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“A movement that does not have a vision for children and for young people is a movement with an expiration date.”

-Angela Kunkel-Linares 

We are excited to share that our upcoming Giving Project will focus on resourcing the power and leadership of youth organizing. Since 2015, the Headwaters Giving Project has worked with nine cohorts of community members who, collectively, undertook meaningful political education, donor organizing, and grantmaking to select the grantees for each iteration. As our team ramps up for the launch of our tenth Giving Project this Fall, we wanted to share insights into our framework for youth organizing. 

Interested in joining our next Giving Project cohort? Keep an eye out for applications opening Monday, April 13th!

Youth organizing in the fight for collective liberation 

“Youth organizing is the strategy towards a liberatory world. It’s not a side project in the fight for collective liberation.” 

-Angela Kunkel-Linares

In choosing youth organizing as this year’s theme, the Giving Project team wanted to make it clear that our vision for a liberatory future is incomplete without the leadership and input of young people. We believe that youth organizing should not simply utilize the labor of young people – it is a way of organizing that strategizes with young people’s leadership and engagement. 

Angela Kunkel-Linares, Giving Project Program Coordinator, brings her own youth organizing experience to this framework. She shares, “Most of our beliefs about our movements, about the world we want to build, are beliefs that most children carry and are told are not reasonable.”

Movement spaces are also complicit in looking down on the vision and revolutionary actions of young people. “I think that’s a really common experience for youth organizers,” says Kunkel-Linares. “They step into this imagination of what the world can look like, and they get told that it doesn’t follow the rules of what adult organizers say they have to follow in order to win. It plays into a lot of respectability politics.”

Sierra Judy, Giving Project Senior Program Officer, points out that our movements need the radical hope we see in youth organizing work. “True youth organizing work, rather than work simply done by youth, goes beyond the status quo. There’s an abolitionist thinking, where it’s possible to reimagine what could be rather than trying to work within what already is.”

So, how does it feel when there is authentic youth leadership? “The tell is joy, for me,” Kunkel-Linares says. An organizing space that sees so much forward progression without room for joy is dangerous. “When I step into a youth-led space, it is often imaginative and expansive in the way the young people see themselves and the way that they see this moment.”

Many movements have been led by young people and proven themselves powerful. For example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC or “SNICK) started with four Black students staging lunch counter sit-ins to challenge racial segregation. Their sit-ins led to students from other colleges and high schools joining in, leading to tens of thousands of students participating in sit-ins. The 504 protests or the International Indigenous Youth Council at Standing Rock also demonstrate the power of youth organizers leading the way. As Kunkel-Linares points out, “History shows that when youth are prioritized as leaders, movements win.”

Centering youth leadership is class disruption

“Including young people and children into conversations about class and class disruption is a key towards unlocking the capitalist hierarchy.” 

-Angela Kunkel-Linares 

When we think of systems of oppression, whether it be racism, ableism, gender oppression, classism, climate change, or others, youth are consistently among those most directly impacted. Youth and children have also been an intentional target in attacks on communities of color, including the hundreds of thousands of Native children taken and forced into colonization through boarding schools, or Black and brown children with disabilities being criminalized within their schools. 

Many of us are feeling rage and grief with how ICE is targeting children. Judy says that all of these things are connected. “Be radicalized, be horrified, and tangibly support young people in building something else.” Youth should not have to silently inherit the world that we live in, Judy adds. “We must allow ourselves to be moved to the point of action in solidarity with young people. Part of that is resourcing, through both time and money, the ideas, leadership, and dreams of young people in our own communities.”

Kunkel-Linares adds, “Children are overlooked as a hyper-exploitable class by the rich, by colonizers, and by familial power dynamics. I see such a connection between the work of the Giving Project, which is class disruption, and youth organizing.” 

Class disruption for Giving Project members includes engaging in political education and cross-class conversations about racialized capitalism. These practices help break down the silence, shame, and division that people of different classes often experience and instead build cross-class understanding and solidarity.

Giving Projects also use the “meaningful gift” framework, where each cohort member self-determines what amount would be meaningful for them. This emphasizes that the significance of a financial contribution is not based on a dollar amount, but the self-determined commitment to what is meaningful for each person. Because youth organizers aren’t always given the space, respect, or agency that we believe they deserve, our team sees centering youth organizing as part of our larger commitment to resource movement work in a way that disrupts class division and expands decision-making power beyond people with power and money.

A multigenerational commitment to youth leadership 

“Believing in youth leadership does not mean youth are alone in it.” 

-Sierra Judy 

In many ways, the Giving Project is uniquely situated to build solidarity with young people. Rather than asking young people to join as cohort members (in fact, we are only recruiting cohort members ages 18 and above), the Giving Project is focused on moving money to spaces built by and for young people. This isn’t a new model – each iteration of our Giving Project has called on people across the community to come together and figure out how a multigenerational, multiracial, and cross-class group can act in solidarity with organizers on the ground.

“We’re very clear that the Giving Project is an intentionally multigenerational space,” says Judy. Bringing a multigenerational cohort together to center youth organizing is a way to make space for youth leadership – without requiring young people’s labor. She adds, “We can build pathways for solidarity with youth through the connections and political education we facilitate within the Giving Project.”

Making space for youth leadership also requires work in our day-to-day. Kunkel-Linares reflects, “The strengthening we all need to do is in relationships. Not simply one-on-one relationships with children, but also noticing how young people and children exist in our world. Noticing that the way you interact with the adults around you impacts the children and young people in their lives. Our interactions with each other have to reflect the loving hope we hold for our children, for their liberation.”

For some youth organizers, the Giving Project may be their first time going through a grant-seeking process. Judy shares, “Our hope is that through this grant process, we can show that youth organizing has a space in the funding stream of philanthropy. That youth organizers deserve to be respected and affirmed.” Organizing happens with or without funding, but philanthropy needs to open the door to young people’s leadership. “We want their experience of the Giving Project, of being trusted and seen as leaders, to be an expectation for how they are treated in the world. And we want them to let us know – how can we be in this work with you?”

What’s next?

We’re excited to dive into this world of youth organizing with you. If you are interested in joining our upcoming Giving Project cohort, please keep an eye out for cohort applications opening on Monday, April 13th.

Many of our applicants apply to the Giving Project because someone in their life encouraged them to. If you think of someone who would be a good fit, we encourage you to let them know. For youth organizing organizations interested in applying, the Giving Project Grant will open in July. We look forward to your applications!

In the meantime, we invite you to learn more about how youth organizing fits into our collective fight for justice:

• “The Politics of Childhood,” an essay from Medicine Stories, by Aurora Levins Morales

• Teaching to Transgress, by Bell Hooks

• Solidarity with Children, by Madeline Lane-McKinley