Spring is in the Air!
By Raphael Lagoc
Spring is in the air!
Our clocks have turned forward, the days are heating up, the birds are chirping and my sinuses are raging. It’s a lovely time.
As the season is livening up, so too is the staff at the Global Action Research Center. There is a new energy all around as we shake off the last vestiges of our winter hibernation, looking ahead with a tentative hope for new possibilities in what we can safely and comfortably do now in our garden. We just recently had a community dinner at the Ocean View Growing Grounds, the first in a series of dinners in partnership with United Women of East Africa and hopefully the first in a year full of new and exciting events in general at the garden. While Zoom still reigns supreme thanks to the convenience it offers, more of our other meetings are being held with actual people in a room together sharing space and energy. Finally, as of the end of February, our Saturdays at the garden have become just a little bit busier with the launch of our Spring cohort for our Young Environmental Justice Advocates Academy.
With all this talk of our renewed spirit and drive, this is not to say that we have not been keeping ourselves busy before now - in fact, it is because of the work we have been doing, the ideas we have been developing, and the foundations we have been building, that we are able to hit the ground running. It seems fitting then that, in this time of renewal and in welcoming this new medium for us to communicate with you all, I start things off with a retrospective about one of our projects, and how we got to this point now.
Through the past few years, I have watched an idea grow and develop and expand, and this idea has looked like and been called a lot of different things - The Youth Citizen Science project, the Young Community Scientists, the Triton Tree Trust, the Young Environmental Scientists, all culminating now in the Young Environmental Justice Advocates Academy, or the YEJA Academy for short.
This project took its first steps early in 2020 alongside a passionate teacher and his eager group of students at Health Sciences High before the beginning of the pandemic cut our time short. For a time, the Global ARC, like many others, had to focus on keeping the lights on and reimagining what our work looks like in quarantine. Eventually, we were able to pick back up with another group following an almost opposite journey - City Heights Youth-for-Change.
Youth-for-Change had organized for years around different youth issues in their community, collaborating with other local organizations on ballot initiatives and conducting their own survey of their community around the actual unheard concerns and experiences of City Heights residents. That survey and all the work prior was supposed to wrap up with a big exhibition showing off a photography project that Youth-for-Change did to illustrate the real people, the experiences, the soul of the story they were telling. Instead, that too was cut short by the pandemic, and with many of the group’s members moving on in other directions with graduation and college and careers ahead, making up for that loss was difficult.
But at this point, that is not an uncommon story. We all have experienced disappointment and loss through these past years, but this story does come with its own ray of hope. In one of their last meetings before going on a hiatus, Youth-for-Change expressed two big hopes: first, to transition to climate action due to the growing crisis and its relevancy for youth, and second, to expand their circle and grow the group beyond the primarily Somali and Bantu youth that made up its original core. As it turns out, they were able to see those hopes manifest in a new form with the Young Environmental Justice Advocates.
The Young Environmental Justice Advocates began with a pilot cohort made up entirely of members of Youth-for-Change and their network, split into two divisions: the older members, the original core, of City Heights Youth-for-Change went through training around climate science and developed a live demonstration project in our garden, while their younger siblings, long since yearning to come with their older siblings to meetings and events, formed a new junior division of the YEJA academy. I still remember the story of our youngest and most vocal member, Nuriya, literally standing at the window of the apartment complex many of them lived in, watching the crew running off to the garden until we finally committed to running the younger division and one of the members finally invited her to come with, unaware of the endless energy and confidence they were soon bringing in.
With our newest cohort, we now welcome students coming from as far as San Ysidro, and while the majority of our group is still from the City Heights area, it’s no longer a mix of siblings and old family friends across the Somali and Bantu communities. The spirit of youth wanting to be heard and to tell the stories that are not being told lives on, only now it’s got even more stories to tell, more perspectives to share. As I mentioned, many of the original core of Youth-for-Change transitioned to new and exciting life directions. Two of them however count themselves among this current cohort, building some continuity between the efforts and bringing forward their experiences by energizing the new group and stepping up as some of the most vocal and engaged members. While we did not have the capacity to continue running a regular junior division, we also still keep in touch and just recently took them on an alumni field trip to attend an event down at the Kendall-Frost Marshlands around Mission Bay.
There is an old saying by Isaac Newton I particularly like that captures the ethos of much of this kind of work: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The Young Environmental Justice Advocates was never meant to replace Youth-for-Change, and as a program, it certainly makes no claims to the past achievements of the group. But in the program’s infancy, through weeks of development and revision, through moments where it felt sometimes like trial-and-error, together with these youth we defined something new. Bringing the skills and savvy they have developed through their various campaigns and offering their unique perspective as youth activists, Youth-for-Change breathed life into this program in a way only they could.
As we look today towards new horizons in supporting youth activism and growing our garden, we do so with the knowledge that this space, this work, these opportunities are possible not because of the coming spring, but because of the winter, and the fall, and all of the summers that have come before.