Matt Gonzales and Aneth Naranjo
The school integration movement in New York City (NYC) was blossoming in 2019. The public’s eyes and ears were following the lead of student organizers from groups like IntegrateNYC, Teens Take Charge, the Asian Student Advocacy Project (ASAP), and many others who were bringing segregation to the forefront. The city began to take real action by adopting recommendations from the School Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG) (School Diversity Advisory Group, 2019), and funding local diversity efforts. During an IntegrateNYC meeting early in the year, one of the youth directors made the point that we should retire segregation because 65 is (supposed to be) the age of retirement. This idea helped launch a citywide public outreach campaign that included the creation and distribution of 10,000 newspapers written by youth and a huge #RetireSegregation rally on the steps of Times Square to demand action. This moment represents the pinnacle of student advocacy for integration in NYC—a momentum that seemed unstoppable. It represents the power of intergenerational youth-led organizing. And, sadly, it represents the last major public action for integration prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly changed the organizing landscape.
As we approach the 70th anniversary of Brown, we offer our reflections from organizing in youth justice spaces for the past 10 and 20 years, respectively. We do not seek to glamorize the youth integration movement in NYC, rather we seek to acknowledge the incredible work, mistakes, and intentions that were needed to develop and sustain our intergenerational, youth-led movement, and also what didn’t work. We will share our experiences fighting for integration and youth power in NYC, as well as the evolutions in our careers and our current work with youth, locally and nationally. We will conclude with our reflections and recommendations for those interested in supporting youth justice movements.
The Ebbs and Flows of Youth Advocacy for Integration in NYC
In 2014, the UCLA Civil Rights Project released a report shining a light on the fact that New York State had the most segregated schools in the country, with NYC being the primary culprit (Kucsera & Orfield, 2014). This galvanized interest from the public and students, in particular, wanted to do something about it. We came to meet through our work at IntegrateNYC, a youth-led advocacy organization launched by NYC high school students from the South Bronx and their teacher. Aneth was part of the first cohort of student leaders to shape the organization and Matt was the first Policy Coach. IntegrateNYC began as an elective class. It led to a school exchange and discussion about school lunches and school resources. That led to a citywide youth council, which became the space where we dreamed up the “5Rs of Real Integration.” This policy framework was used to shape a Brooklyn desegregation plan, and eventually the SDAG recommendations. Student voices from IntegrateNYC, Teens Take Charge, ASAP, and arts-based advocacy organization Epic Theatre Ensemble were leading voices across NYC on school integration policy, and began to build themselves into the ecosystem of education justice organizing.
The Impact of COVID-19 on Youth Organizing
The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on the student organizing landscape in NYC. Youth organizers knew that inequity issues that existed for years were now being exacerbated, predominantly affecting Black and Brown youth. Students were marked absent or had missing assignments they could not complete because the city failed to have an organized and thoughtful process for delivering laptops to students. Students who needed a safe space outside their home no longer had anywhere to turn. Young people’s mental health was deteriorating, and the city left them with no resources. Countless young people were not supported and continue to not be supported. Despite being abandoned by local, state, and national institutions to navigate a global pandemic, young people and their families continued organizing and fighting for issues they cared about. While it is a tribute to the persistence of marginalized people to fight for justice, in actuality, it led to much burnout.
Since COVID, the movement has experienced significant turmoil, with leadership and organizational transitions, as well as conflict and harm that has been unresolved and unaddressed. This has had a significant impact on the education justice organizing landscape, and has left many groups absent in policy discussions, allowing anti-equity and extremist groups to take up space. In addition to numerous leadership transitions for ourselves and the organizations we’ve collaborated with, the 2021 Mayoral campaign ushered in an administration hostile to the work of school integration, and many other education justice policy issues.
Whereas under previous administrations and school Chancellors student voices were prominent—or at least impossible to ignore—in the policy-making process, this has not been the case under Mayor Eric Adams. Since arriving in office, Mayor Adams has cut nearly $2 billion from school budgets, resulting in teacher layoffs, loss of social workers and other mental health support, as well as critical programming like restorative justice and social emotional learning. In spite of years of advocacy led by groups like the Urban Youth Collaborative, Dignity in Schools, Ya-Ya Network, Brotherhood SisterSol, and many others, he has also continued to hire more school police in lieu of making the necessary investments to support student mental health. The administration has also reversed COVID-era policies that supported school integration, like reinstating discriminatory middle school admissions screens and doubling down on policies known to perpetuate more segregation. Given these circumstances, the youth organizing landscape and leadership has had to evolve. We see young people now more than ever focusing on creating their own spaces to organize around the issues that impact them—climate change, the school-to-prison pipeline, police brutality, and housing insecurity, in addition to school segregation and many more issues—instead of looking to spaces to “fit” or “accept” young people.
Breaking the Cycle: Adults as a Barrier to Sustainable Youth and Intergenerational Spaces
In our experience, the biggest barrier to building sustainable and meaningful youth and intergenerational spaces and movements is almost always the way adults show up. This often comes from a failure to recognize adult-youth power dynamics, and manifests in taking up too much space; over-explaining and lecturing, rather than listening to young people; infantilizing young people; and being transactional instead of relational. These types of behaviors will immediately undermine what is often a well-intentioned desire to collaborate.
We also believe it is important to uplift tensions within the nonprofit sector. It is vital to reflect on how rules are often more imposed on young people when creating organizational structure and how youth are often held to a different standard. These issues are in no way exclusive to youth-serving nonprofits and organizations, but are ultimately toxic and counter-productive for building sustainable youth and intergenerational spaces. Anti-Blackness pervades our country and our institutions. Leaders in nonprofits, especially youth-serving organizations, need to reflect deeply on the ways anti-Black racism manifests in their organizations. We also understand that the funding landscape for youth organizations has created harmful incentives and expectations, and the continued need for youth organizations to produce a product or campaign for their funders has harmed organizing and created dynamics that have led to severe burnout. These barriers imposed by adults ultimately stem from young people’s lack of legal rights and formal political power.
Moving from Youth Voice to Youth Power
Our time at IntegrateNYC gave us an opportunity to build relationships with like-minded organizations, and to connect school integration and desegregation to the larger education justice movement in NYC. In our current roles at NYU Metro Center, our work is centered on providing strategic support to grassroots education justice organizing groups, with particular emphasis on supporting youth organizations. We continue to provide direct support to groups like IntegrateNYC, ASAP, Youth Power Coalition, Urban Youth Collaborative, and many other youth organizations across NYC.
As the first Youth Justice Coordinator at the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative (EJ-ROC), Aneth’s goal has been to continue creating spaces and resources for young people. Young people need more free spaces made by young people where they are not being tokenized or feel like they always have to be productive. We’ve currently been helping coordinate and co-facilitate youth power convenings with the Youth Power Coalition, where our goal is to do exactly that. Our youth justice program is focused on helping students build strong relationships, leadership skills, and serving as a hub and network for youth organizers.
These reflections have come from our experiences in numerous youth-serving organizations and over years of collaboration. The evolution of our relationship from adult-youth mentors to now colleagues has created the opportunity for both of us to reflect on our work and practice, and to refine how we do things moving forward. We offer these guiding principles and reflection questions for consideration as you approach working with young people.
Adult Allyship 101: When we host intergenerational spaces, we have taken on the practice of doing a short breakout for adults and students. In these spaces, we gather adults and walk through the expectations and intentions for adults in a youth space. We lean on the Adult Allyship 101 resource created with the Youth Power Coalition. We use this simple grounding to orient adults to the ways youth expect their participation. Strong adult allyship comes from building trust with your people. This happens through developing authentic and meaningful relationships with young people. Establishing authentic relationships requires adults to show up with authenticity, and to refrain from transactional dynamics. If you are only showing up to a youth space to lecture them, or to get them to do something for you, don’t.
We encourage readers to explore the Adult Allyship 101 resource as a starting point for how adults can use their privilege to support youth power, and how adults should commit to showing up in youth spaces. We also encourage adults to engage their younger selves in their lives. Too often we are not encouraged to tap into the things we found joy in as kids and teenagers, like art, music, and crafts. While these activities are mostly seen as “hobbies” and are less encouraged as you grow up, these are the activities that ground us and connect us to ourselves and the world around us.
Youth Voice, Youth-led, and Youth Power: We invite readers to deeply consider their perceptions of these words. Adults often claim to want “student voice” in their work or movement, but simply including student voice is the bare minimum of engagement and often leads to students being used as decoration or tokens for an event. We also often hear about “youth-led” organizations and movements, but we have seen this quickly revert to adult decision-making structures, especially when under organizational stress or transition. Building sustainable, youth-led spaces requires trust, strong relationships, and intentional practice.
We find the Ladder of Youth Participation created by Hart (1992) to be a valuable tool when considering what types of youth engagement you desire. We strongly discourage any activities that fall toward the bottom of the ladder (manipulation, tokenism, and decoration). We also want to acknowledge that it takes significant work, time, and relationships to build adult and student capacity for the higher levels of the ladder, and this might mean building capacity slowly. We also remind readers that if you find your engagements fall toward the bottom of the ladder it doesn’t make you a bad person or malicious. Many of the educational structures and adult-youth power dynamics reinforce the bottom of the ladder because, as stated above, our society does not actually want young people to have agency and autonomy.
We encourage readers to review the ladder of participation and consider where your engagement activities with youth fit into this ladder, and where you could make changes to your practice to move you and the youth in your movement up the ladder. Ultimately, we seek to move beyond the ladder of participation and youth-led structure to developing sustainable and authentic youth power. This goes beyond adult-initiated activities and events and seeks a future where young people have political and legal rights and power—and adults are able to follow their lead. Building youth power is a necessary element for strong intergenerational spaces.
We Keep Us Safe: Abolition is necessary for the movement. We understand this term and the associated policy implications can often intimidate adults who find discomfort in radical shifts in the status quo. We encourage readers to be curious about those tensions, explore the origins or roots of those tensions, and embrace the possibility of an alternative future. We argue that abolition is the only rational politic and framework to transform our society and our movements. Young people are deeply attuned to the concepts and ideas of abolition, and adults wishing to be stronger allies should familiarize themselves with these ideas. Abolition traces back to the origins of resistance in this country and has always been at the center of Black liberatory thought. There are countless resources to explore, but we will share a few to get started: We Do This, ‘Till We Free Us, by Mariame Kaba; Abolition, by Angela Davis; Let This Radicalize You, by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba; All About Love, by bell hooks; and Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom, by Derecka Purnell.
After a global pandemic, a white nationalist attempt to overthrow the government, almost daily mass shootings, climate crisis, and multiple genocides taking place before everyone’s eyes, youth are hyper-aware of what is and isn’t working as intended and what is and isn’t serving them. Short-term, incremental, neoliberal solutions are unacceptable or unsustainable. We continue to live in a society of mass incarceration, persistent segregation, and continued exclusion and criminalization of young people. We encourage an abolitionist mindset to apply to all our movements and spaces, and believe without this adults will always be out of step with youth. Lastly, we cannot say we care about young people here, without caring about the young people everywhere, including in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan. We can’t forget their voices in the movement for youth power everywhere.
Aneth Naranjo (aneth.naranjo@nyu.edu) is the Youth Justice Coordinator for EJ-ROC at the NYU Metro Center.
Matt Gonzales (matt.gonzales@nyu.edu) is Director of the EJ-ROC at the NYU Metro Center.
References
Kucsera, J., & Orfield, G. (2014). New York State’s Extreme School Segregation: Inequality, Inaction and a Damaged Future. UCLA: The Civil Rights Project / Proyecto Derechos Civiles. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5cx4b8pf
School Diversity Advisory Group. (2019) Making the Grade I and II: The Path to Real Integration for NYC Public Schools, New Programs for Better Schools. Retrieved from https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/metrocenter/school-diversity-advisory-group
Hart, R. A. (1992). Children’s participation: From tokenism to citizenship. Florence, Italy: United Nations Children’s Fund International Child Development Centre. Retrieved from https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/childrens_participation.pdf
You must be logged in to post a comment.