The State Of Youth Address
Photo courtesy of peter lubembela
Written by Peter Lubembela
On Sunday, February 20, at 1:30 pm in Montbello (Denver, Colorado), student leaders got together to discuss and reflect on the state of youth leadership in the Denver community and how we can affect positive change in our communities and our people.
Our message is: To our elders, community leaders, business owners, parents and mentors, as young people our heads are bloody but unbowed. Resolute in our pursuit of a better, brighter and more inclusive community than the ones we grew up in, we incessantly answer the call to show up when needed.
Driven by youthful energy and passion, we race past our limits, empty, on a road that often feels like it refuses to fill us up, support us or guide us. Despite showing up, our voices are not heard on the proper platforms that let us arrive at our desired destination of change. We are frequently burning out doing passion work because we do not have the tools or financial support to sustain our work. These barren conditions hinder our ability to organize largely and effectively in our communities.
We need spaces for coalition-building and community empowerment for youth of color. Two of the biggest challenges we face are not having productive problem-solving outlets or proper compensation for our work. The symptoms of those two challenges are that youth are hyper-focused on surviving. This fixation on surviving, living from stipend to stipend, hinders youth from developing the skills that are necessary to thrive through their advocacy work. This struggle deprives youth of hope and of the belief that we can make our communities better.
James Baldwin once said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Our love for our community and youth demands that as young leaders, we demand action and initiatives to ensure our kids are thriving.
We are excited for the future and married to the hope that our future will be better. Our meeting of active leaders in the community to brainstorm solutions was extremely motivating and inspirational. People of the community, we have to be intentional about making sure young people have a part in producing our community instead of solely being products of it. We need a plan for our community that has space for young people to contribute, along with a plan on how they can.
Sadly as a group, we have come to realize that change will most likely happen within the next 2 generations, not in our lifetime. The work we do now will lay a proper and complete foundation for the next generations. We have accepted the responsibility of educating ourselves to ensure the upcoming generations won't face the same issues we faced.
The greatest gift we have in our community is that everyone has individual rage they are willing to strategically utilize to help our community and that is such a beautiful thing. Despite being historically underserved, our community is the embodiment of love and resilience. Time after time, we have seen community members come back to their communities with knowledge and passion.
We are grounded in the reality that we are family. As big brothers and sisters, we are motivated to be greater than the disorganization that we saw in our childhood. Even today, In our community we see leaders arguing on social media and putting each other down. We, young leaders, commit to selflessly showing up to intentionally propel the movement forward.
It’s important we adopt the African principle of Ubuntu; I am because we are. We can’t keep comparing survival and success based on white, Eurocentric ideas and principles. We need to start unlearning and decolonizing how we view the world around us to truly reimagine our freedom and liberation with a focus on community.
There is no clear solution to addressing the issue of burnout and exploitation but we can start by consistently showing up for youth in all endeavors, not solely the ones where their presence helps the adult leader.
We need more activities that provide youth with a productive conduit for their energies. Lastly, we ask that leaders commit to not taking advantage of our passion and willingness to help out. This means paying for your youth. Growing up in a low economic standard community, we don’t need to have everything to be happy, we just need love, guidance and economic opportunities to better ourselves.
Peter Lubembela (he/him) is an experienced leader and community organizer in the D.C and Denver, Colorado communities, and the founder and president of 10For10. He is passionate about uplifting and empowering immigrant and minority voices in professional, social and academic spaces.