CYES 295:
I believe that to make lasting, holistic change we must first look at the role of youth autonomy and agency in our schooling system and society at large. Youth are the most vulnerable to social control, policing, institutional racism and sexism, etc. Youth have the capacity to recreate our world and dream of the impossible, which is what makes them the biggest threat to the capitalist, white supremacist, heteropatriarchy that makes up our global power-holders. The ability to imagine is a dangerous and powerful tool that is unique to youth.
Creative expression unlocks a world of imagination and social change that is limitless and inclusive to all. Through my experiences with youth slam poetry, the DIY arts and music scene, and my work on campus with Floetic Fridays, I have seen firsthand the role that creative expression has in building community based social justice.
In order to deeply engage with the role of youth agency, imagination, and creative expression, I need to embrace the humbling uncertainty of not knowing the answers. I am twenty years old, which means I have just left my teenage hood. Making it all the more important that I work not to be a charismatic leader by being the expert, but by providing information for inspiration and growth to stem from. In their book, “We make the road by walking”, Ch. 3; Myles Horton and Paulo Freire discuss the question, “My expertise is in knowing not to be an expert”. In this section of their discussion they point that in order to empower others to be change-makers we mustn’t direct them with the answers or lead them to believe that there are answers at all, but rather encourage critical analysis and self-guided exploration and discovery.
To address and promote youth autonomy I want to engage in popular education. I think that youth are often subjected to spaces that don’t allow them to express themselves, critically analyze, build healthy relationships, and most of all make mistakes. I am hoping to put these ideas into practice with my field site of the Scamp After-School program at HX Library in Stone Soup Community Center in Worcester, MA. We are building an alternative learning space to promote collaboration, community engagement, social justice, and creative expression amongst youth. The Scamp After-School draws on the power of play to inspire and empower youth to take accountability for their communities and their dreams.
I have many role models that inspire me to take on this work, one being Cindy Crabb. She wrote the book, “Things that Help: Healing our lives through Feminism, Anarchism, Punk, & Adventure”. In this book she advocates and gives examples for how communities can make change without the help of institutions. I have also learned a lot from the writings of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a poet, writer and activist that is originally from Worcester, MA. In her books she talks about what it means to reclaim power for communities in ways that allow for sustainable social change.
NOW:
My praxis project site did not end up being with Scamp After-School project, but I do believe that a lot of what I was working through and discussing as my theory of change rings true for my eventual site Floetic Fridays as well. For this section, reflecting on my theory of change, I decided to include a letter that I wrote to the Floetic Fridays organizers as a conclusion to my praxis paper. This letter encapsulates a lot of what I have learned from this process but also about social change in general.
Dear Floetic Fridays,
I am not sure who is reading this. Maybe you are currently an organizer of Floetic, and you are referenced in this paper. Maybe you used to be a part of our community but have since gone on and graduated. Maybe you have never even met me before, but you are now a part of the leadership of this work. No matter how you come to this letter, I want to say thank you. Cultural organizing is vulnerable and exhausting, but I promise that you are making an impact even if you can’t see it yet. There are a few things that I want to emphasize within this letter about what I learned through this praxis project, and what it means for the broader community of activists.
First off, we must collectively commit to the idea that we are working towards long-term visions of change. Through this work I have been constantly reminded that while the need to radically change our world is urgent, it takes a long time for transformation to occur. This is not to say that we must de-escalate our dreams or stop dreaming at all, but rather we must understand that we may not ever see the impact we are building towards. A crucial element to visionary work is accepting that we are working towards a future that is so beautiful, we may not be the ones to benefit from it. As cultural organizers, we have to be okay with that. We build the infrastructure for everyday acts of rebellion against what we have been taught is normalcy. I believe that if we stop dreaming long-term then we are letting our oppressors win. If we choose to build our organizations around reactionary, urgent calls to action, we are centering our oppression instead of centering our liberation and collective freedom.
Building towards long-term visions of change demands that we value the slow, intimate, pauses within our work. Cultural organizing puts value on the meals we share, the laughs we have, the moments of failure, and the moments of trust.
Second, by collectively dreaming for long-term visions of change, we are not only building from our future strength but from our ancestral strength and history. As organizers, once we begin to accept that time is non-linear, meaning not arranged chronologically, we can receive strength from those who were revolutionary in our history and those who will be revolutionary in the future. I believe that by seeing our work as a part of a larger history and future for resistance, we can build a movement that is even more powerful than we have ever imagined. To quote brown, “Transformation doesn’t happen in a linear way, at least not one we can always track. It happens in cycles, convergences, explosions. If we release the framework of failure, we can realize that we are in iterative cycles, and we can keep asking ourselves- how do I learn from this?” (105). Through this praxis project, I have learned that we must constantly be asking ourselves, “How do I learn from this?”, not to forever put ourselves in the cycle of academia, but rather to root this work in our past, present, and future.
Third, cultural organizers wear many hats. This work will never stop feeling like a whirlwind. In the Spring of 2019, a group of Floetic Organizers were driving to the Worcester Pop-up, the location for that month’s Floetic event. We were all a bit stressed, trying to find ways to solve small issues that have come up along the way. Pauline asked the car, “Does Floetic ever stop being stressful? Like, is it always going to feel this chaotic? I think we all knew immediately, that the answer to that question was yes. This work is chaotic and stressful because making meaningful change is supposed to be hard and messy. As cultural organizers, we are healers, DJ’s, technicians, emcees, singers, artists, social media wizards, chefs, facilitators, baby-sitters, and at the same time we are people. This work demands us to skilled in a multitude of ways, but it also demands that we show up as our authentic selves, ready to be honest, vulnerable, and transparent about needs and capacity.
Fourth, as a collective cultural leadership, we must acknowledge difference and tensions if we wish to work from a place of love. Despite working within consensus-based models for decision making, there is never a time where we can have total agreement. We are unique people with varying identities, strengths, and needs. If we stop working within models of homogeneity, we allow ourselves to hold time for confronting our tensions head on. Our interventions around dialogue and conflict touch at this. But I want to emphasize that in order to truly love, we must celebrate the diversity of thoughts, needs, and ideas that comes with community organizing and activism.
Finally, we must allow currents of transformation to emerge naturally. We can be strategic, diligent, and endlessly committed to our visions for change, but we cannot force outcomes. I have learned that sustainability does not come from forcing agendas, structures or entire organizations on to future organizers. Rather, we must pass down visions, power, history, relationships and then get out of the way. We must build spaces where people can feel resilient, brave, and inspired, and then watch as they grow and build on their own. We will never win if we don’t accept that things need to modify, take hold and move forward. We build foundations for the future, but we cannot control what the future brings.
I have endless love for Floetic Fridays. This work matters and I hope that this project inspires others to continue asking how can we learn from our movements of social change; our future depends on it.
Sincerely,
Naomi Rose Weintraub