By providing free arts education to youth with limited access, our programs seek to empower young people with opportunities to discover and develop their own voices. We firmly believe that in order to overcome the difficulties of the circumstances within which they are situated, young people must think of their voices as vital tools through which they can process their lives, shape the world around them, and hone their abilities to envision and create long-lasting impact. To achieve this, our programs employ educational best practices while encouraging youth to write about issues relevant to them, in their own vernacular. Youth thus engage their own cultures and bridge their personal literacies to the traditional academic literacies presented in school.
At Youth Speaks the voices of youth matter.
We Believe in VOICE
We believe it is critical that young people have opportunities to find, develop, publicly present, and intentionally apply their voices. Silence is a powerful thing when chosen, but incredibly oppressive when forced upon.
We Believe in CONTINUUM
We are committed to providing opportunities for youth to engage with the tradition of oral literacy and oral poetics so as to immortalize the voices of today’s young writers.
We Believe in COMMUNITY
Youth Speaks reflects diversity and engenders a community of young artists who reach across demographic boundaries toward self-exploration and growth, providing a platform where conflicts are resolved on the page or the stage, rather than on the street.
We Believe in CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Youth Speaks is committed to the written and spoken word, innovating our program so that it remains accessible and attractive to the population we serve, and reflects their stories without leaving out the stories that have come before.
We Believe in INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
Youth Speaks provokes movement from silence to empowerment based in liberatory pedagogy and youth development. We intend to democratize a civic population of youth by giving them a platform to speak.
We Believe in EXCELLENCE
We challenge young people to find their own voices, to work hard to apply them, and to do so responsibly. We ask youth to not be afraid of their own potential; we promise them we won’t be.
We Believe in LIFE
We are firmly attached to the idea that every young person matters, that we all deserve to be safe in our local environments, and have the right to know that our voices will be heard and will live on.