Youth Speaks

Youth Speaks is a Bay Area-based national nonprofit that uses poetry, spoken word performance, and youth-made media to unlock young people’s civic consciousness and to help them leverage their voices and stories to influence public policy, combat misinformation, and heal civic trauma. Founded in 1996 in San Francisco, Youth Speaks offers a comprehensive slate of literary arts education programs and provides numerous opportunities for youth to be published and heard. At the local level, Youth Speaks does this primarily through partnerships with schools and after-school programs, and it offers regular open mic opportunities and city-wide public performances for young poets and performers. At the national level, Youth Speaks is best known for its Brave New Voices Youth Poetry Slam, which brings together 500 of the best youth poets from around the globe each year for four days of workshops, showcases, and slam competition. This grant provides general operating support for Youth Speaks to provide high-quality programming for youth through programs and partnerships at the local, regional, and national levels and to build a global community of youth media makers able to influence culture and policy change on issues that matter to them.

Youth Speaks is a national nonprofit that uses poetry, spoken word performance, and youth-made media to unlock young people’s civic consciousness and amplify youth voice. In the Bay Area, where Youth Speaks is headquartered, it provides in-classroom and after-school spoken word workshops and runs poetry, spoken word and other media making programs. At the national level, Youth Speaks is best known for its annual youth poetry slam, Brave New Voices, which historically has traveled from city to city each year, to host in-person workshops and a national spoken word competition. This general operating support grant enables Youth Speaks to conduct strategic planning and implement a vision for the organization’s next 25 years. This will include re-imagining its support to build a vibrant youth spoken word movement around the globe; adapting Youth Speaks’s youth development pedagogy and program model to move beyond individual impacts and toward strategies that enable youth to influence policy and civic life effectively; and growing the organization’s staff and improving its internal systems to meet the demands of this new vision.

Youth Speaks is a national nonprofit that uses poetry, spoken word performance, and youth-made media to unlock young people’s civic and political consciousness. It challenges young people to find, develop, publicly present, and apply their voices as creators of social change, and it is committed to amplifying and advancing the policy preferences of youth from non-dominant communities. This grant provides general operating support for Youth Speaks to continue its efforts to nurture and amplify the voices of young people, with a special focus on BIPOC youth, and to connect them to each other and to public debate on issues and policies that affect their lives.

Youth Speaks provides free arts education to youth with limited access, empowering young people with opportunities to discover and develop their own voices by making the connection between poetry, spoken word, youth development and civic engagement. This grant supports Youth Speaks to participate in a national convening of participatory civic media organizations supported through MacArthur’s Journalism and Media program. The meeting is designed to help coalesce the emerging field of participatory civic media, of which Youth Speaks is part, by facilitating new connections and collaborations and building a shared sense of identity among a new breed of media and culture organizations using participatory media to amplify historically marginalized voices and strengthen American democracy.

Youth Speaks is a national nonprofit that uses poetry, spoken word performance, and youth-made media to unlock young people’s civic and political consciousness. It is best known nationally for its youth poetry slam, Brave New Voices, that brings together thousands of youth each year to share their voices on a national stage. Youth Speaks also hosts a professional learning community of local spoken word organizations and partners with schools and other nonprofits in the Bay Area and nationally to carry out issue-based campaigns that use poetry and spoken word as a hook to engage youth. This grant renews MacArthur support for Youth Speaks. It provides general operating support for the organization to create opportunities that inspire young people to find, develop, publicly present, and apply their voices as creators of social change. Youth Speaks helps to amplify the voices of young people, especially those from marginalized communities, and connects them to important policy debates on issues relevant to their lives and their communities.