This last year has been hard for me as a youth ally. On Sat, August 10th, I attended the closing ceremony of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project (YWEP), an organizing project that is led by and for young people of color who have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. They are transitioning after nearly 12 years in operation. August would have been the 20th anniversary of the South West Youth Collaborative, if it hadn’t closed its doors in 2012. It was also the the third anniversary of the death of youth organizer Damien Turner, whose murder sparked a movement calling for a trauma center on the South Side of Chicago.We’re in a moment when a number of youth organizing projects which were previously flourishing and developing incredible youth leadership development are closing their doors. This is happening across the city, as well as nationally. Part of it is funding. There just isn’t a lot of support out there for youth organizing and activism. But it isn’t all funding related. Youth development is incredibly difficult. You can’t work with youth without thinking about how they are surviving, if they have a bite to eat or shelter, because a lot of our youth don’t. There are a lot of crises and trauma that youth organizers are dealing with every day. Within a week of South West Youth Collaborative having to cease operations, we lost a youth to violence. We see so many of our youth dying, it feels like youth of color are being decimated in our city. And many of the programs that are being funded don’t build youth leadership, or they increase policing of our communities, or they just aren’t evidence based. People get frustrated at fighting and fighting and nothing changing, and our youth leaders get burnt out.The good news is that there are things we can do. We can help build the capacity of the existing youth organizations, and pool our resources to support them financially. We can train more youth leaders, so that the incredible youth who are out there every day don’t have as much riding on their shoulders. We can help organizations think about ways to thrive inside and outside the non-profit system. And we can respond in new ways when an organization does have to shut its doors.The ceremony held by YWEP last week to mark its closing was different than I’ve ever seen before. It was a very intentional and healing space that honored the work of the young folks that have been involved in YWEP and the organizations and individuals who have supported them over the years. When I’ve seen other organizations sunset, they have focused on the paperwork, the administration, the communication to external partners, but YWEP did a great job of doing that AND prioritizing the people that they were there for in the first place. They were also really intentional about honoring the paths of the young women moving forward, and celebrating that they are going to college and getting jobs. The mission of YWEP has always been to support the dreams and desires of girls in the sex trade, and they did that until the very end.The work of their campaigns will live on in other forms, and that’s what we’re seeing with a lot of our youth groups. Even though the doors are closed and the building is gone, the youth are continuing to work and find creative ways to continue their campaigns.If you want to donate to support youth led social justice organizing in Chicago, you can make a donation to the Youth Fund for Social Change here. Please put “Youth Fund” in the “comments or questions” section.
