Reporting: Thousands of Miles Apart, Teens in Georgia’s Youth Justice Coalition and SF’s Youth Vs. Apocalypse Organize for Change
Originally released 12/7/21
By Megan Robertson
** photo thanks to Youth Vs. Apocalypse
Thousands of teenagers fake their deaths on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. Youth activists give presentations to area high schools. Georgia students testify at congressional redistricting hearings.
Nationwide, young adults are getting involved in political activism at an unprecedented rate. Teenagers are three times more likely to have participated in a political demonstration since Donald Trump was elected, a study from Tufts University finds.
In American society for the last half decade, Trumpism, the spread of disinformation, the COVID-19 Pandemic, racial injustices, and impending climate doom have created a highly charged political environment. These issues have led many to get involved with activism at a local, national, and global scale.
The Americans fighting against these issues are the ones who will have to live with the consequences of inaction: young adults. Young people are more involved politically now than ever before.
This notion manifests itself in the state of Georgia, where a student has founded a youth advocacy coalition in response to injustices seen in her community.
When not attending public policy classes at Georgia Institute of Technology, 19-year-old Alex Aimes is engaging in activist work as the founder of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition (GYJC).
As she and her friends began to look for opportunities to get engaged with political work in the Metro-Atlanta area, she said they were shocked at the lack of opportunity.
“We were finding ourselves entering a space where you’d expect there to already be internships, opportunities to volunteer, ways to meet candidates. None of this was there, in existence for young people to take part in,” she said. “So, we built it ourselves.”
GYJC is a group of student organizers, aged 14 to 23. They are “committed to justice, representation, and a Georgia for us all,” according to their mission statement.
Since its founding in the summer of 2020, they have built a coalition of student organizers throughout the state, hosting dozens of events, both virtually and in-person, for young adults to connect with other organizers, candidates, and representatives. Since their founding, over 11,000 viewers have been reached on Instagram alone and they have aided in over 50 far-right bills being struck from the Georgia State Legislature.
“We realized that this organization was a great way for us to make sure, separate from party, separate from a specific candidate or organization, that we could still make the kinds of changes we wanted,” Aimes said. “Ever since then, that’s been our motivator. Making sure that young voices and power are heard in spaces that usually exclude us.”
This was not Aimes’ first time engaging in political organizing work. Attending a diverse high school, she “saw a lot of the challenges being faced by Georgians,” she said. “Things that are going on in the news, you see right in front of you, including voter suppression and lack of healthcare access.”
By viewing the injustices of others around her, Aimes was inspired to volunteer for a municipal race in her hometown. This then led her to working for Swing Left in the election of 2020, an organization that connects people around the nation to volunteer work for progressive candidates in Republican-lead districts.
What Aimes said she loves most about advocacy work is the communal nature of it.“I didn’t get into organizing because I thought I alone could fix things; I understood that movements fix things,” she said. “I am just one part of that, but I find it really meaningful to be a part.”
Following their work in the 2020 election, GYJC’s mission has shifted to redistricting, which is slated to occur in Ga. 's Republican-backed legislature.
Over the past month, GYJC organizers have been testifying in front of the Ga. congress, sharing personal testimony on how they will be impacted by this zoning.
GYJC has likewise, in their new mission, formed a partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Georgia Redistricting Alliance. They are working to “to ensure students, educators, and communities have the opportunities to provide public input, and that counties have the support they need to draw just, representative maps,” according to their press release.
This redistricting process happens on both a state-wide and community level to be approved before the May 2022 primaries, and is politically charged for a state with a long history of gerrymandering.
GYJC plans to, with their new partners, begin advocacy work to discern what educators, students, and community members want to see in their district. These hopes will then be shared with the people drawing the maps, bridging the gap between community and their elected officials.
“We’re going to go to the county and say ‘as you’re standing and drawing these lines that will represent this district for the next ten years, the time people my age will be having kids, we need to make that process fair,’” Aimes said. “ If we don’t get involved, there is no process in Georgia’s laws to require it to be fair, to be public, democratic, and open. We’ve got to do it ourselves.”
Aimes said that the coalition’s redistricting work is not only advocating for historically oppressed communities in counties, such as Gwinnett, the largest and most diverse in Georgia. Their work is likewise reaffirming youth presence in the very essence of American Democracy.
“As we’re building these districts, this public input process, we’re also building a community that is capable of talking about these issues, engaging in something that’s at the core of American democracy: an ability to assemble and engage,” she said.
GYJC is by no means the only group of youth activists working to dismantle systems of oppression in their community. Across the nation, over two thousand miles away, teenagers in San Francisco are following in the footsteps of so many activists before them, while also making the shoes distinctly their own.
Youth Vs. Apocalypse (YVA), an advocacy coalition founded in 2019 in Oakland, Calif., is fighting for “a livable climate and an equitable, sustainable, and just world,” according to their mission statement. The group was founded by a group of student activists who worked to oppose a proposed coal terminal in their community. While the group has since expanded to all of the Bay Area, the local aspect remains integral to their work.
Lizbeth Ibarra, a seventeen-year-old high school senior in Richmond, Calif., is a lead member of YVA. Growing up in a community which revolved around Chevron’s Oil Refinery, she felt particularly inspired to get involved.
“I passed by the oil refinery everyday and didn’t know that it was harming me and my community,” she said. “I have a lot of friends and family members with respiratory illnesses. I didn’t realize that the reason we have higher rates is because of the refinery that’s polluting the air we breathe. It inspired me to get involved in climate justice.”
Since getting involved with YVA at the start of 2020, Ibarra has been involved in planning protests, promoting their social media, coordinating collaboration on their Hip Hop & Climate Justice initiative, and working on one of their coalitions: California Youth Vs. Big Oil.
Similarly to GYJC in its non-partisan manner, this initiative is calling on Democratic Calif. Governor Gavin Newsom to Stop oil drilling practices in communities, Drop contracts with oil companies in the state, and Roll out legislation calling for a 2,500 ft. buffer zone between drilling sites and schools, community sites.
Ibarra’s personal experience with devastation caused by oil refineries has made her particularly apt to work for this initiative. What keeps her fighting, she said, is the direness of the climate crisis if young adults do not take action.
“We have the most time left on this planet,” she said. “There are a lot of ways our planet is being destroyed. If we don’t all get involved and solve the climate crisis soon, we’re going to be living with those consequences. We’re all going to be impacted.”
Another youth advocate, Simren Sandhu is a fifteen-year-old climate activist who works on YVA’s social media marketing team with Ibarra. As a Sikh American, Sandhu was inspired to get involved with climate activism because of her religious morals.
“In Sikhi, one of our main beliefs is to defend those who can’t defend themselves,” she said. “After learning about so many social and climate injustices that are happening, I couldn’t sit back when I had the resources and connections to make a difference.”
Sandhu first got involved with YVA after hearing a presentation they gave to her climate justice club at school. After this presentation, she was able to get a position in their student fellowship. In this online training, she learned about the art of activism, how to best advocate for those in need.
She was able to move up from her position as a fellow to a lead-circle staff member, acting as Tik-Tok co-coordinator and a social media manager.
Although social media has been found to cause mental harm for young adults, Sandhu has had a differing experience. For her, and for YVA, these technological platforms are integral to the success of their movement, as it introduces teenagers to organizations like YVA that are engaging in climate activism.
“Since we are a youth-led organization, using social media as a form of outreach is really helpful,” she said.
Sandhu said she was hooked on climate justice activism following one of YVA’s largest protests in downtown San Francisco.
“Everyone had laid down on the ground to represent if they were dead,” she said. “It was telling people ‘Hey! This is what our future will be like if you don’t take action now!’ Seeing so many people fight for climate justice is really motivating and inspiring.”
Whether it be protesting on San Francisco’s Market Street, posting videos on Tik-Tok, testifying in the Ga. State legislature, or going live on Instagram, young adults throughout the nation are fighting to dismantle systems of oppression in their communities.
Generation Z is especially fit for activism work compared to older generations, according to Aimes. “We have grown up in a post 9/11 era where everything bad and chaotic in the world is right in front of us,” she said. “It’s televised, we have devices in our hands where we can see all of the problems in ways I think previous generations were able to be sheltered from due to a lack of technology and globalism.”
“We haven’t gone a day without experiencing the effects of climate change, especially in BIPOC and low-income communities,” Sandu said in reference to her generation. “We’re not only the leaders of this revolution; we’re going to be the leaders of everything soon.”
Both Georgia Youth Justice Coalition and Youth Vs. Apocalypse will be continuing their advocacy work with lobbying, student trainings, and events in the days to come. The latest information can be found on their Instagrams @georgia_youth_coalition and @youthvsapocalypse.
