Youth-Led Community Organizing

Abstract

Youth-led organizing, a burgeoning movement that empowers young people while simultaneously enabling them to make substantive contributions to their communities, is increasingly receiving attention from scholars, activists, and the media. This book studies this dynamic field. It takes an important step toward bridging the gap between academic knowledge and community practice in this growing area. The book’s social justice-rooted perspective on the field’s conceptual and practical foundations is an effective basis for analyzing youth-led community organizing, but it also offers glimpses of successful groups in action and helpful insight into how fledgling organizations can become stronger. These groups and their young participants represent the politics and activism of the future, and the book guides to their key aspects and recent developments.

The Civic Empowerment Gap: Defining the Problem and Locating Solutions

“…Closer to home, students could elect class officers who will collaborate with the teacher on planning field trips and other special activities; or, they could as a class deliberate about and vote on issues including due dates for major projects, the order in which to read class novels, or the consequences for minor disciplinary infractions. Numerous examples, analyses, and evaluations of such approaches are available in the research literature (e.g., Weis & Fine, 2000;DarlingHammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, 2002;Westheimer & Kahne, 2002;Kahne & Westheimer, 2003;Noguera, Ginwright, & Cammarota, 2006;Apple & Beane, 2007;Schultz, 2008;Cammarota & Fine, 2008;Delgado & Staples, 2008;Hess, 2009) and from practitioners and civic education organizations. (See www.campaignforthecivicmissionofschools.org for information about and links to over 100 well-vetted curricula, programs, and organizations.…”

Taking stock of youth organizing: An interdisciplinary perspective

“…Scholars of applied human development (Camino & Zeldin, 2002;Zeldin, Petrokubi & Camino, 2008), social work (Checkoway & Gutierrez, 2006;Delgado & Staples, 2008), education (Ginwright, 2010;Kirshner, 2009), sociology (Warren, Mira, & Nikundiwe, 2008), community health (Peterson, Dolan, & Hanft, 2010), and psychology (Christens & Dolan, 2011;Watts & Flanagan, 2007) have published recent studies of youth organizing efforts. In addition, foundations and intermediary groups have taken notice, resulting in a proliferation of publications on the practice (e.g., Fletcher & Vavrus, 2006) and impacts of youth organizing.…”

“…It has emphasized youth as fully competent participants in society. Indeed, their exclusion from many settings has been framed as a social injustice (Delgado & Staples, 2008).…”

Improving Community-Based Youth Work: Evaluation of an Action Research Approach

“…Competency frameworks have added increased clarity to the occupation, but do not seem to capture fully the wide families of practice that are evident in youth work, nor the full range of competencies that may be required for youth work based in social justice (Ginwright, Cammarota, & Nogura, 2005), youth-led community organizing (Delgado & Staples, 2008) or youth participatory research and evaluation (Cammarota & Fine, 2008;Sabo Flores, 2008). For example, Vance (2010) reviews 11 competency frameworks and creates a set of 12 competency areas to describe skilled youth workers.…”