We Are the City Spotlight on Youth Speaks
By the Youth Speaks Staff
For 25 years, Youth Speaks has created safe spaces that challenge young people, especially Black, Indigenous, Asian-American, Middle Eastern and North African, Latinx, Pacific Islander, and those from working-class communities, to find, develop and apply their voices as creators of societal change. From our in-school residencies to our out-of-school time spoken word poetry programs and storytelling workshops to our signature International Brave New Voices Youth Poetry Festival and Life is Living Festival, we provide platforms for young people to speak for themselves and their communities.
The Shelter in place order brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020 began on a Monday, and by that Friday we had our first ever online Under 21 Open Mic on Instagram. In the weeks that followed, we swiftly moved weekly writing workshops and our twice-monthly open mics to Zoom. What followed was an absolute explosion of youth tuning in for our activities not only from San Francisco, but throughout the Bay Area, United States, and also international locations. We had recurring international youth artists join us from countries including Jamaica, Canada, Lebanon, and Vietnam. Youth that may have engaged with us exclusively on YouTube or Instagram suddenly had access to our table, virtual as it may be. When it became clear that we could no longer do some of our biggest events like the Unified Poetry Festival, we created an innovative, multimedia youth poetry anthology, “Between My Body and the Air.” It describes that pivot as well as our intent to make space for youth to be in conversation with each other, while we capture what it was like to be alive in a historic moment — in the midst of uprising for Black life, environmental catastrophe, and COVID-19 — as told by young folks. Another pivot we made was to launch a digital cultural campaign “Survival Pending Revolution” which engaged young people in exploring vaccinations as well as challenging the underlying conditions that make injustices, such as COVID-19, police violence, climate change, and more disproportionately impact the health of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander communities.
Today, we find ourselves in the midst of another transition. In Fall 2021, we joined our school partners in bringing back in-person workshops to classrooms. For the entire school year before that, we adapted our in-school programs to allow us to provide the support and flexibility our partner teachers and students needed. Everything was online and we provided synchronous social-emotional and mental health, and educational supports to youth and educators, through a new online curriculum and asynchronous learning materials. The Zoom chat became a precious space for youth voice and engagement, even as many cameras remained off as youth managed connectivity issues and held onto what little privacy they could as the spaces of home and school blurred.
Now, our Teaching Artists meet students at their schools with masks on and create space to process the many shifts in the pandemic, emerging war in Ukraine, healing and relearning connection in an era defined by distance. Our out-of-school activities have followed suit, with our first in-person workshops, open mics, and poetry slams beginning the first week of February. The energy of these spaces is electric as we facilitate critical connections through conversation and call and response. Additionally, we’re all navigating new challenges such as how to perform with a mask on, how to gently remind our neighbor to pull it up over their nose as an act of love, how to ask for someone’s proof of vaccination with no shame, and how to bridge the gap between our in-person and online participants at our hybrid writing workshops. Currently, our writing workshops are more highly attended by online participants than our in-person participants at a ratio of about 10-to-1. But our in-person numbers are steadily growing with the long-missed magic of youth stumbling into the library or the museum where they take place, wondering what’s going on and how they can get involved. Our in-person open mics and slams flourish, vibrant with an energy that feels how it first felt when we moved our events online. On both ends of this transition, whether we were creating our first online or in-person events, it has felt like a kind of exhale, a relief that, no matter what is happening with the world, no matter what dangers drive themselves between us, we will always find our way back to each other. There will always be something that needs saying and we will always find a way to applaud that young and necessary truth, the way it clears the air and makes another life possible.
“Like a lot of metropolitan cities across the country, San Francisco has a rich history of cultural, ethnic, religious, and economic diversity — this has always been one of San Francisco’s greatest gifts. At a moment when there’s a lot at stake — it’s a rapidly changing city — one of the greatest assets to emerge out of San Francisco are young people who are fighting to preserve their family and community legacies to ensure that belonging isn’t just a catchphrase. They are holding adults accountable, as a city and community of people who believe in justice, cultural equity, and the power of diversity to fight to preserve and protect communities that have been in San Francisco for generations. San Francisco is rich in activism, people power — young people and communities that have been here for generations are demanding that a just economic recovery is one that squarely uplifts the stories and lives of the most marginalized communities.”- Michelle “Mush” Lee, Youth Speaks’ Executive Director.
Some of the things San Francisco must do and continue doing include:
● Invest in resources that ensure that youth and their families can stay in our city;
● Invest in neighborhoods and organizations that provide youth and their families affirming spaces; and
● Ensure that our neighborhoods and public spaces are invested in and that these places are welcoming and accessible to all San Franciscans.
We look forward to doing our part at our new programmatic home located at 265 Shotwell. We’re looking forward to investing in this cultural facility, building out the space for our programs and activities, and investing in programs that will engage the broader community through our artistic practice, creating a sense of inclusion and belonging for all. We envision building an intergenerational, creative, and vibrant space to engage the residents at 2060 Folsom Street and our larger community through our artistic practice, rooted in storytelling through various digital and real-life platforms. We are creating a community gathering and cultural space that facilitates connection, intersection, and a sense of belonging, in a city where these spaces are slowly disappearing.
Youth Speaks has been serving San Francisco youth for over 25 years! What do you believe has contributed the most to the organization’s success, and what do you predict for Youth Speaks’ future?
In addition to having some of the most excellent Programmatic staff out there as our Teaching Artists, Youth Speaks’ deep history of celebrating young people and their voices as harbingers of hope and catalysts for change is one aspect of our organization’s success. Our pedagogy is rooted in life as primary text: our belief that a writer’s journey to their story is just as valuable as the story itself. Youth Speaks has always thoughtfully challenged the mythical center of the social and cultural order to celebrate voices, texts, and narratives deliberately excluded from the larger American Story.
As the world around us rapidly changes, young people are seeking out greater platforms of conversation and opportunities to be able to make profound and lasting impacts on the issues that matter most to them. Whether it’s movements for racial justice, climate change, transgender or reproductive rights, Youth Speaks remains committed to ensuring that the voices and imaginations of today’s youth, especially BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ youth, are centered and celebrated.
