Youth Together
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Our Story: Youth Together emerged as a collaborative project in 1996 following a 2-week long emergency closure of Castlemont High School in Oakland, CA, and the weeklong closure of Richmond High School in Richmond, CA due to violent race riots. Outraged by the conditions in their schools that led up to these riots, students and community members came together to strategize how young people could lead efforts to identify solutions to the root causes of both the physical violence (e.g. fights between students, increased gang presence) and the institutional violence (locked bathrooms during the day, punitive tardy policies) that was present on their school campus. Youth Together began working in five targeted high schools: Berkeley High School (BHS), Richmond High School (RHS), Skyline High School (SHS), Fremont Federation of High Schools (FFHS), and Castlemont Community of Small Schools (CCSS).
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Our Mission: Grounded in our commitment to peace, unity and justice, the mission of Youth Together is to address the root causes of educational inequities by developing multiracial youth leaders and engaging school community allies to promote positive school change.
Our Vision: Education is a basic human right, not a privilege.
The vision of Youth Together is to reclaim public education. We seek to create public educational systems that are just, community based, supportive and people centric. We aim to empower, mobilize, and build self-determination among students and their communities.
Youth Together envisions students who think critically, are social change agents, and who challenge internalized, interpersonal, and institutional oppression in their schools and communities. Specifically, we envision public schools as spaces where youth, their families, and community members are key decision makers in their educational experience.
We envision an educational system that is both the center of the community and a tool for creating community. When local educational institutions are designed to meet the needs of students, a strong community is created.
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