Civic Engagement

Northern California

“Civic engagement is an opportunity for anyone to be pushing for any sort of change — whether it be big or small. It means that anyone from any community can get engaged, whether it’s going to a school board meeting or pushing the Council to do the things you’re asking for.”

Tafari Lee

Tell us about your work and why you do what you do?

I am civically engaged today because I was able to learn more about my own heritage. In eighth grade, my mom forced me into Fillipino cultural dancing classes. This was the first time I became interested in a history lesson; the class taught me a lot about my own history and culture. I began to be more self-aware about how one’s background can shape their environment, and that they have the power to shape their community’s future.

Currently, I am involved with various civic engagement initiatives at the city and local level through Little Manila Rising in Stockton. As a grantee partner of the California Funders of Boys and Men of Color, the organization was recently selected as one of 12 grantees to lead the education equity blueprint work for the Sacramento / San Joaquin Region. The goal isto ensure that boys and men of color have the supports they need to access quality education and pathways to a career that fuels their spirit, and their futures. Being part of this organization continues to drive my advocacy for education equity, ethnic studies and the wellbeing of my community. 

In 2018, as part of my work with Little Manila, a group of students and I presented at the All-American City Awards about what makes Stockton, and its youth, so special, diverse and unique. I also participated in the Filipino American Youth Leadership Conference, a national conference that brings together Fillipino youth to develop their leadership skills, and the Pilipino Youth Conference (PYC), which focuses on getting youth in touch with our history and culture. And, most recently, I met with Governor Newsom, Michael Tubbs, community based organizations and youth about the current state of our city, what we want to see, and, more specifically, what police reform can look like — how we have a statewide police standard for oversight and a set curriculum and how we hold people accountable. The Governor was shocked that someone as young as I am is talking about police reform. 

Tell us about the community you live in. What are some challenges, opportunities or attributes that make it unique?

I grew up in the middle of Stockton, but went to school in Lodi. When I was younger, I didn’t notice much of a difference. It wasn’t until I looked around and realized there were more students of color than white kids, that I knew I had to advocate for an ethcnic studies curriculum. To me, ethnic studies is a history class for everyone. For those who are learning about their own ethnicity, it is a gateway to the history and culture that makes up their story and heritage. For others, it’s a way to learn about other groups of people and understand their perspective and life experience better. From that, I went to the Capitol to talk to state representatives to push what is now the AB 331 bill to make ethcnic studies a requirement as a standard in high schools across the state. 

What does civic engagement mean to you and why, particularly in this moment, is it so important?

Civic engagement is an opportunity for anyone to be pushing for any sort of change — whether it be big or small. It means that anyone from any community can get engaged, whether it’s going to a school board meeting or pushing the Council to do the things you’re asking for. Community members speaking up is so important right now because the people who are making decisions need to hear from the people they are representing. You can’t just complain and not do anything about the change you want to see. 

What does leadership mean to you and how does that show up in your work? Why do you feel like it’s important to support the leadership and voice of boys and men of color?

A leader is someone who is able to be both firm and flexible at the same time. They are in the front, taking feedback and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of everyone around them, seeing the best in everyone. It’s so important for boys and men of color to be in leadership roles because then they become mentors for someone else. I didn’t have role models that looked like me growing up. 

How do you define education equity, and why is it important? 

Everyone deserves equal access to schools and quality education, no matter if you’re able to afford that or not. It shouldn’t matter if you’re from an affluent or low-income part of town. Students who attend schools that are underfunded deserve to shine as bright as those who attend schools that have access to a lot of resources. Students should also feel empowered through things like ethcnic studies that teach them about their history. I truly believe if people are empowered with information and are learning about their ancestors, they will feel empowered to be more engaged in activism and advocating for the change they want to see. 

What would your call to action be to policymakers and leaders to call for education equity, particularly for boys and men of color?

Make ethnic studies a high school standard nationwide. I’m lucky to live in Stockton, which is the most diverse city in the United States, and know about so many cultures. Through ethnic studies, other students will learn about their own identity and the culture that they are not exposed to. If ethnic studies was standard nationwide, it would be a major change for what we consider common knowledge across the country. 

Tafari Lee is a senior in Lincoln High School and an activist for a statewide curriculum for ethnic studies as part of Little Manila. He was part of the All-American City presentation for Stockton in 2018 to talk about how young people are making his hometown the unique and diverse place that it is. 

RESOURCES:

• Little Manila Rising’s After School Program 
• Tafari from Little Manila Rising Shares How It Felt To Be On The AAC Stage
• California to require ethnic studies to graduate high school under bill headed to Gov. Newsom
• California Funders for Boys and Men of Color Awards $300,000 to 12 Organizations Focused on Educational Equity in Sacramento County and San Joaquin County

Southern California

“I’ve always known that I am fortunate to live as I live, and have the opportunities I’ve had. My parents immigrated from Nigeria and worked hard to create a life that was radically different from the one they had.”

“But growing up in Los Angeles, I have only seen things get tougher for the average Angeleno. In one of the most prosperous cities in the nation, makeshift homeless camps are next to commanding skyscrapers of multinational corporations and financial firms. People are struggling to find affordable housing and are finding it impossible to attain the quality of life that generations before them comfortably enjoyed.

“It’s become tougher for young people like me to imagine starting families, buying homes, or holding down well-paying jobs. We are seeing that today, hard work is not enough. When I look at the problems facing us, I don’t want to wait until I’m ‘old enough’ to affect systemic change.

“Today, millions of young people across the country are taking action now, on everything from gun safety and climate change to immigrant rights and Black Lives Matter. As young people, we’re closer to the daily issues we face in our schools and communities; we know what is needed to create a better world that works for all youth. But we won’t make real change, unless we have a real voice.

“We face many barriers to getting involved. The institutions that have the most influence on our lives – school boards, legislatures, city halls – often do not offer us a seat at the table. I want to change that.

“I began getting involved as a teenager to ensure that young people’s voices are heard in the debates and policy discussions where youth are most affected. In high school, I served as president of the Black Student Union and demanded that a teacher be held accountable when she allowed a student to dress up as Hiram Weseley, a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard for Historical Figures Day. That action and concerns about my school’s dress code policy led me to found a political action committee with my debate partner to combat structures of injustice on campus.

“In 2018, I was elected to serve as the student member to  the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Board of Education to represent the needs and interests of over 600,000 young people. I often find myself in the difficult situation of telling adults things they don’t want to hear, such as the need to adopt district-wide policies to advance racial, economic and gender justice.

“I also got involved with Power California, an organization that works to mobilize youth of color to change the voting age to 16 because I firmly believe 16 and 17 are critical ages for young people to empower themselves through organizing and advocacy. Power California is a statewide multiracial civic engagement organization made up of youth and families across the state.

“An initial bill to lower the state’s voting age to 17 is currently pending approval in the California state Senate. This youth voting rights campaign builds off of our earlier efforts to lower the voting age in LAUSD school board district elections to 16. We authored and helped pass a resolution for the school board to research the feasibility of a 2020 ballot measure that would lower the voting age.

“I believe in voting rights because I believe voting represents a first critical step toward making change and holding our leaders accountable. Voting is crucial particularly for people of color who are often and historically excluded from the ballot box, and for young people whose future quality of life depends on the decisions that are being made now. Black and brown youth bear the brunt of this injustice as they are forced to attend schools that are severely underfunded and have more police officers than counselors.

“Yet the percentage of people of color who vote is still lower than the percentage of whites who do – for example, even with historically high turnout among people of color in the 2018 midterms, 57.5 percent of eligible white voters voted while only 40.4 percent of eligible Latinx voters did. Young people of color don’t even have that access, since the voting age is set at 18. The challenge we are faced with is not only getting people off the sidelines of politics but making the ballot accessible for all.

“I’m committed to empowering my generation, making sure we know what’s at stake and have the tools to activate ourselves and our community members to bring about real political change. We’re ready; it’s time to extend the voting age to include young people already creating change.

“We urge the adults who are entrusting us with the future, to listen to young people and follow our lead. Our collective fates may depend on it.”

Tyler Okeke is a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) student board member and Power California youth leader.

Resources

• Meet The LAUSD Teen Fighting To Lower The Voting Age To 16 In School Board Elections
• L.A. students are already activists. Now they want to vote at 16
• Power CA Vote at 16

Central Valley

“From single working parents, to young people navigating systems of oppression, my community has many hidden leaders that simply need to be encouraged or recognized. Leadership shows up in our hardships.”— Alejandro Jurado

“We are not these stereotypes that the media says we are. We’re people who are resilient and come from glorious places.”— Jesse Orñelas

Alejandro Jurado and Jesse Orñelas are part of Youth Leadership Institute’s Rise and Lift program in Merced. In this Q&A, they talk about the impact of COVID-19 on young people in their community,  how they partner with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color and the importance of using one’s lived experience to advocate for change.

Tell us about the community you live in: what makes it so special? What are its challenges and how have those challenges been exacerbated by the pandemic?

Alejandro: Merced has challenges that are specifically impacting young people, including substance abuse, homelessness, mental health and food desserts in low income parts of town. You can really see the segregation by which neighborhoods have access to clean air and parks, and those who are over policed and have some of the highest rates of suspension in the state, particularly for Black youth.  There were many issues young people were facing before the pandemic, however with COVID, these things have only been heightened. Since young people are stuck at home, for many, this means  not having access to school as their safe space of escaping the situations they are dealing with at home, in addition to not having access to food or technology the school may have provided. It creates a lot of anxiety that young people are being forced to navigate through.

Jesse: One thing’s for sure: community violence has not slowed down during COVID and young people are dying. Just recently, we lost a young person in our program to an overdose. Resources that are needed are not reaching those that are most impacted, and there are school and city officials who are still turning to incarceration and pushing young people out as solutions. It’s not just a need for more resources; it’s about meeting young people where they are and listening to them about what they need. 

What is your background and what inspired you to do the work you are doing now?

Alejandro: At the age of 10, my mother, sister and I immigrated to the United States from Mexico to join my father, who came before us. Being raised by my mom, who essentially was a single parent, gave me a lot of perspective. When I moved to the United States it was a culture shock. We arrived to violence, drugs, and a neighborhood where farmworkers, Latinx and Black communities lived side by side. All these complexities gave me a lot of understanding of the society we live in. My parents came here to survive. For them, education was always an exit from the situation they were in, but, when I made it to UC Merced, I didn’t have the tools or support I needed to succeed. Struggling with my mental health, I had to drop out to go to community college. However, that was the beginning of how I began helping youth who were having a tough time navigating their own journey. I started doing voter registration in different communities, supporting organizing with undocumented students, there I started to understand more closely how the immigration systems deeply hurt our communities. 

I knew I could help even more through the Youth Leadership Institute. The Institute believes in the leadership of young people in the Central Valley and using their stories to determine what’s needed for our communities.  Doing cultural and healing work and understanding trauma young people go through allows me to help and create space for youth to process their experiences, and use that growth to lead campaigns to change their communities and cities.  A lot of people see young people as if they don’t know what they’re doing, but overlook the powerful work and transformation young people lead, bringing to their communities healing and liberation. When you talk to young people, they know exactly what they need and what they want to see.

Jesse: I grew up in Southern California witnessing intimate partner violence and, when I was 16, my father committed suicide. As a young person who was victim to such horrible things, I found myself projecting pain on other people and, the day after I turned 16, I was arrested for attempted murder and incarcerated for six months. This prevented me from attending high school and forced me into a community school that was connected to a juvenile probation facility, where adolescent behavior was treated with detention. This was exactly the right formula for bad things to happen: not enough resources, marginalized places for young people being hit hardest, generations of poverty and incarceration and gang involvement and everything that goes with that.

After being incarcerated for the last time a decade ago, I decided it was time for a change. I was forced to either go to college or get a job, so I decided to go to school. There, I learned about the social determinants of health – the things constructed by the system that helped me make the bad decisions I was making. I remember that moment so clearly – I felt played. It was eye opening and frustrating at the same time, but I kept going. I got involved in the Brown Berets, and learned to love the community and skin that I’m in. We are not these stereotypes that the media says we are. We’re people who are resilient and come from glorious places.

What do you feel are the greatest threats and opportunities facing communities of color, and boys and men of color, across California?

Alejandro: The greatest threat is that to our existence. Our physical and mental health are being profited from and exploited in so many ways. The way our communities are kept impoverished, overworked and exploited has direct links to our early deaths. There are so many traumatic experiences that we are impacted by that a regular person shouldn’t go through, but for us, it’s become normalized. Our reliance shows when even with the heavy impacts of an oppressive system, our communities take the journey of healing and creating solidarity amongst struggling people; to take the journey that Jesse has taken and using personal experience to use our voice to mobilize and organize to dismantle and create. Destroying the systems that keep us down, creating alternatives for ourselves and building community – that is what gives me hope. 

Jesse: The biggest threat is the fact that white supremacy has a hand in everything. We see that corporations and big agriculture expect us to be thankful for minimum wage jobs with no future in towns like Merced; that the Mayor expects us to be grateful for jobs that pay a minimum wage with no meaningful career path. Poverty continues to be a threat to us as well as lack of political representation. But at the same time, our greatest asset is resilient people. Black and Brown folks have resilience in their DNA and we can weather the storm. What we’re experiencing now is the desperation of white supremacy. All we have to do is use our resilience to weather this last storm to extinguish it.

How did you get involved with the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, and how do they support the work that you do?

Jesse: As you can imagine, it’s hard to find a job after being incarcerated. Merced is the belly of the beast. The government and city officials have traces and hints of  white supremacy. My focus was to get resources to young people and, when I landed a job with the Youth Health Project, I was fortunate to have a supervisor named Marilyn Mochelle who said, “What you have lived through should be a resource and I think you should get involved in the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color.” She reached out The California Endowment and got funding to do work in Merced. It was surreal that my experience was being seen as an asset, and it felt good to know that the struggle me and my family had gone through has resulted in a job that doesn’t feel like work sometimes.

Currently, the two sites that Youth Leadership Institute has in Fresno and Merced align with the Healing Together campaign. We have participated in the Advocacy Days at the Capitol with PolicyLink and the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color to push for passage of numerous pieces of legislation that would result in the betterment of youth of color. We focus a lot of our work in local campaigns that affect boys and men of color, such as Schools not Prisons and Educational Justice. As an organization, we have also been part of their work in signing letters of support to elected officials around police brutality and advocating for CEOs to sign letters of support for numerous initiatives that have passed at the state level.   

How has your work been impacted by COVID? What are you seeing among the young people you work with? Any solutions you would like to push for?

Alejandro: With COVID our work shifted quite a bit. The way we engage with the youth has all moved to virtual, which creates obstacles, however, we have persisted and continue to create space, even if virtually, for youth to come together.  An aspect of young people’s lives that has been greatly impacted is their academics. Education was, and continues to be impacted. COVID-19 has created a lot of uncertainty for many. Seniors were in the process of applying for colleges and now don’t know what the new year will bring, many youth are now faced with parents who are no longer able to provide for them. We are currently working on a campaign around education justice, looking at how different resources can be allocated to better support young people. Our goal through the campaign is to ensure that when they do return to school, they are not returning to the same issues.

Jesse: The needs of young people are not being met. We need to listen to our young people and communities – the experts – as to how funding and resources can be best allocated to support them.

What does leadership mean to you and how does it show up in the work that you do or in your community?

Alejandro: Leadership to me means using any tools, resources and experiences available to us to advocate for our communities, share any knowledge we might have and ultimately build strong relationships that will ground the power of our collective. From single working parents, to young people navigating systems of oppression, my community has many hidden leaders that simply need to be encouraged or recognized. Leadership shows up in our hardships. 

Jesse: To me leadership looks radical: it’s led by love; it’s led with empathy. It’s going into the belly of the beast and not compromising our value that liberation for all oppressed people must happen for all, or none at all.

Resources:

• Youth Leadership Institute’s Rise and Lift program
• Alliance for Boys and Men of Color Healing Together Campaign