These important projects are grassroots; they are critical in their practices; they each create and use liberating pedagogy to empower themselves and their communities. I'm blessed to be a mentor, trainer, student, and ally with each of them. Please check out their sites, and if you can, make a contribution to their remarkable work.
The Center for Young Women's Development (San Francisco), directed entirely by young women, has developed a program that integrates political and economic literacy, legal education, meditation, and life skills. CYWD transforms young women coming out of the juvenile justice system into advocates and activists for gender equality and economic justice.
(contact: Marlene Sanchez)
DEBUG develops young leaders out of the lower frequencies of the high-tech Silicon Valley workforce through an action-reflection process that builds self-esteem as it builds consciousness and induces writing, visual and performance art, and rich community activism.
(contact: Raj Jayadev)
IDEPSCA- Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California employs a creative popular education that empowers domestic workers, day laborers, youth and women for economic development, political action, and civic participation. It is an exemplary model of integrating education with organizing, and integrating working class leaders of color into the broader social movement.
www.idepsca.org
Engaging Education- a student-directed recruitment and retention program for students of color at UC Santa Cruz. E2 facilitates a student-run, Freire-inspired core course each quarter introducing students to the social movement and organizing them to advocate for educational and justice in the university and beyond.
www.engagingeducation.org
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Youth United for Community Action (East Palo Alto) recently engaged its young organizers in
participatory research to study the detrimental effects of a local mutlinational waste treatment corporation ( the company, ROMIC, was forced to clean up after ten years of community resistance, led in part by YUCA).
(contact: Charisse Domingo)
Critical Education for an Engaged Community is a cultural advocacy group working for education for cultural democracy and linguistic justice. Among its activities are heritage rights advocacy; community language promotion; people's art through theater and writing; leadership development; social media production; continuing and alternative eudcation; and linkage and solidarity building. It is based in the Kalihi District of Honolulu, O'ahu, Hawai'i.
(contact: Jeffery Acido)
(Represent 2 Witness aka The Critical Faith Project) is a leadership program created in 2003. To date 190 young adults of color have participated (60% working class and 40% middle class). During its seven years as a program of the PANA Institute at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA., the project included a two-week residential intensive, quarterly training retreats, a 'graduate' program (Congregational Leaders Internship- CLI) and a one-week immersion experience (e.g. post Katrina New Orleans; Tohono O'odham Reservation, Arizona/Mexico). Most participants began as high school seniors and completed the two-year experience as college students.
r2w aka the critical faith project
