Our Guiding Principles

Well-being is our top priority. Rather than waiting until the symptoms of struggle arise, we proactively check in and support others based on their needs and interests. When we inevitably make mistakes trying to care for each other, we have open dialogue and identify ways to hold ourselves and others accountable to learning from and redressing past harms. Viewing ourselves and each other as more than our mistakes, we balance accountability with grace and kindness.

In Practice

• When people join our team, they develop and share wellness plans, guidelines on what they need to prioritize their wellness in their work and balance in their lives. Managers check in on these plans regularly to ensure they provide support as needs change.

• When a member of our community — whether staff, youth participant, or teacher fellow — struggles to fulfill expectations, we facilitate restorative conversations. We start by exploring what’s causing challenges and ask, “How can we support you?”

• We will have an emergency fund to support members of our community.

We recognize the unfair treatment — at a structural and individual level — that people of color, women, queer and trans folks, immigrants, people with disabilities, and other historically excluded communities have faced for millennia. We strive to rectify wrongs by extending opportunities and resources to individuals and communities who face significant challenges that stem from the consequences of oppression.

In Practice

• We recruit from and prioritize accessibility for communities of color and other historically excluded communities when seeking teachers and schools to implement programming with, vendors and organizational partners to engage, and individuals to join our team.

• We use our newsletter and social media platforms to elevate the stories and work of Black and Brown leaders, making a concerted effort to showcase individuals who hold multiple marginalized identities.

• We strive to allocate at least 10% of our resources to directly supporting youth leaders (e.g. stipends for community organizing work).

We must practice what we preach in terms of youth leadership. Young people should not only have a space to share feedback with our organization, but the power to make decisions. We create opportunities for adult allies and youth leaders to work in partnership towards a shared vision of liberation. We ensure that youth leaders have adequate information, time, and compensation to answer strategic questions that inform where our organization will go.

In Practice

• We guarantee that at least 1 person on our Board of Directors is under 18 years old, and that another person is under 22 years old. We also consult our Youth Advisory Council on strategic questions before engaging our Board of Directors.

• We will involve young people in all hiring decisions for full-time staff.

• We will use youth feedback to build capacity and opportunity for youth leadership within our programming.

Liberation work is communal work. We are not alone in supporting youth leaders, so we seek feedback from and partner with teachers, peer organizations, and youth to advance our shared mission. We also make time for community-building beyond its “productive” value. We balance our effort to work towards justice with the cultivation of genuine human connection. Building and maintaining meaningful relationships with others is an important goal in and of itself.

In Practice

• Our youth workshops, teacher trainings, and other gatherings start with a community circle so people can share where they’re at, ask for what they need, and get to know one another.

• We host kickbacks for youth and teachers to build community and power with like-minded individuals from across the country.

• We proactively connect with others doing justice-oriented youth leadership work, so that we can learn from and build with them.

No matter our audience, we’re transparent about the purpose, progress, and pitfalls of our work. Sharing the outcome of and rationale behind our decisions leaves room for others to learn from and critique our work. While we recognize the importance of tailoring our communication to meet people where they are, we don't believe in doing so at the cost of sacrificing who we are.

In Practice

• We include salary information in every job posting.

• When publishing reports about our programming, we include information about shortcomings youth and educators have identified.

• If we’re struggling to get work done on time, we name that honestly and ask for grace and support to move forward.

Good decisions come from good data. We don’t narrowly define data to just mean what you can easily count. Instead, we gather statistics and stories to paint a complete picture of what people enjoy, thrive at, struggle with, dislike, and yearn for. That said, we acknowledge there are limitations to even the most thoughtful data collection and analysis processes.

In Practice

• We update our programming based on quantitative and qualitative feedback from pre/post surveys from young people and educators.

• We clearly define competencies needed for staff and interns, and measure them through performance tasks in our hiring process.

• We will create strategic priorities based on survey and interview feedback from hundreds of young people, educators, and partner organizations. Where we head as an organization will be based on what we hear from our community.

Helping individuals navigate and overcome hardships today is important, but we push ourselves to go beyond that and change the circumstances that created these challenges in the first place. Our goal is to build new ideologies and institutions that sustainably promote a just world. In our ideal world, the direct service work we’re offering now is no longer needed — because the world is a just, loving place for everyone.

In Practice

• In addition to our direct service work, we will design and advocate for public policies that make education relevant, affirming, and useful for every young person.

• Through our curriculum, we help young people think about how to address the root causes of social injustices, not just respond to the symptoms we see.

• We only bring on funders who aim to address the root causes of oppression, not just its symptoms.