Youth Power + Social Justice
Collective members Jax, Tomas and Rudi attended the 2019 Saying it Outloud Conference where Jax presented their workshop “By and For Youth: Organizing Through Action and Practice”.
Stonewall Youth is By + For Queer and Trans Youth.
Stonewall Youth is dedicated to providing the training, resources and support necessary for LGBTQ+ youth to build and exercise their leadership and power within our organization and our communities. Youth participants, youth staff, and Fellows also gain skills that will benefit them in future employment, education, and community organizing. Stonewall Youth supports trans, queer, and youth leadership in our larger community by actively modeling trans and queer youth leadership.
LGBTQ+ are centered at Stonewall Youth in many ways. This includes:
Hiring and supporting a youth-majority staff collective. Stonewall Youth is operated by a non-hierarchical and consensus-based staff collective. We currently have a 8-member staff collective; five members are youth. We strive always for equality and equity in our collective. All collective members work part-time, and all receive the same wage. The role of adults staff, volunteers, and Board members at Stonewall Youth is to be respectful collaborators with youth staff and participants, offering expertise, support, and experience when requested while intentionally and consistently ensuring that youth lead and are centered at all times.
Offering paid Fellowships, which allow youth to earn money and gain work experience by helping with programming, administrative tasks, or community projects. Fellows receive stipends for their 3-month Fellowships. For more information click here.
Youth participants are encouraged to engage in every level of decision-making, including Board membership.
All our adult staff, volunteers and interns in the space are thoroughly trained in how to assist, support and mentor youth without speaking over them.
Youth power is a social justice issue. “Youth” is more than just a series of developmental stages. In the same way that society is structured around assumptions of straightness, whiteness, maleness, able-bodiedness and their idealization, so too is society centered around adulthood. The societal belief in the adult as the ideal means that adults are too often given power and privilege over youth. (here, bryn has paraphrased a really great article and they will track it down so they can In the nonprofit sector, this means that youth voices, ideas, perspectives, and power are marginalized. Some organizations that serve youth hire “peer staff,” but those youth staff usually do not have much power to direct and control the organization.
LGBTQ+ youth truly run Stonewall Youth.
Our work is rooted in social justice and anti-oppression values.
We address the root causes of oppression while providing access to services and activities that alleviate the stresses of marginalization and assist LGBTQ+ youth to survive and to build sustainable lives.
As an organization we know that racism, ableism, adultism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and other injustices are interconnected oppressions that deeply affect many LGBTQ+ youth, as well as the health and well-being of all members in our communities.
Other programming we offer related to social justice are our caucuses. Caucuses happen once a month normally the third Friday of the month. Our caucuses our split into two groups, our people of color caucus and white caucus. The caucus for people of color leaves the space with our staff of color to engage in community building. This has taken form in going to the Painted Plate or going out to eat. The caucus for white people stays at Stonewall to engage in an anti-racist workshop. Recently the white caucus has started to partner with SuRJ’s Olympia chapter, click here to see their Facebook . Workshops we have done include “Can White People be Woke?”, “Uncomfortability vs. Unsafety”, and “Anti-Oppression 101”.
In the past Stonewall has also hosted “Stonewall Activism Saturday School”. We have not offered this programming in a while but hope it will make an appearance soon.
SASS is quarterly workshop for youth organized by youth that supports LGBTQ+ youth and their allies in exchanging skills to become more effective activists in their communities and stand in solidarity with the movements that surround us. SASS not only fosters learning and the exchange of ideas, but also encourages networking and collaboration between activists in the Pacific Northwest who are engaged in community work and seek to participate in new types of organizing. Each Saturday School is centered on a different theme affecting our communities.
Past SASS workshops have focused on the themes “Know Your Rights & Harm Reduction for Queer Youth,” “Between Borders: Colonization, Violence, & Resistance,” and “Bodies Behind Bars,” which focused on LGBTQQIA folks and the prison industrial complex.