Youth Organizing Power, with Collique Williams

Boston Ujima Project
9 hours ago
9 min read

The City School is an exemplar in Boston of youth participatory education, development, and organizing. Founded more than thirty years ago as a program at Milton Academy, The City School's location in Upham's Corner now functions as an "on-ramp for social justice organizing," supporting youth of color in understanding injustice, running campaigns, knocking on doors, and mobilizing theoretical understandings into practical plans for how to address them amongst their families and communities. Ujima's Editorial Manager, Alula Hunsen, spoke with Executive Director Collique Williams last November to learn how The City School breaks down siloes and supports youth-led praxis.

Alula Hunsen: I would love to hear about your personal, 20-year journey through organizing spaces: where did it start for you, and how did you end up at the City School?

Collique Williams: I’ve been doing youth work since I was a youth organizer back in the day, since I was 13 years old. It’s amazing work that I’ve had the privilege to make my career.

I grew up in Hyde Park and still go to the same church that I did when I was a kid, Hyde Park Presbyterian Church. We’re part of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization: they do organizing work, bringing churches, synagogues, and community organizations together to work on issues. GBIO saw violence amongst younger members of the community, so they hired an organizer who wanted to in turn address the issue with youth organizing. They started this organization called the Boston-area Youth Organizing Project (BYOP). My peers needed a liaison between the youth group and the larger organization; I was like, “I'm not gonna do it.” And the rest of my peers were like, yeah, you're gonna do it <laughs>. Little did they know, they were putting me on my career path.

I eventually went off to college, to be an “actual organizer.” I figured out that school was not the most conducive environment for that, at least not the school I was at, so I came back to be an adult organizer in the BYOP space, still supporting young people. We started multiple transit campaigns—--the first successful one was implementing a discounted youth pass, making sure that young people from the ages of 18 to 25 could have affordable means to travel around the city. We learned how to talk to power, how to be in spaces and in places with public officials, how to bring people out and do our own civil disobedience.

BYOP was also a part of the Journey for Justice Alliance, working on education justice: I spent a lot of time working with folks trying to prevent the heavy school closures during the Obama administration (we put out a report on this: Death by a Thousand Cuts).

In 2015, I ended up here at The City School for the first time, focusing more on youth development and training while also learning program development: fundraising, how to run an organization.

After that, I ended up at Community Labor United (CLU); I had worked for so long with adults in youth spaces, but I had never worked with adults in adult spaces. It was very helpful in terms of understanding that adults are really just big young people, <laughs>. If you can do a workshop for a young person, you can do the same workshop for an adult. I also learned what state lobbying looks like, and spent a lot of time up at the State House working and building relationships with public officials.

While I was there, I worked with the Green Justice Coalition, specifically working on another transit campaign (trying to get a more affordable fare for low-income people riding the MBTA). It was a dope campaign that took a lot; having support from an incoming Mayor Wu at the time, and incoming Governor Healey, was really instrumental.

And then I found myself back here <laughs>. I’ve brought back two things from my time at CLU; one is that we often forget community and labor are one and the same. Labor unions are community members, they’re our folks, and we can make organized labor fight for us.

My goal is to help build young people's leadership, and to ensure that they’re able to join labor and other organizing spaces in positions of leadership (on executive boards, as union stewards, etc.).

One of the significant reasons that I came back and took this job is seeing how great the need is in “adult organizations” for community organizers—there were so many spots that orgs were trying to fill, and in my mind I thought, “The City School should be training up young people to do this.”

What is the power behind organizing with young people?

When I look back at any movement for change and revolution, young people have been at the center. We look at South Africa, young people were there. Children’s marches, lunch counter protests during civil rights—young people.Young people have moved the world. They're not always recognized as leadership, but their leadership has been paramount. Young people's voices weren't heard, but they were often leaned on.

Sometimes folks have a reaction to young people, thinking that they don't know enough; but they’re still so often moved when they see them taking action.

If the youngest of us see something wrong with this issue, then there might be something wrong with this!

What is The City School, for those who are not aware?

We are over 30 years old. The City School originally came out of a program at Milton Academy: young people would spend weekends outside of Milton, in the “inner city,” to understand what was different and how they could work towards equity and making sure everybody has what they need. Milton, Massachusetts, is literally right next to Mattapan. So <laughs>, they didn’t have to look far.

I like to describe us now as an on-ramp for social justice organizing for youth.

So oftentimes they're coming in caring about a lot and knowing a lot, just without the language. We teach the fundamentals. If you care about your friends that are getting stopped by police, that's police brutality, and you can fight against it. If you care about your school not having enough, that’s educational injustice, and you can fight it. We teach young people about social justice, and about how to make change in their communities: to be affected and decide that you want to bring people together to do that, that you want to organize.

We have a number of programs: our flagship program, our summer leadership program, is six weeks long in the summer for 14-19 year olds. We also have a school year program, which is called Pathways to Change—we take twelve to fifteen young people from the summer program to do some deeper work with us during the school year, and then they'll come back and they'll teach new young people that come in the next summer, and so on. We have our Baker Fellowship, for young adults from 19-25 that want to continue on this path of youth work and youth organizing.

Our final two official programs are our Social Justice Leadership Institute and our Social Justice Education Institute. With the Leadership Institute, we go to boarding schools (like Milton Academy, who’s still one of our partners to this day), and we do a leadership weekend for teens in those schools asking: “hey, you all are at places that have extreme amounts of wealth. How do you reconcile that? What can you do to work towards equity and justice?” All that good stuff. And our Education Institute is for anybody that enjoys our work and would like to receive training from us.

We also have a youth organizing campaign that’s hoping to build a non-carceral response to mental health crisis and “non-emergency” crisis that does not require a person with a gun to come and answer. We’ve been working on this for three years, and are in a relationship with the city to try to get this response piloted.

Where is that campaign now?

We are doing research and we're building community buy-in. One of the things that's difficult with creating an alternative to the 911 system is that folks don't know that there can be an alternative. One of the goals of organizing is to be able to stimulate folks' imagination to what can be, because they're oftentimes working only with what they've seen.

Folks will be like, “what do you mean no police? How is that supposed to work?” And I'm like, “I'm glad you asked. Here are some examples of how it's worked in other places, and here’s how people have responded to these alternatives.”

At the same time, we're taking our marching orders from community. We already know that our communities are hesitant to call the police because we don't know what the hell is gonna happen. You call the cops saying, “I need help,” and you might be the one to be harmed. Now we’re asking: what do folks feel like they need? And if you were in crisis, what would make it so that you would feel comfortable not calling 911?

I’m really inspired by these branches of participation, education, empowerment: how do you balance those things across your programs and across pedagogy in general at The City School?

We use the Freire model here—everybody's a teacher. Everybody has something to learn, everybody has something to teach, and education does not happen from the top down. We share what we know, and we encourage other folks to share what they know. Steel sharpens steel: peer-to-peer learning is important

In the last five years we've been really moving education towards hands-on action—being able to do work on the ground is very important. We ask our young people to do small community action projects, where they will test out some of the theories that we've talked about and practice going out to organize an action with random folks in the community.

Right now, we’ve got our young people supporting signature gathering for rent control to make it onto state ballots; we want them to be able to speak to people on the street and make a case for it. Affordable housing feels like it should be fundamental, but there might be somebody that doesn't feel that way—go talk to them. Why don't they feel like it's fundamental? Go fail, go fall in this small space so you can learn how to pick yourself up and keep going.

I think the experiences we have are what help us develop our theories of change. Before I started working at Community Labor United, for instance, if you would have asked me about labor organizing as a part of a bigger picture strategy to meet community needs, I probably would've been like, “hmm, I'm sure it's a thing. I'm sure it could be connected.” But I couldn't see it all the way, until I got to CLU and saw people working on wage theft campaigns, childcare access campaigns, even the Driving Families Forward campaign (to allow undocumented folks access to driver’s licenses). Everything was more connected than I thought it was, but I would not have had that experience if I had stayed in one place. So at The City School, we offer what we can while also being like, “baby bird, go leave the nest. You need to go see what else is out there.”

Speaking of supporting the baby bird leaving the nest, as it were, you have a practice as staff of ensuring that you are connected in some way to other organizations' work and campaigns. I'm really curious about this method of cross connecting your work—how does this support The City School and its own organizational development?

We cannot do this work in a silo. We cannot move this work from our own perch. It creates an adversarial relationship between organizers who agree with each other! Doing it together creates more power. My staff and my young people should be connected to other campaigns because they need to see, like I did at CLU, how we connect our campaigns together, and you can't make those connections unless you're there. We're talking about housing here and we're talking about youth jobs over here, but those two things are connected because young people are part of their household and they are supporting their families in paying rent. These two things are not separate, we're fighting for the same thing. There are more root causes that are connected than are separate. If we can understand that, then we can actually be nimble enough and flexible enough to support our families and our communities.

What’s the most recent thing that you've learned from a young person?

That some young people like to dip Takis in milk .

<laughs>. Yeah. The culinary combinations and experimentations are next level.

I might have to go try that just to verify, but I don't know. Besides that: young people are so excited to see their parents and their adults into the concepts they’re learning, they really want their support. That’s why we end our summer program every year by asking our young people to invite their families into the learning process—they get really joyous about people in their lives being excited about their work. And this reaffirms the fact that we need to be doing this together, right? We can bring each other together to do this work.

A friend shared this with me, too: “if it's bad now it's because we've been winning.” All of the things that are coming down, all of the executive orders, it's in response to the fact that we have been winning and we've been doing what we’re doing.

So we gotta keep hitting them. That's where the energy comes from.

Incredible note to end on. Thank you so much, Collique.

Collique Williams (he/him) is a seasoned community organizer in Boston, and returned to The City School as Executive Director. With previous experience at Community Labor United, he advocated for accessible and equitable public transit. Beginning his activism journey in 2001 at the Boston-area Youth Organizing Project (BYOP), Collique has a strong foundation in mobilizing youth for social change. His tenure at the BYOP equipped him with valuable skills in community organizing and youth empowerment. As Executive Director, Collique aims to deepen youth engagement at The City School, recognizing their potential as current and future leaders. He is dedicated to fostering meaningful transformations in social, labor, and political spheres through youth-led initiatives. Collique brings a wealth of experience and passion to his role, driving The City School's mission forward.