Wellstone Action!

posted by Mattie Weiss

FEBRUARY 27, 2009

Last week I attended an exciting gathering of young, passionate progressives from all over the country, Young People For's (YP4) 2009 National Summit. This summit, it’s fifth ever, focused on leadership development and teaching sustainable strategies to promote social justice. It brought together the 2009 Fellows who were selected from over 1,000 applicants to receive financial, technical and media support while implementing their self-designed Blueprints for social justice.

YP4 was founded in 2004 to invest in the next generation of leaders and build a long-term national network for young progressives. It is the kind of organization the progressive movement should have had 25 years ago, but they are making up for lost time by organizing, developing leaders for the future, and fostering an active, creative, and diverse infrastructure.

The resource intensive leadership development that is offered to the fellows takes students that have passion, ideas and community connections and gives them the opportunity to develop their skills and ideas, and scale their projects. Programs like this are a promising development for the progressive community at large. Youth leadership development is something the Right has resourced for several decades; progressives are just starting to build their own similar infrastructure for young people.

At the Summit Campus Camp Wellstone did a training called Building Relationships, Building Power. It focused on the necessity of building relationships intentionally and prioritizing connecting with people. The training was transformational for a number of the participants, who were surprised by the power of something so simple as a 1-on-1, or the intentional conversation.

I want to take the time to highlight some excellent blueprints; if you want to explore more, summaries are located here.

• Stephen Adler of the U. of Illinois at Chicago wants to organize males in his community in an effort to combat sexual and gender-based violence and to promote a healthier definition of masculinity. 

o        Stephen is working to accomplish this by increasing the visibility of anti-violence messages, building a community of men to do anti-sexist and anti-violence trainings, and to find someone to pass his work to when he leaves.

•  Andrea Jaeger from the Ohio State U. wants to promote class awareness, build skills, and create stronger networks among the activists and organizations of Columbus, Ohio in order to form a more cohesive and powerful movement for social change. 

o        Andrea will develop knowledge and skills around tactics that will win campaigns, build coalitions among the labor, peace, welfare-rights, environmental and other movements, and organizing a weekend-long event.

• Morgan Lucas from Penn State U. wants to help alleviate global poverty by spreading awareness and getting college students involved in micro-lending through CampusKiva.
  •      Morgan sees the ample opportunity of Campus Kiva to assist motivated entrepreneurs climb out of poverty all over the world by educating fellow students on development issues and the potential role they can play through micro-lending. She wants to start campus chapters at new schools, encourage collaboration and raise and distribute $20,000 in loans through these Campus Kiva chapters.