Justice Pipeline

Our new Social Justice Leadership Pipeline initiative is a positive, tiered pathway that supports young people towards lifelong community organizing. This pipeline will ignite young people as change agents, sustain their growth as activists, and provide long-term organizing opportunities in the movement. We are prioritizing a holistic, systemic expansion of our youth empowerment model.

The Social Justice Leadership Pipeline has 4 main components:

-A 3-month YO 2.0 leadership development program, building directly from the entry-level Youth Organizing Institute (YO!)
-6-month Movement Building Internships, honing youth skills and passion
-A youth organizer staff position, coordinating youth-led, direct action campaign work
-Expanded community education and alliance building with other social justice organizations, forging new organizing opportunities for youth when they age out at SYPP

With this pipeline, we strive to support youth beyond short-term periods of community organizing. Our past approaches to that support have varied from year to year with the exception of our annual Youth Organizing Institute (YO!). The YO! is an invigorating introduction to activism, but it isn’t enough to sustain youth passions towards social change. We seek to build on the YO!’s foundation by providing a clear, structured path from entry-level organizing toward a long-term relationship to social justice work.

In order to undo systemic oppression at its roots, movements must build alternatives that offer young people sustainable options for social engagement. We must move away from a system where zero tolerance policies go hand in hand with high stakes punitive testing. Our society continues to frame education issues by leaving youth out of the picture as active members. We need to value a society that trusts marginalized youth to actively participate in solving their communities’ most dire problems. This initiative is a step in that direction, pushing local youth activist work to become more emotionally, intellectually, and financially sustaining, so that youth can take leadership and now and into the future.