Environmental Justice Leadership Series

This summer we hosted a series of workshops to develop identified YVA leaders as strategic organizers and movement builders. It was such a joy seeing youth from different schools around the Bay Area learn together.

During our first workshop we focused on the importance of history and studying the social movements who have came before us. We mapped out our own timelines and how we’ve found ourselves in the social and environmental justice movement. Through this workshop youth had a chance to ground themselves in past movements and present work. Youth also had a chance to learn about our movement elders!

In our second workshop we analyzed movements on a deeper level. We saw that many of our collective struggles share a common enemy: capitalism and imperialism and the practice of putting profit over people. We ended the day with writing collective poetry and use our words and art to advance our struggle for liberation, led and facilitated by Aniya Butler.

In our third workshop we brought together all the knowledge we‘ve built and learned how to transform it into action! Hannah, our lead organizer, brought us through the differences between organizing, mobilizing, and advocacy, and how and when we use each. Youth learned about holding a praxis and utilized it to strategize and plan hypothetical campaigns. We are thankful to FCYO for these powerful and sharp definitions that we had the honor to teach and share with the youth! We thought strategically about how we can build strong strategic campaigns to build power and win!