Siempre en Lucha y Siempre Por Nuestra Gente
UPROSE Youth Justice
Youth Justice is a Brooklyn based youth group that houses five social justice campaigns. Significantly, Youth Justice organizes around issues they identify as pertinent to their lives and always attempt to produce tools and/or take actions that will be useful for further community activism and decision-making.
Youth Justice gives a shout out to the Madrinas and Padrinos that are making this summer enjoyable for our Youth Organizers! Gracias!
Madrinas
Jody KassYvette Shiffman
Mercedes Narciso
Padrinos
Juan BeritanMichael Cairl
Tom Angotti
Ron Shiffman
Chang Xie
Eddie Bautista
Become an Organizer
Youth Justice At the Table: Designed to provide intensive and holistic ongoing organizing training and support to the new and old Youth Justice members and leadership. The young people are introduced to the history of Civil Rights, the Peace movement, the Young Lords and Black Panthers, the Chicano movement and other youth led movements. Workshops cover racism, sexism, environmental justice, heterosexism and classicism. The young people learn about colonialism as we discuss Puerto Rico and the island Vieques as contemporary case studies. The training provides the foundation for involvement in ongoing youth led campaigns and/or the development of new ones. While facilitating the At The Table Leadership Training Sessions, 3 times a year youth are also trained to use video as an organizing tool.At the Table
- Creates a space for interaction and strategizing
- Presents new ways of looking at issues including environmental, economic and social justice, Youth Justice, health, incarceration and education
- Teaches and reflects on the skills and theory of organizing, such as the use of direct action, research, media, video and popular education as tools for youth organizers
- Identify resources, builds networks, and link current efforts
- Connects grass-roots struggle to systemic/policy change
March 1st for Spring Training
May 15th for 6-8 week summer sessions
To register or get more information, please contact youthjustice@uprose.org
Participate in youth led campaigns! To join email or call! UPROSE Youth Justice is an umbrella that provides youth leadership training to five youth-based groups: SistaSolutions, BrothaUp!, JustPeace, the Environmental Enforcers and Bring the Buya/ Sin Freno Films. Youth participation and direction characterizes all of our organizing efforts.
Environmental Enforcers Since their founding in 1998, the UPROSE Environmental Enforcers have provided a unique opportunity for Southwest Brooklyn and specifically Sunset Park youth, to learn about their urban environment and enhance their community. Our youth, the Environmental Enforcers have been the spark behind the community's organizing efforts and mobilizations for environmental change. The enforcers a cadre of young people committed to exercising ownership over their community by reclaiming the waterfront, exploring environmental remedies, and promoting green solutions. The Enforcers which were started by three 14 year old Sunset Park residents in 1998 as a summer project, have since expanded into a Brooklyn based youth movement which has engaged over 200 young people. The founder, Crystal Domenech, represented the Borough of Brooklyn in a scientific delegation to Antartica where she talked about the effects of global warming in urban environment. In 2005, their work was recognized at the 2005 Gandhi-King Season for Nonviolence youth event at the United entitled Healing Our Planet: Youth Take Action for Environmental Responsibility in honor of environmentalist Wangari Maathai of Kenya winning the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and 2005 beginning the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development.
SistaSolutions, is an initiative begun by Sunset Park young women that promotes awareness, sensitivity, and accountability around gender discrimination issues. In response to the daily sexual harassment to which they are subjected, the young women carry out outreach, workshops, and proactive campaigns. The most recent culminated in the declaration of Sunset Park as a "Harassment Free Zone". The young women engage elected officials and school authorities as they develop their education campaigns and learn research, advocacy, writing, legal and communication skills.
BrothaUp! During monthly meetings, participants discuss male roles, relationships, sexism, and the general pressures of being male youth of color. BrothaUp! is a forum for self and collective education. They are currently developing a police misconduct/racial profiling campaign.
Bring the Buya is the youth's news media project. Bring the Buya articles focus on the community-based social justice that our youth address through their activism. These pieces present an autonomous and critical view and thus educate the community, solicit its input, and inform it of upcoming workshops, forums, and events. It is an excellent opportunity for young people to develop writing, research, critical thinking, and computer skills.
Sin Freno Films - Become a filmmaker! As video becomes a more accessible medium, there is an increasing need for social justice, environmental justice, and other not-for-profits to create video representations of their work, their struggles, and their communities in order to reach out to a broader audience. However, these videos take a lot of expertise, time, and equipment to create and not every organization is equipped to handle this type of project.
At UPROSE, Youth video crews receive training in all aspects of filmmaking with an emphasis on the creation of educational and advocacy videos. The project coordinator identifies like-minded organizations that are seeking video crews at low cost to create videos for them from start to finish. On any given video crew, there will be a coordinator with previous experience in each aspect of the process, camera, sound, and editing crew members with previous training, but less field experience, and production assistants who have very little training and will use this as their starting off point.
If you would like to enroll or hire a video crew, please email us at MediaJustice@uprose.org.
Training on Final Cut Pro HD takes place throughout the year, here are the Registration Deadlines:
- December 1st for Winter Training
- March 1st for Spring Training
- May 15th for 6-8 week summer sessions
Together, these groups make up UPROSE Youth Justice. Youth Justice has its own decision-making structures, including a rotating steering committee charged with executive responsibilities.
