The Youth Organizing Institute offers a variety of workshops that create containers for meaningful and real dialogue between young people around painful, complex, and systemic issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, and incarceration. Our workshops are developed in the tradition of popular education, creating interactive and youth-centered spaces for conversation rather than talking at or lecturing youth.

Youth Organizing Institute staff members and alumni come from a wealth of experience with facilitating and developing curricula for popular education workshops and are available to facilitate any of the workshops listed below for your organization, school, or conference for a sliding scale fee. Please contact us for more information.

School-to-Prison Pipeline: Analysis and Solutions

What is the school-to-prison pipeline? What are the policies and practices pushing students of color, and queer/trans, disabled, immigrant, and poor youth out of schools and into the criminal and juvenile systems? What are the solutions to school push-out and how can young people organize in their schools against the pipeline? Using theater of the oppressed activities, shopantibioticsonline fishbowl discussion, visual art practices, and collective knowledge sharing, this workshop will help youth and their allies answer those questions.

Power, Oppression, Intersectionality, and the Roots of Resistance

Explore the root causes and intersections of systemic violence and oppressive institutions like borders and prisons with interactive and visual activities including mapping ourselves and our communities, finding shared struggles and roots in the river of history, and small group discussions about our experiences and our resources.

Ageism and Youth Empowerment in Intergenerational Organizing

Learn how to build youth power in an intergenerational context. How do we respect youth leadership and self-determination as adult allies? How do we avoid replicating adultist power structures and tokenization in our organizing work?

Intersections of Xenophobia, Homophobia and Colonialism

This workshop examines the roots of homophobia in communities of color and the importance of the process of colonialism in enforcing heteronormativity. Participants engage in artistic representations of their “real” and “taught” genders, and deconstruct the US creation myth along with the gender roles it enforces.