Foundations Putting Money Into Campaign led by Youths

In the past two decades, foundations have poured tens of millions of dollars into efforts to help

inspire young people to volunteer, distribute charitable grants, and start their own charities. Now, a small but growing number of foundations say a new need is emerging: to build a generation of activist youths.

Toward that end, grant makers have started giving money for programs such as youth-led campaigns to improve conditions in public schools and to protest environmental hazards in neighborhoods. Foundation leaders say youth activism helps young people learn to identify and confront the causes of problems in their neighborhoods[–]and to realize that they have the power to help solve them.

A handful of foundations interested in such grant making formed the Funders’ Collaborative for Youth Organizing in 2000. Today, its membership stands at 22 foundations and includes such major players as the Ford Foundation, in New York, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, in Flint, Mich. Members contribute money to the collaborative, which has given $1.2-million so far to youth-run activism efforts.

Working With Offenders

The Edward W. Hazen Foundation, in New York, has been one of the leaders, making grants such as the $60,000 it awarded in November to the LA Youth Justice Coalition to help get juvenile offenders directly involved in shaping the policies that affect them.

The organization, which has chapters in juvenile-detention halls, recently collected letters and stories from its members describing their experiences in the juvenile-justice system. Armed with such materials, the coalition was able to persuade the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to reject a proposal that would have automatically transferred young people who were being tried as adults to an adult facility. Chapter members argued that adult facilities weren’t able to meet young people’s educational and emotional needs and said they feared that young offenders would face an increased risk of physical and sexual abuse by adult inmates.

“Youth organizing really does reach out to, involve, and tap into the strengths of young people who typically wouldn’t be seen as leaders,” says Nat Chioke Williams, program officer for youth development at the Hazen Foundation. “Where else are you going to find an organization that has as its membership incarcerated youth?”

The Hazen Foundation awarded its first grant for youth-activism projects in 1991. Since 1998, the foundation has awarded $2.5-million to support youth organizing.

Mr. Williams says one of the biggest challenges Hazen faced early on was that few other foundations thought of youth organizing as a grant-making program area. Since the Hazen Foundation’s focus has always been on providing seed money to new organizations, Mr. Williams says the foundation worried about how its grantees would sustain their programs after Hazen’s start-up funds were exhausted.

“We weren’t sure if any other funders would actually pick this up,” says Mr. Williams. “We weren’t sure if these organizations would last longer than our grant, so it was very risky grant making at the time.”

Fighting Misperceptions

Grant makers in the field of youth organizing say that one of the challenges they face in persuading other foundations to get involved is a sense of confusion about what makes organizing different than volunteerism and community service.

The distinction, say youth-activism grant makers, is that volunteerism meets an immediate human need like feeding the hungry, while organizing asks, What are the causes of hunger and what can I do to alleviate it.

At the same time that they make the distinction, though, many grant makers say that the prevailing definition of service is too narrow.

“I would really like to see us think about expanding our definition of what serving community means to include the kinds of service provided by teenagers and young adults who in fact are working directly to improve their communities,” says Robert F. Sherman, program director for effective citizenry at the Surdna Foundation, in New York.

Adds Vera Miao, project director of the Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing: “You can make the argument that when a youth-organizing group is successfully able to stop toxic dumping in the middle of a residential zone, that’s a community service as much as it is to do a park cleanup.”

Learning Important Skills

Grant makers hope youth-activism projects will not only foster social change but also help give the young people involved in the programs the skills they need to become productive adults.

“Youth organizing is good youth development,” says Ms. Miao. Through the training that youth-organizing groups provide, and by working on advocacy campaigns, young people develop critical-thinking, public-speaking, and research skills, she says. They also gain self-confidence, learn about public policy, and reinforce the reading, writing, and math skills that they’ve learned in school.

“You would be amazed,” she says. “You sit down with young people who are 16 or 17, and they’re able to break down a piece of legislation because they’ve spent time studying it, understanding the impacts, and moving through all of this very twisty, winding language to be able to unpack what the consequences of the legislation are for their communities.”

Some grant makers hope an added benefit of encouraging young people to become activists will be that they will be motivated to vote when they reach age 18.

“Those who get involved in youth organizing come to understand in a much more direct way how power is shaped in communities,” says Mr. Sherman of the Surdna Foundation. “They will have thought about community power, how it’s generated, and who controls what, and I think have more of a sight set on the political process.”

FUNDERS’ COLLABORATIVE ON YOUTH ORGANIZING: A SAMPLING OF 2002 GRANTS

Californians for Justice (Oakland): $25,000 to help young people and their parents organize a statewide campaign advocating equitable distribution of resources in the state’s public schools.

Citizens for Quality Education (Lexington, Miss.): $25,000 to bring students, parents, teachers, and administrators together to create educational opportunities for children and families in Homes County and throughout Mississippi.

Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio (Columbus): $15,000 for the Youth Empowerment Project, which organizes homeless and formerly homeless youths to work on issues they identify in breaking the cycle of homelessness.

Colorado Progressive Coalition (Denver): $25,000 for the Campaign to Stop Racial Profiling in the Streets and in Our Schools, a campaign that involves young people in the fight against discriminatory treatment of minorities by law-enforcement officials, teachers, and school administrators.

FIERCE (New York): $15,000 for the Save Our Space Campaign, which seeks to counter gentrification and police violence in the Christopher Street Pier and the West Village neighborhoods of New York City. The campaign aims to improve conditions for youths who are homeless, members of minority groups, or gay or lesbian.

Sista II Sista (Brooklyn, NY): $15,000 to organize young people to reduce violence against young Latina and black women in the East Williamsburg and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn.