San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Nurturing new generation of social justice leaders
Marlene Sanchez has spent more than 30 years fighting for the rights of marginalized youth and formerly incarcerated people. And the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland nonprofit focused on race and criminal justice issues, has been thinking lately about the importance of developing a new generation of leaders to continue the work.
“A lot of us that have been doing this for a long time feel a responsibility to create sustainable paths to leadership for the next generation,” Sanchez told me. With a laugh, she added, “For the
older leaders, we’re as passionate as ever, but we’re also tired.”
This isn’t a theoretical pursuit for Sanchez, who participated in a roundtable about mentorship that the Ella Baker Center organized on Tuesday night. During the virtual discussion, which featured four leaders with more than 120 years of experience between them, Sanchez announced a new initiative called “We Mentor Us.” Among its many goals is to teach the center’s young leaders how to establish relationships with local and national justice-focused organizations.
Sanchez told me there are a couple of reasons initiatives like this are needed now:
Times are changing. The civil rights era showed America what could be accomplished through focused activism. But the energy that buoyed those efforts in the 1960s has since migrated from living rooms and churches to nonprofits, thanks in part to the Tax Reform Act of 1969 that created the 501(c)(3) tax code used by hundreds of nonprofits in the Bay Area, including the Ella Baker Center.
And the right has shown how adept it is at undercutting progressive gains at the grassroots level, rolling back voting rights, perpetuating transphobic legislation and achieving a nearly 50-year campaign to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion.
“The opposition and the far right — we know they’re strong and pour resources into having leaders in their movements,” Sanchez said. “We have to do that but in a different way . ... And that takes time and commitment.”
According to an online database compiled by the Akonadi Foundation, which seeks to stop the criminalization of young people of color, there are more than 90 Black-led social and civil rights organizations in Oakland alone. Dozens more are led by Latino and Asian community leaders.
Just imagine if they all worked together.
I discussed this with Nicole Lee, who heads up the Urban Peace Movement, a racial justice organization in Oakland that trains young people how to lead social change.
Under her leadership, Urban Peace Movement’s young members successfully pushed Oakland to raise its minimum wage from $9 to $12.25 an hour in 2014; and six years later helped defeat Prop. 20, a state initiative that would have created harsher punishments for repeat shoplifting and changed the eligibility around parole.
Generations Y and Z have been at the forefront of some of our most important movements, leading marches for racial justice after George Floyd’s murder, demanding gun control after school shootings and urging politicians to take decisive climate action before it’s too late.
“We’ve seen young people leading the climate change movement; they were the leading voices to get the police out of schools in Oakland,” Lee said.
Distinguishing them from their forebears, these teens and young adults don’t seek out traditional media coverage, Lee explained. Social media is their platform, and what matters most to them is connecting with peers and dismantling
A new initiative at the Ella Baker Center in Oakland called “We Mentor Us” helps teach young movement leaders how to collaborate with other local and national justice organizations.
Marlene Sanchez, director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, is helping train a new generation of activists.
antiquated power structures.
“The way we older leaders often go about communicating is outdated to them,” Lee said. “As the older leaders ... we can’t just keep saying we know how to run things better because of our experience.”
Passing on experience while empowering the next generation
to determine its own path is the core goal of one of Urban Peace Movement’s most popular programs, Leaders in Training.
Bay Area native Veronica Cañas began participating in the program when she was a sophomore in high school. She’s now a senior at Wesleyan University in Connecticut
and still works with Urban Peace Movement.
In June, Cañas posted a video on Urban Peace Movement’s TikTok account about Alameda County’s district attorney race, explaining the district attorney’s role in the local criminal justice system and the county’s history of mass incarceration. She also urged people to vote in a primary election that ultimately resulted in two progressive Black candidates advancing to the November runoff.
“What I’ve learned over the years is how to speak to elected officials, how to fight to have my voice heard, how to navigate these political spaces,” Cañas told me. “It’s why I feel ready to lead this kind of work when I’m done with college.”
We aging Millennials and graying Gen Xers should be happy to hear that.
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