Preparing for Democracy

Abstract

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) shows a civic knowledge gap similar to the achievement gap, showing urban youth struggling in particular. However, research has shown that urban youth can be civically engaged when they are involved in projects or organizing intended to improve community conditions, not simply absorbing civic knowledge. This article shares findings from case studies of two Bronx-based community organizations that have successful models of civic engagement with urban youth. The findings reveal the practices that the adults use in the organizations to get urban youth civically engaged and to develop a “civic identity.”

Keywords

activism after-school programs urban youth development

Introduction

Like the academic achievement gap, there is a civic knowledge gap (Lutkis & Weiss, 2007). The predictors for both gaps are the same. Family income and parental educational attainment are highly correlated with levels of academic achievement and of civic knowledge (Lutkis & Weiss, 2007). Although both gaps are troubling, the civic knowledge gap has the potential to do even more harm than the academic achievement gap because of the adverse impact on our nation’s ability to have a functioning democracy. A democracy cannot fully function if large groups of citizens do not have the civic knowledge they need to participate effectively.

Civic knowledge is important, as Popkin and Dimock (1999) have shown, because it is correlated with civic engagement. Schools are logical places for improving civic knowledge and engagement among youth, but they need to use the practices that researchers have shown increase their civic engagement. Engaging in controversial political discussions, doing certain kinds of community service, and getting youth to participate in nonsport extracurricular activities have all been found to increase in civic engagement (Hess, 2009; McIntosh & Munoz, 2009; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). And although there are schools that do engage in these practices, it is much more common for public schools, especially urban schools, to devote their energy to continually improving test scores (McNeil, 2001; Shiller, 2010; Valenzuela, 2005).

In this test-driven context, students outside of tested areas like math and English are marginalized or not taught at all in schools, including civic education. Recently, there has been a strong push from the U.S. Department of Education for school curricula to focus on science, technology, engineering, and math or STEM, in a post–Sputnik push for American students to successfully compete with their global counterparts (Robelen, 2011). As U.S. Secretary of Education has articulated, the ultimate goal of schools is to prepare students for a role in the global economy rather than a democracy (Duncan, 2010).

As a result, it has become important to look outside of schools for sites of civic engagement, especially among urban youth. Gimpel and Lay (2003) have suggested, “Perhaps the connection between citizenship and formal education has been overemphasized—to the point we fail to consider other avenues for achieving political literacy”. To that end, this article looks to community-based organizations (CBOs) as sites of civic engagement. We know that urban youth can be engaged as civic participants, and the few studies that do look at low-income and urban youth find positive results from their engagement in civic activity (Fruchter & Mediratta, 2001; Mediratta, 2007; Warren, 2005; Zachary & Olatoye, 2001), but we know very little about the process by which adults teach and engage young people to become civically engaged. To fill this gap, this article presents case studies of two CBOs in the Bronx that help urban youth become civically engaged. The findings help us understand the ways in which nonschool institutions engage urban youth in civic issues and, in so doing, suggests that we expand the ways in which we think of teaching civic education.

Background

The American Psychological Association (APA) adopts a broad view of civic engagement, defining it as “individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern” (APA, 2009). Civic engagement under this definition implies involvement in activities like voting, obeying laws, and “taking an interest in and being involved in the larger, national interest or polity” (Sherrod, 2006, p. 289). This definition does not explicitly include activities like exercising one’s right to protest or to argue against unjust laws and policies.

Scholars of “critical civic engagement,” on the other hand, depart from the APA’s definition and suggest that civic engagement emanates from recognition of injustice and developing a subsequent desire to act to correct it (Kirshner, Strobel, & Fernandez, 2003). That desire might lead to community organizing activities and advocacy work to influence policy in a particular direction. Ginwright and Cammarota extend this idea of critical civic engagement with a notion they call critical civic praxis. Critical civic praxis is focused on the civic engagement of youth, and urban youth in particular. More specifically, it is a practice in which people are “engaged with ideas, social networks, and experiences that build individual and collective capacity to struggle for social justice” (Ginwright & Cammorata, 2007, p. 693) It acknowledges “structural constraints in communities, but also views young people as active participants in changing debilitative neighborhood conditions” (p. 693). Under critical civic praxis, people “critically assess social, political, and economic structures that uphold inequality and consider collective strategies for change that challenge injustice” (Kahne & Westheimer, 2004, p. 3). Once they identify structural inequity, they may develop strategies that put pressure on elected officials to respond and undo the structures that continue inequality.

Critical civic praxis is at the heart of the CBOs in the case studies that follow. Each organization asks young people to critique the world around them and to generate solutions to the problems they see. As a result, the organizations contribute to how young people develop what Beth Rubin calls a “civic identity,” a sense of self as a community member responsible for making improvements. She found that educators can play a key role in the development of a “civic identity” among youth by using critical examination of curricula to help them navigate the discontinuity between their individual experiences and beliefs (Rubin, 2007). Civic knowledge and engagement are elements of that civic identity. The route to developing a civic identity begins, Rubin argues, with viewing young people as change agents who could improve their own communities, then engaging young people in an examination of their communities and discussing how to change the conditions that they see around them. How adults engage young people in those discussions and then get them working on campaigns to improve their neighborhoods is the subject of this study. The study’s two central research questions were as follows:

Research Question 1: What activities/methods have the adults in community-based organizations used to build civic engagement among urban youth?

Research Question 2: How do the young people view their “civic identities” (Rubin, 2004) as a result of working with a community-based organization?

Method

This study was grounded in interpretive methods, which ask the researcher to make sense of the locally constructed experience (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Hatch, 2002; Wolcott, 1995). It was also grounded in critical research, which is concerned with how larger structures of inequality both open up and limit the possibilities of individuals and groups with the least power (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999; Mehan, 1992). Taken together, these approaches guide an analysis of how adults construct civic engagement and youth construct civic identities in a larger context of racial and class inequality.

Participants

Using Patton’s purposeful selection strategies (Patton, 1990), two organizations were selected to participate in the study. The two organizations in the study, Sistas and Brothas United (SBU) and Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood (ACTION),¹ served low-income communities of color, worked with teenagers (aged 14-19), and had specific mission statements dedicated to getting urban youth to develop their own solutions to problems they see, to build power and to improve their communities (see Table 1). Each had small group of adults who worked with 15 to 20 young people, were located on opposite ends of the Bronx in New York City, and faced different neighborhood issues, but both had stated commitments to justice.

Table 1.

Comparison of Two Bronx-based Community-Based Organizations

Name of organization	Number/type of students	Type of program	Focus issue	Recruitment
Sistas and Brothas United	15 Black And Latino high schoolers aged 14-19	Unpaid, summer and after school	Educational equity, school overcrowding, and policing of schools	Word of mouth, but no formal process
ACTION	20 Black and Latino high schoolers, aged 14-17	Paid, after-school position	Environmental, green space; placing jails and waste sites in neighborhood	Word of mouth, but formal interview process

Note: ACTION = Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood.

Data Collection

The data for this study were collected from (a) participant observations, (b) semistructured interviews with adults, and (c) focus groups with young people conducted during two 10-week periods during the 2008-2009 school year with SBU and ACTION (see Table 2). I conducted 3 to 4 hours of observations twice a week from the beginning of their programs through a semester’s worth of programming. Observations included meetings, informal interactions, training sessions, community organizing work, academic support, and cultural events. In each, the type of interaction between adult and student may be different but was shaped based on the work of the particular organization.

Table 2.

Data Collection

Participants	Data collection method	Number of participants/frequency of collection
Adult staff members at community-based organizations	Semistructured interviews, individually with each adult	Two adult staff members per organization each interviewed; n = 4
Young people 14-18 years old	Field notes collected from observed orientations, activities, planning meetings, tutoring sessions, etc.	Twice a week observations for 10 weeks in each organization
Young people 14-18 years old	Focus group interviews	Six students from each organization participated in each focus group; n = 12
Not available	Archival data	Websites, fliers, notes, projects collected over the period of observation (used for background not analysis)

In each CBO, I interviewed two adults who directly work with students about the pedagogies and practices they engage in and what impact they believe it was having on youth. In addition, 6 youths were selected from among a larger group of approximately 20 students in each organization to participate in focus groups to get a diverse set of perspectives. I chose youth on the basis of longevity with the organization, age, gender, and race and ethnicity. The focus groups included questions about reasons why the youth joined the organization, what kind of work they have done while there, the relationships that they formed, and how their experience has affected their civic engagement.

Data Analysis

As in any interpretive study, data analysis was ongoing and iterative. I began by reviewing collected data from field notes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) and transcripts from the focus groups and interviews. I developed a coding scheme through an “open coding process” (Emerson et al., 1995, p. 143). A set of themes emerged from the data that became codes during the analysis and in turn became the coding categories for the data:

Relationship-building: Connecting young people with adults and with one another by identifying their interests, creating a trusting environment, modeling and helping them to explore identity issues.

Encouraging critique: Efforts to understand the underlying reasons why problems exist in a community and how political, economic, and social power works.

Political efficacy: Discovering ways in which young people can make a difference in the problems they see around them, developing their own ideas for how to make change, and using a specific set of skills that help youth fight for that change.

These codes were helpful in defining what exactly was moving young people toward civic engagement. In addition, the categories, or themes emerging from the data, provided buckets into which a series of practices could fall. The themes allowed the data to be coded. The coding process was then followed by a series of memos generating “grounded theory” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). To ensure reliability, I worked with a research assistant to validate the codes and also used member checks (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) to check my interpretation of the data.

Role of Researcher

I came to this research as a former community organizer myself. As a young person, I was inspired by adults who taught me how to think about problems that affected my community and how to organize to address them. I understood how inspiring it could be to tackle problems that affect your own community. Having this perspective was helpful in gaining entry to the two settings in which the research was conducted. During the study, however, I maintained my role as researcher. I did not participate in the settings in which the research was conducted. After the study concluded, I shared my data analysis with the participants as well as the overall findings. This was helpful to them as they continued to improve their work within the organizations.

Sites of Civic Engagement: Two Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)

Sistas and Brothas United

SBU is the youth arm of a larger organization called Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition, which has been organizing in the Bronx since the 1970s. SBU started in 2000 with a small group of teenagers committed to making change in the educational inadequacies they saw in their neighborhood. The mission of SBU was and is to develop the leadership of youth in the Northwest Bronx community who are concerned with the conditions in their neighborhood, interested in developing creative ways to address these problems in concrete ways, and believe in their own ability to build people power to hold all public officials accountable for the decisions they make. SBU’s leaders fight for educational justice, more jobs for youth and community residents, and for more community-based resources.

Four local high schools that are situated blocks from each other encapsulate the story of the injustices the youth in SBU see everyday. Walton High School and DeWitt Clinton High School are both large, overcrowded schools serving the neighborhood’s mostly Black and Latino population (categories that New York City uses to classify students, although they do not reflect the true diversity of the population, which includes young people who were West African, West Indian, Dominican, Mexican, Indian, and Pakistani). The two schools have lines of students waiting to move through the security check during the mornings, making many students late for first- and even second-period classes. The two schools have inadequate classroom space; some classes meet in closets or corners of the cafeteria. Unsurprisingly, they are both plagued by low-performance and discipline problems.

Sandwiched between the two schools are two selective high schools, Bronx High School of Science, serving a mainly White and Asian population from outside the Bronx,² as well as the High School for American Studies, serving a similar population.³ Science and American Studies send their students to the best colleges in the country. The stark contrast between the pairs of schools is striking and not lost on SBU youth who want to see adequate educational opportunities for all young people. The young adults leading SBU (aged 19-22) see the inequity of overcrowded and under-resourced schools for youth of color side by side well-resourced schools for their White peers. So, they educate their younger “sistas and brothas” (aged 14-17) about educational inequity and get them to participate in campaigns to improve educational opportunities for all students.

ACTION

ACTION is also the youth arm of a larger organization called The Point. The Point has been around since the 1990s providing art space, after-school programs, and help to residents launching small businesses. The focus of ACTION is on environmental justice inspired, in part, by long time Hunts Point resident, Majora Carter. Ms. Carter worked for the Point and then founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001, work for which she received a MacArthur Award for her dedication to environmental justice (Holloway, 2008). Hunts Point has been and continues to be the location of sewage treatment plants, prisons, as well as an eight-lane roadway on which hundreds of tractor trailers pass each day (Gonzalez, 2004). Its youth work not only to fight the placement of these eye sores but fight for environmental justice as well. They also learn about the natural environment of the area and work to restore Hunts Point’s connection to it.

ACTION provides a stipend to young people who will work at ACTION to identify social and environmental justice issues facing the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx with the goal of creating and implementing ongoing youth-led solutions. Working together with community members and other community organizations, ACTION serves as a community link for reenvisioning the neighborhood of Hunts Point. The adults leading ACTION (aged 22-30 years) teach the teens (aged 14-18 years) to implement grassroots techniques in community planning and policy and disseminate such information to the community. ACTION serves as role models for positive change for the current generation in Hunts Point.

The young people participating in SBU and ACTION were not particularly civically engaged prior to becoming involved with the CBOs. Each young person has a different story, but few of them had any experience working for change in their communities or with any other traditional civic activity (i.e., voting, participating in a church or school activity) As a Latina involved in ACTION explained,

There’s no active role in society that my family has. A lot of my family members haven’t even graduated high school. I’m the first that’s going to be going to college. So I think it was really just to—I always had a curiosity. So when I first met the former director of the program and she told me about it, I was like, “That’s really cool,” you know? And because I was exposed to it, I was like, “Maybe I might like it.” And so I tried it, and I did. I didn’t have any former experience with social justice and environmental justice. It was completely new to me. But I think that’s what made me want to do it, because it was new and because it wasn’t on my mom’s block, just doing nothing after school.

This young woman was not unlike her peers who came to the CBO and made transformations through their involvement in SBU and ACTION.⁴

Although this young woman’s family was not active in her community, there is a long history of activism in the African American and Latino communities (Enck-Wanzer, 2010; McAdam, 1999; Morris, 1986; Zinn, 2003) that the parent groups of SBU and ACTION draw from for their community-based organizing work. For instance, in the late 1970s Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition, the parent group of SBU, was formed out of a need for housing for the poor people of the neighborhood. The members of Northwest Bronx researched banks that were engaging in redlining practices and insurance companies that stopped working in the Bronx and concluded that they were experiencing a whole-scale public and private divestment from urban communities. They directed their organizing efforts accordingly and generated campaigns against New York City’s Department of Housing and Preservation (HPD) as well as large corporations, like AETNA and Freddie Mac, to get them to reinvest in the Bronx. Through this work, they developed a platform from which they advocated for community reinvestment, quality housing, access to health care, and improved public schools for poor residents of the Bronx. They understood that to improve the lives of poor people, it was not enough just to rehabilitate housing (Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition, 1999). They needed to revitalize all aspects of the community.

The Point, similarly, was developed in response to the needs of the people living in the South Bronx. Started by local artists in search of a community space to do projects, the Point became a place for all local residents to launch their ideas as well as providing a cultural institution for the neighborhood. As the organization became more established in the neighborhood, they got involved in a local campaign to oppose a waste treatment plant in 1996, which they won. This victory got them involved in environmental justice organizing campaigns in the neighborhood and the borough. The Point has since been involved in work against pollution, building jails in the community, and for the development of brown fields and greenways. They continued their commitment to the arts too. Soon there was a demand for more structured programming for young people, which led the organization to develop an after-school program that focused on youth development through the arts and tutoring. But they continue advocacy, as the executive director explained, so that they “get a seat at the table, because decisions will be made whether you are there or not.”

Findings

The young people participating in SBU and ACTION came right after school to the CBOs where they left school environments for the more informal environments of SBU and ACTION. When they first arrived, they met the adults at SBU and ACTION and got to know each other. Then the adults embarked on a process to get youth civically engaged. They passed on civic knowledge (i.e., about the political process, how it works, who the players are, and how to influence it) and asked the youth to develop solutions to problems they saw in their communities. They garnered a sense of individual and collective power, feeling a strong sense of justice and responsibility to the community in which they live. Beth Rubin characterized this as a well-developed sense of agency and interest in community improvement, contributing to their civic identities (Rubin, 2007) and closing the civic knowledge gap (Lutkis & Weiss, 2007).

Relationship Building

Adult facilitators at both SBU and ACTION started off with introductory games that got the youth talking about who they were, where they were from, where they went to school, what they liked to do, who they admired, and what they hoped to do as adults. At SBU, for instance, they started the very first day playing a game called “When the wind blows.” The goal of the game was to find commonalities with each other (i.e., everyone wearing orange, those who were Hispanic, and those who lived in the neighborhood).

At both CBOs young people got to know adults very well. At SBU, they participated in “one-on-ones” in which the adults at the organizations meet and talk more in depth with the young people. In ACTION, young people went through an interview process prior to joining, run by other young people in which they got to know each other. In both instances, adults shared their personal stories, which helped them have someone older than them to relate to and trust.

At SBU, the introductory activities were followed by an “ism” training in which youth started to make sense of terms like racism, sexism, homophobia, and through the process, explore their own identities and experiences with oppression. In one training on homophobia,

The facilitator started immediately with a “guiding imaging” exercise. Youth were asked to close their eyes and imagine that they were in their happiest moment as children, with their best friend. Then, they were to imagine that they told their friend that they were gay. He asks, “What does your friend’s face look like? How do they react? How does it make you feel? Do you think they will keep your secret?” Next, the group is asked to imagine that everyone at school finds out the next day. The facilitator asks, “How do people react to you? What do they do? What do you do? Do you stay at school? How do you react to your friend? Did anyone support you? A teacher? A counselor?”

After this guided imaging, the facilitator asks the group to open their eyes and to talk one on one with a neighbor about what they imagined. In those conversations, some talked about stories of homophobia in school, others shared their sexual orientation, and still others made homophobic comments themselves. After these paired conversations, the facilitator asked the group to share comments from those conversations. The group hesitated at first. Then he told the group that he was gay. This allowed for some more sharing from the students. Next, the big group was broken up into smaller groups to discuss a series of questions that were aimed at getting youth to reflect about their own homophobic behaviors. This was put into a larger context about discrimination that gays were subjected to in variety of ways (i.e., employment discrimination, violence against gays, higher drop-out rates among them). (Field notes September 18, 2008)

Trainings like these allowed young people to explore their own identity as well as oppression that they may have faced or may have perpetrated themselves on others. Through these cathartic experiences, the youth acquired a vocabulary for dealing with problems that many of them thought were unique to them. Using homophobia as an example was particularly engaging since it was an issue on which all of the young people had clear positions. When the facilitator came out to the group, several young people felt that they could also “come out” to their peers, something they had said they were not sure they would have done before that moment. By modeling in this way, SBU became a safe space for the young people to discuss all kinds of oppression and identity openly.

The relationship-building practices had a big impact on the young people. As an African American male from SBU reported,

Jorman (an adult leader at SBU) had a real big impact on me. Like, he’s 19, he got a GED just like I’m doing, and he went to college. And it’s like . . . I trust him more than I trust almost anybody. And this is because he keeps it straightforward, and I feel like he’s a real person. Like, he is a real person. Like, if he was my brother or something; it was just—like, Jorman, something about that guy is just crazy. Like, he makes me do things that I would never really do. And it’s like—it’s not like—it’s like, he’ll be like, “Yo, do this—lift this hundred-ton building.” “Yo, I don’t know about that. . . .” “Yo, you gotta have the heart to do it! Like, I know you can do it!”

As another SBU African American male remarked, “I feel like he treats us as adults. I think that that helps us grow.”

Relationship-building activities continued by introducing the young people to other teenagers working on social justice campaigns. There were deliberate connections made with visits to other local youth groups and visits from other groups from New York and outside the city as well. ACTION met with young people in other boroughs of the city to find out what they were doing in their organizations and had visits from youth groups from Chicago and Los Angeles. SBU was part of a larger coalition called the Urban Youth Collaborative that got youth to meet other teenagers interested in social justice from all over the city. They met regularly to design an agenda for educational justice citywide. These experiences allowed the young people to see that they were not the only ones who were interested and working on civic issues or on social justice (the more commonly used term in the CBOs). Moreover, it facilitated the expansion of the young people’s social network, a key to developing efficacy at a political or civic level.

Building the peer-to-peer connections not only built relationships but inspired the youth to take themselves seriously. They began to think of themselves and their peers as having something to offer and something to strive for. As one Latina involved in ACTION commented,

Being with ACTION, and just the discussions: it really gets your mind going and thinking about the world. One girl, older than me, she was, like, such a role model. She was so amazing in school, she was so driven with ACTION, and she was so passionate. And she took the work really seriously. And I think I learned the most from her. Like, I saw that that’s what I needed to be to move forward, both in my professional aspect and in the skills and everything.

Building relationships was critical to the next phase of the work that the adults at the two community organizations did with youth. The relationship building was ongoing, of course, but it set the stage for introducing new, sometimes radical, concepts to the young people as they started to critique the world around them.

Encouraging Critique

At both organizations, the adults got youth thinking about the world around them with a walking tour of the neighborhood in which the organizations were located. They asked young people to notice and identify what they may have walked by every day: housing, schools, stores, offices, transportation, noise, and overall look of the neighborhood. At ACTION, youth quickly identified environmental problems in the Hunts Point like the placement of sanitation services, lack of green space, and pollution from Bruckner Boulevard, an eight-lane highway running through the center of the neighborhood. At SBU, youth saw the run-down school buildings side by side well-resourced ones, noted the overcrowding, and spotted the unused spaces that could be converted into schools.

The walking tour prompted questions and discussions about why things were the way they were. In those discussions, young people noted the difference between the way things were (i.e., pollution, lack of resources) and the way they imagined a neighborhood could or should be (i.e., clean streets, parks, new school buildings). They applied the language of racism and classism; they learned to explain why their neighborhoods did not have much green space or had overcrowded school buildings. Both CBOs helped young people acknowledge “structural constraints” (Ginwright & Cammorata, 2007) in their communities by asking youth to look at who lives in the neighborhood as well as what housing conditions, transportation, and services exist for those residents. Through an analysis of those constraints (i.e., why the conditions of their neighborhoods exist the way they do), the adults “fostered more aware and empowered civic identities in youth” (Rubin, Hayes, & Benson, 2009).

Following the walking tours, adults at both organizations led workshops on decision making. “Power-charts” were used to show the chain of political power and how it operated. This was eye opening for many youth who saw the decision making in their communities as inevitable and something in which they felt powerless. They also looked at neighborhood history, tracing the ways in which decisions have been made in the neighborhoods (i.e., where to place housing, services), and pointed to who was responsible for making those decisions.

This provided civic knowledge and demystified the decision making at high levels from which urban communities, and especially youth, can feel alienated. It also served to help the youth envision ways they could insert themselves or challenge the decision-making process whether it was by elected officials, business leaders, or others. As one adult from SBU described the process,

Instead of complaining or something, and we have to turn it around and tell them, “Well, do something about it. Find out who is in charge. Talk to them.” So, they definitely come away with understanding that there is a decision maker and people often deal with everyone in the middle and don’t go straight to the decision maker. It’s not an effective use of your time to deal with the middle people. Go straight to the decision maker and do whatever you need to do to get that person to say yes to you or whatever, right? They definitely come away with—I don’t know how to word this—sort of a different perspective on the conditions they live in.

Going through this process with adult facilitators who were working to make change themselves inspired the youth away from their powerlessness. SBU’s adults were particularly effective organizers and felt confident that they could confront people with more authority than they have and win. This was very inspiring to the young people who frequently described people in their lives as complaining about problems but not doing much to address them.

Connecting the issues to young people’s lives was another key for getting young people exciting about making change. As the director of ACTION explained, “It’s personal, I think that’s how you pick problems.” Learning about the asthma rates in the Bronx are the highest in the city, one Latino youth in ACTION explained,

On the other side of the Bruckner, where my mom lives, on Longwood, you get on that side and you’re affected. The smell is really, really strong. And it makes people sick. And the asthma rates are still the same. And—yeah. It is close to my heart. And then also, maybe in the beginning it wasn’t, because I didn’t know too much of it and I didn’t really understand it. Now I do.

After identifying problems, the adults asked young people to think about how they would change “debilitative neighborhood conditions,” pushing them to develop ideas for addressing the problems that they see around them. It was done collectively, so that the solutions were agreed upon. This helped to “build a collective capacity to struggle for social justice” (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007, p. 693)

At SBU, this discussion evolved into a campaign to get an old armory converted into a school building. They started to go to community board meetings, generating talking points and meeting with other groups concerned about the same issue. In ACTION, youth began to work on a campaign to ensure that the “right” things got put into their neighborhood. They worked to reject a plan for a juvenile detention facility while advocating for converting a local brown field into a park.

Using nothing more than their neighborhood and their own experiences, each organization discussed the problems in their communities and encouraged young people to think about ways to make an impact on those problems. They were not reading about something remote and disconnected from their lives. The topics the young people discussed connected with their everyday lived experiences within their communities and with community organizations and institutions, organically closing the civic knowledge gap. The discussions also helped them make meaning of these experiences and translate this meaning into distinct worldviews as they need to in developing their civic identities (Rubin, 2007).

Building Political Efficacy

So I kind of thought this is the hand that we’re dealt, and this is it. And the town hall meetings and the little things that ACTION does just shocks me. People actually show up, and people actually care. I was thinking we’re doing all this work and we’re going to present to like, two people and a kid. And then the whole place is packed? And it’s like, “Wow.” But it’s not really something that runs in my family, that, “oh we’re activists-type.”

As this quote from an African American male in ACTION indicates, seeing success and other people who share a desire for change was a strong motivator for the youth. There is a clear, but not inevitable, connection between making a critique of the world around you and getting motivated to change it. It is easy to get cynical, but the strength of the two CBOs in this study was that they taught young people a sense of their own power and efficacy to make change. In interview after interview, young people expressed this, countering a common view of urban youth as disengaged from civic life at best, and the cause of social problems, at worst. They developed a belief that change does not come from the top but from themselves, building their collective capacity for change, as one young woman said about working with local elected officials,

A lot of them are bullshit. They say things like, “I’m going to do this for you, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that” but then, you don’t see it. It’s like, people really make the difference. People who push things are the community people. People that work in the community. Or like small groups like ACTION and the Point. And one of them rocking the boat. They’re the ones who actually can make changes. Not all these politics people. I really don’t see anything, because I think without us they’re won’t be no change.

Although she dismissed politicians as having empty promises, she saw that change was possible through her own efforts in concert with her peers and her community. Belief in the capacity to make change was truly powerful as a 15-year-old Latina in ACTION explained,

In ACTION, I became aware of how unfair and unequally balanced we are. How you know every community is supposed to have a share of the good and the bad and we’re just like pat-pat-pat. Good. So, it really laid it down on the table. Many of the bad things that we should know about that we just pass on a daily routine, and it’s just like—oh yeah, that’s just another bad thing about Hunts Point. Too bad, I live there. As soon as I learned it, that’s when I gained motivation and that’s when I was like—hold up. Girl, something’s got to change. So after that, I think that’s when I realized that we have to do something.

This young woman exercised the power to do something, becoming heavily involved in a campaign to rid her neighborhood of a juvenile detention facility. She attended coalition meetings, meetings of her community board, and spoke to media advocating against a juvenile facility and for more investment in education.

Few organizations put young people at the helm of decision making, but it does have a powerful effect. The young Latina working to prevent a juvenile jail being built in her neighborhood knew she could navigate the channels of change making, even as a high school student:

I love the jail because it was something that started when I started, actually, so it was like brand new. And to see all the changes that it has gone through—it’s crazy. We fought it, we won—they’re doing it again. So, it shows pretty much how the city views us. And how they think of us. That even though we support things—we will create change, which is coming. So yeah, I really love that whole working thing and I’m always quick to throw myself in that group that has to explain it. Especially now for the town hall. Jail’s my subject. . . . Right now the city is proposing to build it near the jail barges down by the fish market. So we’re trying to stop that, too. And unfortunately, most of the people that used to support us and now turning over and saying—OK, so it’s not near the community any more so why should it matter? Still, we’re like, “no jail” because that’s our main point. No matter what—that’s what we’re trying to get: no jail anywhere near us. And they don’t seem to understand that. So, we keep on working.

This work is difficult and so experiencing “wins” is critical to keeping the motivation going, to seeing that nothing is inevitable. In the prison campaign, for example, ACTION along with a larger coalition, forced the city to reconsider their plans. At SBU, the youth secured meetings with officials at the city’s Department of Education to voice their concerns about overcrowding. These experiences have led the participating young people to believe that there is hope.

A 15-year-old Latino participant at SBU reported that this new skill set was incredibly important:

I’m trying to get as much organizing under my belt as possible so I know how to go through meetings and stuff. You know, how to talk. How to talk to people. . . . The thing that caught me off guard was door-knocking. We had to outreach, going door-knocking, and I didn’t know how to knock on the door and ask them to help with the situation that’s happening, give them fliers. Because a lot of people—initially if someone was to come on my door and knock on my door like, I’d be like, I’m not interested. And now I can see—from the other perspective—how it’s like. So I would say the experience helped me to spread the information out to a different variety of people.

Young people learned to conduct and present research, speak at public meetings, work with media, and plan a campaign. These were not skills learned in a vacuum but that were used in real campaigns to get new schools built and more green space created in the Bronx, giving young people the experiences, social networks, and skills to build their “individual and collective capacity to make change” (Ginwright & Cammarota, 2007, p. 693). At SBU and at ACTION, the young people learned to collect data, to organize, to work strategically, and to speak publicly. By being the center of this activity, doing the work themselves and building the skills, the young people felt that they had gained civic knowledge and skills.

Empowered, the young people developed a sense of their own agency and that they could make demands on behalf of themselves and their communities. As an ACTION 17-year-old Latina described,

I learned just really more in the way that politics works—when I say that, I mean more just how city planning works, and how elected officials play a big role in that. So if the community members have an idea of something, or they have a problem with something, really, you can make as much noise as you want, but if you don’t have elected officials backing you, then it’s not going to make that much of a difference. So just learning how—like, before ACTION, and before really meeting—going to these different meetings and being associated with these different people—I didn’t really know how the local government worked. And now that I do, it’s easier to take it back to ACTION, and say, you know, so I know how this can happen now. So we called a press conference before, and we knew how to be noticed. So I think when it comes to politics, I really mean, just, like, how politicians are involved in the city planning. And just to see how the people can really speak up, and some of them will listen. And also how much they have to speak up, also, to actually be heard.

Prior to getting involved in the two community organizations, several students described themselves as cynical, not believing that change was possible. In interviews, the youth emphasized the fact that they were surprised at how much influence young people could have.

Adults working at SBU told the young people that they are entitled to the same services that middle-class communities have. But they needed to demand it. As one of the adult facilitators described,

Once they start to think I can actually influence this person to make a decision that is sort of like our strategy to break in those misconceptions that the decision makers are untouchable, right? And opening up a space to talk about radical that aren’t really radical ideas. Like, I shouldn’t be in a classroom with 30 science students. I remember the first time I had that conversation it was like what? 30 science students. What are you talking about? Fifteen students! That’s an empty classroom and people would be like, actually no. Everywhere over here, upstate, wherever you go, private school, you know, it is 15 students, 20 tops. Twenty is a lot and I am like, you serious? What? So opening that space—so I want that to happen. Who’s the decision maker? Bring in that—whoever that person is closer to me.

This facilitator encouraged young people to critique a situation of educational inequity and to put themselves in the position of determining the solution. In other words, the decision maker should be answering to the youth, not the other way around. Ginwright and Cammarota call this youth-led solutions to community problems the kind of work that will help close the civic knowledge gap.

Of course, not every young person had a transformational experience working with SBU and ACTION. In some of those cases, the young people had to leave the CBOs altogether because of circumstances that prevented them from participating. For instance, one African American male in ACTION was arrested during the study, some moved, others needed to get jobs to support their families, and a few had academic problems that became obstacles to participating. This was the reality of working with low-income youth to some degree.

Nevertheless, the young people who persisted through were doing relatively well in school, had the support of their families, and had some degree of economic stability. This suggests that poverty can never be ignored as a factor when working with urban youth whether it is on civic engagement or on academic achievement. Still, a follow-up study would be required to find out how the civic identities of these young people have developed into adulthood. The eldest participant in the study is still a sophomore in college, and so such a study is still years away.

Discussion and Conclusion

In spite of the limitations, the urban youth in this study have learned not only that it is possible for them to change their communities but that they have acquired the skills to engage in that change making. They learned from and were inspired by adults who asked them to generate ideas about what they wanted to change and taught them how to go about making the changes that they wanted to see. By engaging the urban youth fully, and giving them agency, the CBOs in this study enabled the youth to develop a civic identity and a civic praxis. The youth participating in the study had a sense of efficacy. They believed they could advocate on their own behalf and on behalf of their communities to improve them. In so doing, they were civically engaged, showing that it is very possible to build civic engagement among urban youth. Armed with concrete skills of civic participation, they were not planning for some future time where they might exercise those skills; they engaged in change making as teenagers.

From this study, we learn that in order to build their civic identity, and close the civic knowledge gap, it is important for urban youth to participate in civic activities in which they can have an impact and see the concrete results of their work. The main strength of the CBOs in this study was that the adults who worked in them were able to authentically engage young people in discussions about real problems in their communities and to provide them a set of skills for addressing those problems. The youth were not reading from a textbook or learning about theories of civic engagement. They were civic participants.

In designing a program meant to engage urban youth in civic participation, there is much to learn from SBU and ACTION. Such a program should be authentic and participatory and staffed with adults who can successfully connect to young people. To ensure that we have more civic participation and engagement of urban youth, we will need more of these programs, and given the current climate in urban schools, perhaps they need to exist outside of schools. Nonprofit organizations and foundations can take up this charge to ensure that urban youth become civically engaged and that we begin closing the civic knowledge gap and create civically engaged urban youth who are active in improving their own communities.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Bio

Jessica T. Shiller is an assistant professor in the department of Instructional Leadership and Professional Development at Towson University. Her research interests include urban youth, school reform, and civic engagement.

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