A closer look at how power maintains power  

Global Action Project 

Are you curious about how dominant power maintains power? Come to this interactive and youth-friendly workshop where youth and staff from Global Action Project break down the use of force and ideologies to create consent for oppressive policies and practices through media. We end with a strategy session on how to make sure that our work is in the interest of liberation. 

Connect the Dots...Healing the Links between Hip Hop and Domestic Violence   

Women Healing & Empowering Women (WHEW)

Love music. Love each other. The Connect the Dots workshop is an interactive dialogue exposing the relationships between hip hop music's glorification of the prison culture and violence against women of color by their intimate partners. Beyond vilification of the art form, this workshop challenges participants to use this same music as a tool for healing.   

Dancing Towards Social Justice: Culture, Health, and Female Empowerment through Tribal Belly Dance

Heather Woodley, City University of New York Graduate Center

(This workshop is for women and girls only.)

Learn, empower and shake what your mama gave you!  This high-energy workshop of Raqs Sharqi/belly dance will weave in discussion of Arab language, diversity, and culture, female health, current issues of social justice, and ways to incorporate this into the class room.  This workshop is geared towards those without dance background, but will be differentiated for those with experience.

Educational Bill of Rights   

Chicago Youth Initiating Change (CYIC)

Actively engage with members of CYIC who are inspiring students and teachers to take action for social justice! Learn about creating an annual Social Justice Student Expo, speaking at school board meetings against gentrified school closings, designing and implementing a Social Justice 101 class, and more while helping us create a national Student Bill of Rights. Come take the next step towards student power!  

Face Movement    

HYPE and Brown Berets of Salt Lake City

Uniting people by the struggles they face to challenge oppression, sexism, racism, borders and more! In this workshop we will work on coalition building between divided communities, connecting ourselves beyond borders, beyond racial divides, beyond all that does and potentially can separate our communities. Face Movement uniting people by the similarity of the struggles we face.    

Lead, Act, Change—Youth Activism in the Curriculum   

Academy for Math, Science and Engineering and Boston Community Leadership Academy

Can U.S. Civics or History courses move beyond a textbook to engage student in issues and solutions? Students from Boston and Salt Lake City will share their participatory action research projects developed in response to the concerns they identified in their respective communities. Students will engage panel participants in a conversation about youth activism and social change within the high school setting.

Pop, Lock, and Drop It—Popular Education By and For Street Based Youth

Young Women's Empowerment Project (YWEP)

Popular Education to break down the issues, lock the knowledge in your mind and drop the knowledge in your hood. YWEP presents their popular education work with street based youth impacted by the sex trade and street economies.  This skill building workshop offers training for youth to take on leadership and develop their own political education curriculum.  

Sister Museum: A Virtual Tour of Sister Sol    

The Brotherhood/Sister Sol

This multimedia workshop will explore the strategies and lessons learned from Sister Sol, a Rites of Passage program for young Black and Latina women. During the workshop, we will: 1) screen a film and share overview of Sister Sol, 2) lead participants through our Sister Museum activity, 3) share strategies and personal testimonies, and 4) provide a space for participants to share lessons around doing similar work.  

Students Engaged in Education for Liberation 

Mary Candace Full (UC Berkeley), Jay Gillen (Baltimore Algebra Project), Uma Majmudar 

This panel will bring to light the ways in which youth serve as active agents in an Education for Liberation framework.  From the Bay Area, to Baltimore, to the Bay of Bengal, the presenters in this panel will illustrate varying models to empower youth.  More specifically the presenters will elaborate on how students helped their city develop useful youth development policies, on how certain schools in India instill the principles of Education for Liberation into their students’ psyche, and how students in California benefited from programs implementing a Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework. 

Understanding Adultism as a Form of Oppression    

Chicago Freedom School

Adultism is a system of oppression that privileges adults and promotes the belief that adults are better than youth. This workshop will explore how adultism within our personal and professional lives creates barriers between youth and adults. We will deconstruct this oppression, explore how we can change the way youth are seen and treated by adults, and provide tools for creating better intergenerational relationships. 

What Kids Know That Tests Don’t Show: Cultural Literacy in School and Community

Kathleen Cushman, What Kids Can Do 

Come try our fun and provocative "SAT"—co-produced with Bronx high schoolers—to test how closely you listen to students and what assumptions you carry into multicultural classrooms.  Then join a dialogue on multiculturalism, equity, learning, and testing. We’ll brainstorm cross-cultural issues in our own communities, and explore how to create “SAT-You!” A complimentary copy of the book SAT Bronx is included.