1959 Highlander Way · New Market, TN 37820 · phone: (865) 933-3443 · fax: (865) 933-3424
e-mail: hrec@highlandercenter.org

Visite esta página en español

Background | Program | Highlander Staff

Note: For pictures from the annual Seeds of Fire Youth Leadership Training Camp, see our Photo Gallery.

Be our friend! www.myspace.com/seedsoffireprogram

Background

Seed of Fire responds to the contradictory relationship that youth experience in relation to adults. On the one hand, young people are idealized and romanticized, called "our future," subjected to endless experiments in education, and considered so innocent and inexperienced that everyone is called upon to protect and mentor them by good example. Every adult is an expert on youth.

On the other hand, the young face myriad problems and challenges.

• They are the most sought-after consumers targeted by advertisers and the media.
• Their behavior is criminalized and often tried in adult courts.
• Their bodies and minds are the objects of sexual predators and drug pushers.
• They are called into the marketplace to provide cheap unskilled labor, especially in the food and tourist industries.
• They experience public school systems that are financially devastated by the lack of tax dollars and that too often oppress and criminalize youth instead of educating them.
• They are all too often isolated by race, poverty, sexual orientation, and/or location (in inner cities or rural areas), cut off from the skills and resources needed to improve their lives and their communities.

In part because of these problems, there are few genuinely youth-led organizations in the South (outside of university settings). And even when young people are brought into organizations, it is all too often as tokens instead of partners, as followers instead of leaders. Movement-building on the left has suffered from this lack of multi-generational shared-leadership organizing models. There have been few new ways of looking at old problems or ideas, few new approaches to using old strategies, and little fresh energy. The courageous risk-taking and fire of youth-led movement is absent.

top of page

Program

Highlander is responding to these problems through its Seeds of Fire program, which offers the democratic space and the skills for youth aged 13-19 to find their own voices and leadership. The program works with young people in a number of ways, including the following.

• Extensive outreach, field visits, and ongoing backup to support youth activists in their communities.
• An annual youth-led leadership training camp that gathers 20-25 young activists and provides them with intensive peer-based training and experiences that open up the concepts of youth power, critical thinking about organizing, and ownership of their own projects and organizations.

In both our field work and the camp, we strive to help young people to develop a shared power analysis, to understand the connections among oppressions and forms of exploitation, to become aware of the history of people's movements, to gain skills for cultural work, leadership, and organizing, and to bond together into a network that can both support its members and provide a powerful voice for youth issues.

Seeds of Fire youth leadership camp, summer 2002. For more pictures, see our Photo Gallery.

In addition to working with youth activists, Seeds of Fire is also expanding its work to include a specific focus on young activists and leaders in their 20s. Activists and leaders in their 20s are already engaged in a wide range of social justice efforts in the South as paid staff and volunteers, yet they face many institutional barriers, and older leaders and organizers often do not recognize their knowledge, skills, and leadership. This period of life is also a time when young people make the critical decision about whether to commit their lives to social justice work. Highlander is committed to strengthening intergeneratinal and cross-generational orgnaizing through gatherings that address the challenges and opportunitis facing activists in their 20s and by ensuring that our other programs include the different generations involved in movement work in the region.

Finally, Seeds of Fire works with the leaders of adult-led organizations in the South that are making efforts to do youth work and youth organizing. Our goal is to help these leaders examine institutionalized sources of ageism within their organizations, implement intergenerational models of work that honor and sustain youth power and leadership, and create youth-led organizations that can speak directly for youth on the issues that concern them.

Through these and other efforts, Seeds of Fire is empowering youth to become leaders in their communities and to be part of a broad-based movement for social and economic justice.

top of page

Highlander Staff

Elandria Williams
E-mail: elandria at highlandercenter.org
Phone: (865) 933-3443 x232

top of page