The Social Justice Youth Development Approach

As someone who aligned with this ideology last week I was excited to continue to read about Social Justice YDEV (SJYD). I try to keep this ideology in mind in any space where I'm working with youth and when I'm in a space where we're talking about youth. The latter seems to happen a lot in schools and organizations where we're talking about youth but not keeping the social, economic and political forces impacting our youth in mind. I've been in conversation about discipline, lack of involvement and mental health with adults who are blaming or assuming and thinking, often saying, have we asked youth? 

The quote from this article that really resonated with me was when they talk about the difference between service learning and social awareness:

"a service learning approach might encourage youth to participate in a service activity that provides homeless families with food, while social awareness encourages youth to examine and influence political and economic decisions that make homelessness possible in the first place"

I think we see this a lot in schools and community organizations. We're providing positive supports, for example we're giving out resources on mental health and providing safe spaces to youth who might also be giving these resources to their community. But that's not SJYD. I imagine that would look more like youth reflecting on their mental health as it relates to their race, gender, economic status, etc. and understanding the roots of mental health as it relates to these identities. Building into what resources are, or are not there (this does play into the more service learning side but I think with it being supported by other aspects this is still acceptable), in their own communities and what the community needs and advocating for the political leaders in their community to address the institutional factors that are impacting the mental health of their community. 

I really liked the table on Critical Consciousness and Youth Outcomes for Social Justice as well and will definitely use this model, and article to continue to reflect on the youth spaces I'm a part of and develop.

My artifact: There were so many things I thought of as artifacts in my work that relate to my work in the SJYD realm. One that I have documented through some photos and videos was a youth let BLM walk that happened in Woonsocket last June. A group of middle and high school youth wanted to lead a walk in their own town that started in the middle of town down to the police station to demand justice then back up the the center of town where youth spoke, sang, and rapped. They coordinated from start to finish the entire walk and all they asked of us as adults was to be there for support incase anything escalated, luckily nothing did. It was a really fantastic day and I'm excited to share some media from it in class.