Amidst the many programs, expansion, and partnership work happening here at the Alliance, we forgot to tell you about an exciting new program we’re housing for the cycle. It’s called the Midwest Culture Lab, and its purpose is to increase the civic engagement of young people in the Midwest by integrating cultural organizing and story-driven content with grassroots, youth organizing.

This spring we partnered with experts in marketing, advertising, and culture to create a story platform by young people of color in the Midwest in order to tell a more authentic and holistic story about their lives. This summer we hired cultural organizers and put out a call to emerging creatives across the region to tell the unsung stories of their communities centered around joy, resistance, and transformation!

This is bigger than getting the cool kids more engaged in politics. We’re working with over 50 creatives (and paying them!) to create their best content using the story platform “Co-created by us, real, and with joy!: The world we need.”

And because everything we do is centered in the field, this work is anchored by affiliates and partners at Chicago Votes, Ohio Student Association, and Michigan’s We The People.

We believe that politics is where some of the people are some of the time, but culture is where all the people are all of the time which is why we are so excited to develop programming that joins local influencers, culture creators and community organizers to co-create more just communities that reflect the values of the people.

To learn more the Midwest Culture Lab visit our website or watch this webinar for a more in depth explanation.

At the Alliance, we believe in building powerful youth organizing homes that are explicitly locally-led and youth-led.

Which is why we are beyond excited to announce…

Our board of directors just formally approved a new Alliance Affiliate and home for young organizers and activists in the Twin Cities – Minnesota Youth Collective!

Young people are the largest age group in Minnesota – that’s some serious power that the Minnesota Youth Collective is ready to flex. This organization was thoughtfully built by statewide partners and is led by its fierce founder, Emily Wellen, an Alliance alumnus herself and former national program staffer at the then Bus Federation! MN Youth Collective has already welcomed an incredible staff of eight that’s building power across the state (& they’re still hiring)!

While less than a year old, the team has already hit the ground running – coordinating student walkouts for gun safety, training young people across the state in all things organizing, hosting March for Our Lives Road to Change activists, and registering voters like it’s what they were born to do (over 2,000 voters registered already this year)!

You can follow their work to engage and empower the largest age group in the state on Facebook, Twitter, and Insta or make a contribution to their work here.

We’re inspired and re-energized every time our family gets a little bit bigger…

Can you believe it’s already June? Summer is in full swing and so is our network. We’ve got some BIG updates and wins from across the country that we’re honored to uplift this week:

 As part of the Ohio Organizing Collective, Alliance affiliate Ohio Student Association, is supporting a ballot initiative that will reclassify drug possession felonies as misdemeanors and reinvest millions of dollars into drug treatment and community-based recovery programs. Next week, 100 out-of-state allies will meet in Columbus and join in-state teams to close out signature collection for the initiative. The week will wrap up back at Columbus Pride, an event that an estimated 500,000 people attend. We moved resources to support this effort and hope others will too!

 Last Tuesday, our affiliate MOVE San Antonio celebrated their 5th birthday in a big way – by unveiling MOVE Texas. They have been Mobilizing, Organizing, Voting, and Empowering a new generation across San Antonio and have expanded to reach young people in Seguin, San Marcos, and Laredo. Their new name better reflects the scope and depth of MOVE’s work in Texas and we’re so excited to celebrate this moment alongside them.

In Chicago, HB4469 is on the verge of making history after passing the Senate. This bill championed by our affiliate Chicago Votes would set up a formal process to ensure people have access to the ballot and understand their voting rights are restored upon release and it would make Cook County Jail the first jail in the country to be an official polling location, nbd. Learn more and urge Governor Rauner to sign the bill.

Our affiliate in Wisconsin, Leaders Igniting Transformation, celebrated a big win at the school board level after their students fought to strike an incredibly dangerous provision of proposed discipline policies that would have mandated police be called on students for “suspected criminal activity.” LIT’s vigilance and leadership in Milwaukee Public Schools is what will dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline.

One of our newest youth organizing partners, New Hampshire Youth Movement, is working with a coalition of organizations to protect the right to vote by pushing Governor Sununu to veto HB372 and HB1264 – bills that would suppress voter participation, particularly of students.

Our affiliate, Washington Bus, is gearing up their Tuition-Free College campaign, collecting stories about why students are #BrokeAF and hosting public events where young people can hold their elected officials accountable and shape what the Seattle Promise program could look like.

Young Progressive Policy Group – New York, our youth organizing partner, is fiercely fighting to lower the New York voting age to 17 by championing a bill that also ensures NY high school students are fully educated in civic participation and streamlines the process of voter registration by encouraging students to register in the classroom.

Finally, our affiliate New Era Colorado hosted their annual Toast to Democracy on Wednesday, bringing together hundreds of New Era friends and allies to celebrate and support youth-driven democracy. Happy 12th birthday, New Era!

Staying rooted in building local power and supporting the young people leading the charge is how we win. We couldn’t be prouder to work alongside a network that is transforming the landscape of their local communities, cities, and states to build a society worthy of our generation.

When students were murdered at a Parkland High School, we were heartbroken at more loss of life in our nation’s public schools. Like many of you, we have been inspired by the survivors who have shifted the public conversation away from fruitless thoughts and prayers to civic engagement, voting, and direct action.

Although most of our groups have not historically focused on gun violence, young people in our communities have taken us there in recent weeks. Newly engaged young activists from across the country have been reaching out to ask for help in organizing marches, rallies, walkouts, and of course, voter registration. And our network has answered with an enthusiastic hells yeah!

From Missoula to Miami, Chicago to Denver, Portland to Erie, Providence to Columbus, we have been blow away by the incredible actions across the network. It’s taken us 2 days to uplift all of their work on social media because there has been so dang much. The power of long-term organizing in communities is that even if we’re not known to work on a specific issue, the organizations in our network are trusted peers, partners, and allies when it comes to taking action alongside our nation’s youth.

To help support these activations, we were so lucky to receive rapid response support from a few donors (thank you!), which means $90,000 will be going to 17 organizations over the next week to support rapid response youth organizing between now and the April events.

At the same time, here at the Alliance, we want to be clear about our role in this work. We recognize that very few of our groups work on gun violence prevention. And if they do, it’s usually through the lens of organizing against the school to prison pipeline and uplifting its impact on youth of color. At a minimum, we want to ensure that these newly engaged young people have local, youth-led organizing homes to grow their skills and keep fighting for social justice. Ending up on a national email list is not good enough; this generation deserves so much more. That’s why we’re working to help organizations in our network scale to add additional paid organizing staff and student interns to mobilize these newly engaged activists in the long run.

And we want to make sure that folks are aware of and supporting groups like Community Justice Reform Coalition, an organization that centers black and brown communities at the nexus of gun violence prevention and criminal justice reform (if you haven’t heard of them, please check them out!). CJRC is filling a much-needed gap in the gun violence prevention movement – one where most impacted communities are too often forgotten or ignored. We know that only when groups like CJRC are uplifted will we ever be successful in this fight, and we hope you check them out.

For a closer look at the amazing work that took place around the country, take a look at our social on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

What a week! Our entire team is in awe of the incredible work and the result in Alabama. The turnout of young people and black voters, specifically black women, puts front and center the founding principle of the Alliance’s theory of change — when people from/in their local communities lead, organize and make their collective voice heard, our democracy is stronger and better reflects our values. In addition to glorious victory for democracy on Tuesday — we also have some pretty exciting news at the Alliance!
On Monday, our boards of directors formally approved a new Alliance Affiliate: Leaders Igniting Transformation (LIT) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

At the Alliance, we’ve always believed that locally-led, youth-led political institutions have the power to change the world. We’ve seen it demonstrated with Chicago Votes, Engage Miami, Ohio Student Association, and MOVE San Antonio that the Alliance model can be adapted and implemented all over the country. Now, we’re helping a new operation get off the ground and we’re not just going in for 2018 — we’re incubating new infrastructure to last.

We first met LIT as part of the 16 young leaders from Wisconsin who received scholarships to attend the Youth Organizing Summit (Thanks, Brico Fund!) in April. Right after the conference, LIT became a Youth Organizing Partner and almost immediately, our program staff and local leaders flagged LIT as a rising star in the Midwest and prompted incubation conversations with organizers, donors, and other progressive leaders on the ground. After an in-depth process of vetting and analysis, we concluded that we’re incredibly excited to work with Leaders Igniting Transformation!

Positioned on the western shore of Lake Michigan, Milwaukee both translates and first served as an Indigenous ‘meeting place’ given its name by the Potawatomi Tribe. It couldn’t be more apparent that Milwaukee has deep community building and culture at it’s core.

Dakota Hall, founding Director of LIT has worked as a community organizer alongside his new board members and young volunteers at local organizations such as Milwaukee Inner City Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES!), and others. It’s a team reflective of the city’s heart and soul and they’re looking to build a new force for positive change.

The interest in this effort from the beginning has been tangible, both locally and nationally. Brico Fund, Movement Voter Project, NextGen America and a series of individual donors’ support have been critical for the Alliance to have space for a series of conversations in WI and to provide seed funding to these local leaders to develop their own plan. 

LIT has a ton of work ahead of them in order to organize and mobilize a new generation of Milwaukeeans to build a community that works for everybody. In 2018 and beyond, they’ll be focusing on criminal justice reform, specifically fighting the school-to-prison pipeline and working to redistribute and invest misused public funds into schools and other public services; reinstating basic voting rights for marginalized communities and specifically during the voter registration process; and long-term economic justice through reducing the weight of student debt and promoting free community college for the next generation – plus a ton of the young voter mobilization and leadership development (in MKE called “Black Hogwarts”) that you’ve come to expect from Alliance affiliates.