The Power of Transformative Youth Organizing: A Conversation with Taryn Ishida

Taryn Ishida is the leader of Californians for Justice, a youth-powered organization dedicated to fighting for racial equity in California’s schools. Recently, Taryn joined Raikes Foundation Executive Director Dennis Quirin for a conversation that covered everything from transformative organizing, to the purpose of public education, the backlash against Critical Race Theory, and philanthropy’s emerging understanding of youth and community-led strategy.

Dennis and Taryn’s conversation, lightly edited, is below.

Dennis Quirin: I am really looking forward to talking with you about what you’re seeing in education reform, youth organizing in democracy movements, and in philanthropy, because these are all things that squarely land within your wheelhouse. But first, could you start with a little bit about Californians for Justice? I know CFJ started as one of the first California statewide voter organizing efforts, and it was a place for young people, adult activists, and others to organize and rally in protest. You’ve evolved since then. Can you tell us about the evolution of CFJ?

Taryn Ishida: Our history in voter work is still showing up in big ways in our current work, for example we helped lead a social justice and labor coalition to win Proposition 15, to address a corporate tax loophole that has led to the under-funding of CA public schools and services. The other part of our founding story is we were one of the only multiracial organizations at the time, trying to break down the silos between Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, White, queer and immigrant communities. That intersectional and multiracial power-building work becomes very relevant when you’re talking about the makeup of who is in our public schools and especially the public schools that have been under-resourced for so long.

It also comes into play when we think about the purpose of education and how it has changed over the course of hundreds of years. When we think about a big and bold vision for what the purpose of education could be, it looks very much like what we try to do with young people who walk through the doors of Californians for Justice — build individual and collective power to engage civically and solve pressing problems in our communities. Young people find healing, explore their identity, and build relationships that propel them towards numerous possibilities for themselves and for the collective good. What if all the things that are beautiful about youth organizing became the core purpose of what schools did?

Dennis Quirin: That’s a very interesting and provocative comment, and it makes me think about two trends that are both unfolding in education. One of the trends I’ve thought a lot about is this move towards education as a tool for workforce development, and the other is education as a place for bolstering civil society. The growth of STEM has been huge, which is obviously very important, but it is tied very closely to workforce development. I’m curious what you think about what happens when you devalue humanities, social studies, and other fields that emphasize our shared experience and shared stories. How are young people making sense of civil society and how to participate, especially as they become politicized younger than in the past, if those fields of study are less prevalent in education?

Taryn Ishida: I think I would reframe it in two ways. I would say that, in an ideal world, every young person can explore the possibilities of their future. Maybe that is going to take them into STEM. Maybe that’s going to take them into becoming a record producer. Maybe that’s going to take them in a lot of directions, but the important thing is that everybody has that agency and that power and that belief in themselves when they graduate from school to go and discover that. Ideally, barriers of race and class and gender have been acknowledged and eliminated to an extent that all young people can go do that discovery. I’m not talking about utopia. Those barriers will be here for a long time, but young people will have the tools, the opportunities, and the resources to navigate and overcome those systemic barriers and knock a few of them down permanently to help the next generation.

I think the big question is, how are we preparing young people to tackle some of the biggest challenges in their communities and in the world? That’s always been what youth organizing and CFJ was about. When we got started the biggest challenges were racism and xenophobia — laws that were trying to deny people basic rights. Now on top of that there are challenges like global climate change, a pandemic. That is something we want young people to have the tools to be able to tackle. Another major challenge is mental health, which I would say is a generational issue that has always been there, but it’s going to really be front and center in the coming years.

That is what I mean when I talk about young people being able to participate. It’s more than just voting or knowing how to debate or how to understand the news. It’s about how you tackle some of these great challenges of our time, and what are all the tools young people need to have to be able to do that. They’re going to need to understand how voting works, they’re going to need to understand the democratic process, but they’re also going to need to know the history of their own communities and their own stories so that when they really come together, it’s not just for their individual needs. It’s for the collective good of all people and particularly all oppressed people.

Dennis Quirin: I’m curious, in your tenure at CFJ and before, are you seeing youth organizing as a methodology evolving? Then if so, how so?

Taryn Ishida: I’ve seen youth organizing as a field evolve toward supporting the whole young person. Holistic healing has become embedded. Just like social-emotional learning has become embedded, hopefully, in what schools and classrooms take responsibility for. Very similarly, youth organizing is saying, “Hey, we really need to take this healing piece seriously.” Healing in your cultural identity, as well as your mental and social and emotional development. The other big change for us is really getting more nuanced about inside/outside strategy and implementation.

Twenty years ago, there was no one on the inside of our political process or on the inside of districts that we felt aligned with our values or vision. Now there actually are a lot of inside allies who share some of those values and share that vision. We’re asking ourselves, “How do we find those people and help them be successful and become partners in a bigger movement to shift the culture and the systems of our schools?”

I worry about what happens when we don’t try to transform and partner with people inside the system. Where do they go? Do we just throw them out? I’ve seen that again and again. They just go get a higher paying job in central office or in the State Department, and they just go and do that same harm somewhere else. If we don’t take this more transformative approach to organizing, all we’re doing is passing the buck or pushing harm somewhere else in the world and in the system.

And I think the implementation part is really important. We’ve got to make that word cool, Dennis, because I think that’s where we’ve learned that, even if it took us 10 years to pass a new policy, it takes another 10 years to implement it right. We need to make our wins real. Implementing policy with fidelity, shoring it up, fixing it up, tweaking it to get it right — all that takes time. For example, you can require people to put students onto a college track, but if you don’t change their underlying beliefs rooted in racism, you really aren’t going to shift the culture of schools, and you’re going to see those same patterns replicated. The technical fixes are not enough.

Dennis Quirin: You mentioned this evolution of organizing, and I’m curious about inside/outside strategies. Have you seen a change in the way that CFJ is able to partner with different types of organizations? When I was in San Diego, one of the things that I was so happy to see when I got there was CFJ had these strategic long-term partnerships with public interest lawyers, with some of the best policymakers and writers, and other organizers. That spirit of working collaboratively has allowed CFJ to play a unique role in these statewide coalitions, bringing its gifts and talents into a collection of people who can complement CFJ’s strengths with their own. Given that backdrop, what does collaboration on inside/outside strategy look like?

Taryn Ishida: It definitely looks like us doing a lot of inside work. You can’t actually get to an authentic inside/outside partnership without pushing past the typical transactional relationship. Even if we have 30 minutes with somebody in the legislature, we use a third of that time or more to build relationship and connection. It’s a strategic move. It’s not just about feeling good, it’s because we want to get past the typical, “what can you do for me? what can I do for you?” to form a foundation of humanizing each other, exploring each other’s stories, each other’s motivations. That’s the foundation to create these values-aligned partnerships that last decades.

Now, we are still working through a lot of the “isms” in our inside strategy. Most of our folks are young people of color who are talking with administrators or school board members who are older, still majority white, still majority men. A lot of those “isms,” — sexism, racism, adultism, classism, still play out.

That is hard because who wants to stay at tables that harm us? We all need to have mental health and healing and resiliency supports. I need it all the time just to keep making myself wanting to come back to that superintendent who for five years talked down to me or made me feel small. Or to the board member who always showed up 20 minutes late to our meeting and then dismissed us for not having our act together. There are so many different ways that has played out, but I believe if we can stay at the table we can win.

One superintendent I’m thinking about in particular, when that transformational moment happens, Dennis, I mean, that just has ripple effects. I have seen it ripple, and it was worth those painful years. It was worth all of that pain and persistence from us because now that person is still in the work, even if they’re not a superintendent anymore, even if they’re not a state board member, they’re still in it, and because they’ve had that light go on about young people, what they’re capable of, or why organizing has to be there, our movement is able to gain a mile not just a yard. When we say transformation, that’s what we’re talking about.

Dennis Quirin: For a long time, organizing work was not really on the map as a fundable, credible strategy. Philanthropy has been shifting, and now it seems like it’s top of mind for many, many funders. I’d love to hear from your perspective, from the funders you are in relationship with, but also from the funders that are just outside, are you seeing philanthropy evolve in its understanding of youth organizing and of power?

Taryn Ishida: We’ve been fortunate that there have been funders who’ve reached out to us, and I’m sure many others, as they’ve been going along that journey of understanding systemic racism and youth voice, engagement, and power. We like to try to explain it to them on a spectrum so they can make transparent and accountable choices about where they’re falling on that spectrum. One approach to youth voice is as an input strategy. That’s like, “Let’s ask some young people to give feedback on this thing we’re doing as a school or as a funder,” but can go all the way to the co-creation side of the spectrum, which is where we see adults and young people as real partners.

Then there’s the very far end of the spectrum where you’re really ceding control to youth governance — that’s really youth power building. It looks like things like participatory budgeting or fully turning over democratic control and governance to young people or community.

The second point that I try to make with folks is that if you really are serious about student voice or student organizing, you have to be rigorous just like we would be rigorous about creating a whole new set of curricula. In schools, you need to bring in experts on student voice and power because you don’t want to recreate harmful and dominant narratives and harmful and dominant solutions.

For example, the individualism narrative is so strong. There are young people who walk into CFJ saying things like, “Oh, well, the reason that those students don’t succeed is because they are lazy, or they should be kicked out of class.” If you don’t want to repeat some of the harmful narratives that have been in our culture, you have to invest in political education, you have to invest in leadership development and critical consciousness work as you support young people to lead and govern. You have to have a rigorous approach to do that work well.

Dennis Quirin: We’re coming out of this remarkable period that many people think of as a watershed moment. One aspect of this moment is the increase in consciousness about racial justice in this country.

And, predictably, we’re now in the midst of this orchestrated backlash on Critical Race Theory and, fundamentally, on the gains of consciousness and the normalizing of the idea that there are tremendous structural barriers for people of color in this country. How are you making sense of how to operate as a leader of a racial justice organization, particularly one that’s focused on education reform?

Taryn Ishida: That’s a big question. This is a moment where I hope we can come together and double down on racial justice, but I worry the moment will pass us. We were worried about that last summer, seeing this moment of support slip away. I just saw some recent polling that showed major declines in support for the Black Lives Matters movement and addressing racial justice. Even without the counterattack on Critical Race Theory, we were already losing newly “woke” folks from different race and class backgrounds.

I think we need to be looking to the folks who have done racial justice work for a long time and asking them where they would want to invest, what are the strategies that have worked, and then how do we invest double, triple, a hundred times in that work? How do we find out from folks who really know racial justice where we need more investment or what could be scaled?

Dennis Quirin: What are you hopeful about right now?

Taryn Ishida: I’m hopeful about the generational perspective people are taking in the movement — seeing 20-to-50 years out and seeing ourselves, individually and collectively, as part of this longer arc. That makes me hopeful because it opens us to new possibilities. Short-term thinking is such a problem, especially in times where everything feels urgent.

Urgency is often the thing that we shoot ourselves in the foot with. We’re totally guilty of saying, “This is a moment, you got to do this now.” Seeing a longer arc makes me hopeful because I just see new collaborations happening between young people and elders, between Black and Asian Pacific Islander communities. I see this happening between policy, research, and organizing groups. I see these beautiful collaborations happening because folks are realizing how we are all part of the longer 20-to-50-year movement, and that’s what it’s going to take to reimage and rebuild the world that we want. A world that is a more loving, holistic, and healthy community for all people.