This research brief illuminates how youth organizing can be a powerful strategy for transformative SEL and college success for BIPOC students. Our main findings indicate that:

• Youth organizing strengthens academic self-efficacy and academic engagement.
  • Critical analysis skills, research skills, and content knowledge developed through campaign work translated to confident engagement in college courses.
  • YO alumni arrived on campus prepared to engage with professors and other adults, build academic and social relationships with other students, and persist through setbacks because they’d practiced those skills in situations with meaningful stakes for
    themselves and their communities.
• YO alumni developed relationship and networking skills that facilitated their adjustment to college life. 
  • Public speaking and communication skills from youth organizing fostered confidence in YO alumni when they connected with professors, college staff, and other adults such as internship advisors and potential employers.
  • YO alumni were able to connect with peers on college campuses as experienced community builders. They approached their peers with open-mindedness and curiosity due to organizing experiences that had taught them to listen to and value perspectives at odds with their own, appreciate the ways that lived experiences
    shape values and perspectives, and disagree respectfully and productively.
• YO alumni developed self-management and “critical resistant navigational skills” that helped them persevere in culturally incongruent spaces. 
  • Explicit conversations and modeling around mental health, mental health supports, and self-care prepared YO alumni to prioritize and attend to their mental health in college.
  • YO offers welcoming and affirming counterspaces that address differences openly and explicitly, and where young people take ownership of decision-making and
    responsibility for building and sustaining community. These spaces were sources of support into college and models for the kinds of communities young people sought out and created on campus.
• YO alumni used their organizing skills to resist injustice and transform their college communities.
  • Opportunities to identify, learn about, and address social inequality—to deepen their critical consciousness–supported YO alumni to identify and respond to microaggressions.
  • Experience with critical action fostered a sense of efficacy to resist and reshape college environments that didn’t reflect their identities and needs.

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