees to demonstrate measurable campaign wins within the bounds of short-term grant cycles, revealing our skepticism toward their long-term strategies. We advise youth groups to use palatable language that will allay potential political discomfort.
When we ask youth organizers to retrofit their visions to meet our approval, we deplete them of precious time and resources and make it harder for them to turn their passion into action.
Recent research by the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing, which Mónica leads, identified 320 youth-organizing groups across the United States, most led by young people of color, low-income youth, young women, and queer and trans youth. Together, these groups help tens of thousands of young people build the leadership and organizing skills needed to take on the greatest problems of our time and fight for a more just and democratic future.
As leaders in philanthropy, we believe it’s past time to meet the vision and commitment these young people clearly demonstrate with far greater funding. That is why the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing launched the Youth Power Pledge, a campaign to raise $35 million to build the power of youth organizers. Of those funds, $15 million will go directly to grassroots youth-organizing groups across the country and $20 million will support grant making, leadership development programs, and a range of resources to strengthen youth-organizing groups.
If we want real change, we need to recognize, support, and amplify the visions we all had as youth. We must brush away our cynicism, return to that passionate belief in freedom as a real and attainable possibility, and support young people’s power to realize what they are certain they deserve from the world. We hope you will join us.
