Model and Strategy
- Healing Justice: advancing a framework and deepening the practices of healing justice that centers wholeness, intergenerational wisdom, repair, and liberation.
- Capacity Building: expanding our collective capacity to practice transformative youth organizing as young leaders, organizers, and organizations across the state.
- Field Building: strengthening the field by increasing resources, shared knowledge, leadership pathways, and infrastructure for our movements to thrive.
- Power Building: connecting organizations through a trans-local strategy to strengthen and elevate the organizing work in local schools, cities, and regions.
“I've learned how collective healing is important to sustaining movements and organizations. It put into perspective how much of my passion and drive to help is fueled in grief, but [I learned] to use this to heal and transform my community." —Youth Organizing Institute participant
Young people actively participate in field leadership and strategy opportunities at YO! Cali. These include a year-long paid Youth Organizing Squad internship program, where young people lead all aspects of a campaign, and participation in the Youth Power Fund, where youth sit on the grantmaking committee with equal voting and decision-making power. Youth leaders make up 50% of YO! Cali’s statewide Steering Committee, which holds decision-making power for the organization, working with staff to set frameworks, strategic direction, and longterm goals.Impact
YO! Cali was established in 2017 with the initial goals of building regional and statewide youth organizing infrastructure in California; supporting young organizers to move into positions of leadership, decision-making, and power; elevating and connecting place-based campaigns for greater impact; and widening funder interest and long-term investment in youth organizing. Over the past five years YO! Cali has made progress on all of those fronts. Among its most notable recent accomplishments:
Convened and facilitated by YO! Cali, the Northern CA Youth Power Fund has run two cycles of participatory grantmaking through an intergenerational decision-making process. The first round, in November 2020, provided $20,000 rapid response grants to 25 organizations, with subsequent grants of $10,000 to each organization. The second round, in 2021, awarded $60,000 general operating grants to an expanded cohort of 29 grantee organizations. In 2022 YO! Cali launched a capacity building and peer learning component for Youth Power Fund grantee organizations.
In 2022, YO! Cali was contracted by the California Health and Human Services Agency to ensure that youth perspectives and voices helped to share the Agency’s new five-year Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative. YO! Cali worked with its network organizations to produce a report that reflects the voices of 129 BIPOC young people who represented the regional and ethnic diversity of California’s BIPOC communities, uplifting their recommendations to transform California’s mental health systems for young people. As a next step, YO! Cali will collaborate with 10 community based organizations, supporting young people to lead research on promising efforts around the state to elevate young people’s mental health.
2022 marked the sixth year of YO! Cali’s regional Youth Organizing Institutes. The Northern California Institute brought together 70+ youth leaders and organizers from 17 organizations, 93% of whom rated the experience as “excellent”. In the Central Valley, 55 youth leaders and organizers from more than 20 organizations took part.
Leadership
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J Ishida
YO! Cali Co-Director
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Crisantema "Crissy" Gallardo
Power Building Director, Central Valley
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Linda Sanchez
Field Building Director, Bay Area