Grown Up to Grown Up

An Invitation to Listen to Youth Organizers to Act as Champions for their Vision.

Youth on Root’s entire purpose is to support youth on the frontlines of environmental justice, and to elevate their leadership in the movement. These youth are of course disproportionally low-income youth of color, particularly Black and Brown youth. Here at YoR, we know this because not long ago we were these young people, searching for a place where our fears and ideas would be heard. We are determined to build an unbreakable network of youth organizers across California who have the tools, resources, and community support they need to lead the fight for environmental justice. As we always say, “youth are not the leaders of tomorrow; they are the leaders of today.”

While providing educational resources and training to frontline youth is a huge part of what we do, it is not because we believe that the environmental justice movement is in need of more “engagement” from youth. In fact, to us it seems just the opposite. Youth organizers have been showing up for their communities and our one earthly home for generations now. They’ve been more than “engaged.” Frankly, when it comes to the youth environmental justice movement, it’s us grown folks who need to learn to listen to youth so that we may act in support of their vision. 

Right now is a season of fear. Many of us are terrified as we watch our hard won civil rights be systematically stripped away. Some of us have the perspective to remember this cycle of history — have rarely, if ever, felt protected by a nation built on White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy. As an African American descendant of transatlantic slavery, I look to my ancestors who refused to die through many hundreds of years of atrocities so that I might live to pick up their continuous and unyielding fight for liberation. 

Perspective may not be a comfort, but it can be a source of tenacity and focus. We know the tactic all too well: the torrent of executive orders and supreme court decisions attacking our safety and right to exist from so many angles we don’t know where to strike back. The fear we are experiencing is by design. A divided population of the oppressed is taught to believe we are powerless, when in fact we hold the keys to our own liberation. The keys live in the perspective of generations, not just from the wisdom of elders and ancestors but from the passionate ingenuity of children — our young cycle-breaking warriors. 

So how do we best support Black and Brown youth through their very justified climate terror, especially when we share in their fear? We listen to act. We invest in their leadership, and hold their role in the cycle with tenderness and respect. We stay believing in them, no matter what. We become just a little bit bigger than our fear, and take responsibility for our own power. We fund and resource our own movement, because we’re all we’ve got. We pour all those resources, monetary and otherwise, to youth organizers on the frontlines of environmental justice, and we trust them to do what they need with those resources. We offer our support rather than our oversight. After all, look at what they’ve accomplished without our money or our attention — imagine what they’d accomplish with it.

Rachael Meyers

Executive Director, Youth on Root