Unleash the Power within YOUth: Community Organsiser Activism

^{At YouthxYouth, we root our work in the belief that activism, like life itself, takes so many forms, each one necessary and vital in our journey of cultivating a just and liberated world. This year’s annual YouthxYouth crowdfunding campaign is centred around raising support to sustain the work we do at YxY by showcasing the diversity of the activism that exists within our community, from artivists to community weavers, and everything in between. This crowdfunding campaign is an invitation, an open door if you will, to sustain the work of YxY through 2025 and beyond, and to witness the power and depth of activism. Through this campaign, we’re intentionally holding up a mirror to reflect the faces of those we serve and uplift, the activists whose journeys we nurture and who nurture us in return. As part of this, we are releasing a series of blogs that explore 10 different archetypes of activism.} 

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly!” This mutuality is what drives community organiser activism. Now to us, community organising is often the quiet (yet essential!) part of our social change work. It’s less visible than frontline activism, the activist archetype we explored before this, for example, but equally profound in its immense impact! Community organiser activism is essentially about building collective power through deep relationship-building, systems thinking, movement building, and strategic collaboration. It centres listening deeply to the lived experiences of communities and supporting their inherent capacity to create change instead of parachuting in with predetermined solutions.

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Anti-apartheid movements that were alive during the rise of the apartheid regime in South Africa and civil rights organising in the 1960s are examples of the deep roots of community organising within social change movements. A recent example of community organising is the Black Lives Matter movement that was founded in 2013, but whose presence more recently became known again in 2020. Over the past 10+ years now, local Black Lives Matter chapters have emerged, leading community-based programs and advocacy campaigns to demand systemic change.

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Organising of this nature continues today, however transparently it operates alongside other community organizing efforts with limited resources and facing significant institutional resistance. These specific systemic challenges are faced by other archetypes of activism and they unfortunately remain quite prevalent in changemaking work. However despite this these activists powerfully persist!

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Community organisers understand that sustainable change comes from empowering people to recognise and leverage their collective strength. Once again, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed", this truth remains central to community organising today.

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This form of activism operates through intricate webs of relationships, where power is built horizontally and not top-down. Unlike more visible forms of activism, community organising is often slow, intentional work. There is a prioritisation of building trust that enables creating sustainable infrastructure and developing “leadership” that can continue creating change long after initial points of activation conclude.

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One of the most liberating aspects of community organising, for us, is that it recognizes that those most impacted by systemic challenges are also those with the most profound agency to creating meaningful change. Essentially their work is led by the idea that communities have the inherent capacity to define and create their own liberation.

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At YouthxYouth, we expand on the idea of community organising through what we call “weaving”. Weavers are activists who connect peoples, projects, and knowledge in synergistic and purposeful ways. The act of weaving is complex: it involves deep self-awareness, developing intergenerational and intercultural relationships, organising diverse education stakeholders around a common vision and mobilising people into action. It essentially, building on community organising, involves being and becoming the (eco)systems we wish to see. 

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As this way of resisting and showing up makes up a large part of our work at YouthxYouth we're excited to honour this archetype of activism by sharing an interview with an incredible community organisers within the YouthxYouth community, April Grace Garcia!

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April is a community organizer from the Philippines. She is a graduate of the public school system, an experience that opened her to the realities of education in the country. She started as an ESL Teacher in 2018 where she realized her potential to teach other people. In 2020, her

development sector work started in AHA Learning Center, a non-government organization that aims to give the best with those who have the least in life. She worked in the organization as an Education Officer for its Makati and later Tondo Center. During this time, she was in charge of building foundational skills and the mentoring of over 300 students and 200 parents.

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Stay tuned to our social media for these inspiring conversations!

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Through these interviews, we hope to bring you closer to the lived experiences of activists within our community, hopefully offering a fuller understanding of what it means to be an activist, in its vast multiplicities.

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As we journey through the other archetypes of activism we invite you to reflect on the interconnectedness of these roles. While each archetype has its distinct facets, together they make up our YouthxYouth community and how magical is that!

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Our crowdfunding campaign is about celebrating this diversity, and by contributing, you are not only helping sustain YxY’s work but also joining a community that values and nurtures a broad spectrum of activism. We invite you to support those who dare to act, whether it's on the frontlines or behind the scenes, as we envision and work towards the more beautiful futures our hearts so deeply long for.

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Donate now!