April showers did not stop the Youth Organizing Institute as we held our Spring Training day April 18-19. Over 15 youth from the Triangle to Warren County spent the weekend in Raleigh at the AFL-CIO office for workshops, story sharing, and community building.
The first half of the weekend focused on the power of storytelling, while the second half addressed the importance of building strong ties to different communities through canvassing. Youth created audio recordings of each other’s stories and made plans about how to share those stories with their communities in creative and powerful ways. After sharing our personal histories with each other, we talked about the stories we can tell with data and the power of canvassing as a tool for connecting communities to the issues that impact them.
We knocked on doors Saturday afternoon, gathering data on people’s experiences in schools and having conversations about how we can improve our schools. The spring training prepared youth to take action against the school-to-prison pipeline and share their experiences through creative and emotionally compelling as well as research-based methods.