A few Project VOYCE staff are participating in the Funder’s Collaborative for Youth Organizing’s (FCYO), Organizing to Win (OWL) Lab, a national cohort of youth-serving and youth organizing organizations that have intentionally chosen to be in greater solidarity and alignment across the country. The staff members representing PV, are currently joining monthly/bi-weekly strategic education sessions with other organizations across the country that are also in a strategic planning stage. The sessions consist of engaging with deeper understandings and concepts that help us get to the root of what liberation and equity can look like within the nonprofit industrial complex and our society in general. As a part of the year-long cohort process, after the monthly sessions, we follow up by completing quarterly assessments that navigate our organization’s planning process in its growth. This space allows us to collaborate, brainstorm, and get feedback from other youth organizations, as well as our own, that are in development as well.

As a youth-serving organization engaging with FCYO we wanted to share with you all a couple of the key concepts that we recognize can be building blocks for the future in youth organizing, activism, youth-led action research, equitable youth/adult partnerships, and beyond.

Racial Capitalism

Racial capitalism offers a conceptual lens through which to understand the inextricable linkages between the systems of structural racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. It demonstrates that capitalism is not simply harsher on Black and other indigenous people of color because of the racist roots, but that the systems themselves constitute a racist and classist structure with multiple levels.

A racial capitalism frame debunks the false dilemma of whether to prioritize race, class, or gender, as well as the shallow analyses and misguided strategies that come from that forced-choice (i.e. disproportionate impact). Building solidarity is a long-term process among multi-racial working-class movements.

Generally, the architecture of racial capitalism shows up in a DNA that centers 4 common strands. These strands are:

• Exploitation: The labor of poor and working people that produces the profits of the wealthy few

• Dispossession: Theft of wealth, land, resources, and/or freedom for profit, to grow capitalism, often shaped by/shaping racism and  government control

• [the devaluing of] Reproductive Labor: the activities, labor, and work necessary for the reproduction of society, daily and intergenerationally

• Extractivism: taking an economic function that facilitates and sustains the commodification of earth.

Thoughts from our Project VOYCE Staff:

One of the most eye-opening parts of this process for me has been working with dozens of youth organizing groups across the country who are also restructuring and redefining how they serve their communities. Sometimes it feels like Project VOYCE is all alone in the ocean of planning and visioning, so it’s incredibly validating to get feedback from other folks with similar goals, values, and many of the same barriers as Project VOYCE, despite our regional, cultural, and organizational differences. 

I’m also really grateful to be learning truly radical frameworks and theories around social change. Too many workshops and trainings water down their critical lens to appeal to a broader audience or avoid alienating those who are not as comfortable discussing the realities of inequity in our systems. FCYO doesn’t shy away from these topics and instead helps us dig deeper and challenge our perceptions of how the world works and how it affects students nationwide. 

At Project VOYCE, I’m currently working with our Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) Cohort. It is comprised of young people doing student-led, designed, and focused research in their school communities to learn more about the raw, authentic experience of being a DPS Student. There are countless ways to apply what I’ve learned in my work! Teaching our students about these systems and how they intersect gives them additional insight to help frame what they learn in their research process. 

Students can trace back surface-level symptoms like disengagement or stress to understand the more profound societal influences that manifest and perpetuate the harmful experiences that many students share. By teaching them these profoundly enlightening lessons from FCYO, students also gain the tools, language, and perspective to envision an equitable, sustainable future for their school communities more deeply. These learnings will also equip students to create solutions that actively heal the collective trauma that many students have gained from their lives in the public school system.

Propositions on Solidarity: 

Learning all of these resources from FCYO is helping our organization manifest the goal of solidarity and provide a way to put the work into practice. The cohort leaves us with these propositions as we are navigating our organizing and personal worlds. We are encouraged to create our own propositions and building blocks for the future we want to see:

• We (progressive social movements) have a common enemy: The Ruling Class

• We need multi-racial solidarity among poor and working people if we are going to have the power we need to overcome our shared enemy

• We need to recognize and work through the barriers to multi-racial solidarity: the real differences between poor and working-class people, and the false divisions that have been cultivated between us

• We need to fight for each other. That means:

  • We actively work to challenge the inequalities between us

  • We work through race, gender, and nation, not around them

  • We move beyond allyship to a deep interest of shared self-interest