Youth Speaks founder helps students find their voices
When James Kass decided to help young people find their voices through poetry, he figured it would be something he would do for a few years and perhaps 50 San Francisco kids would participate.
He was wrong. Monumentally wrong. It’s been 19 years, and a quarter-million kids from around the world participate each year.
Kass wasn’t much of a visionary about his own future.
But as a graduate student in San Francisco State’s master of fine arts program, he noted the lack of diversity in his writing class. He sensed a universal desire to write, to speak, to share thoughts and ideas, but few places for all young people to do that.
“I knew there was a large population who wrote or wanted to write,” he said. “There were just no entry points for them.”
He launched Youth Speaks in 1996, a nonprofit that works
with teens in schools and community centers to help them write and share their ideas, challenging the status quo through poetry and the spoken word.
Fifty kids in a few years? There were 50 the first week.
Kass, 45, had tapped into what would become a gushing flow of pentup poetry from the country’s young people.
In the ensuing years, his organization has raised more than $20 million — and the affiliated Brave New Voices youth poetry slams sell out the San Francisco Opera House and other venues across the country. He brought the art form to President Obama in the East Room of the White House and has partnered with actor Robert Redford and the Redford Institute to expand the effort to include an environmental focus.
“James is a voice giver,” Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, said in her nomination of Kass for the inaugural Visionary of the Year award sponsored by The Chronicle and St. Mary’s College. “Through Youth Speaks ... thousands of disadvantaged young people have found their voice through spoken word poetry — but even more importantly, these young people are using their voices to insist that we hear, and understand, the broken parts of our world.”
A Beats fan
A native New Yorker, Kass grew up reading the West Coast’s Beat poets. Like many waves before him, he yearned for a life in San Francisco and arrived in the early ’90s.
He was a writer and poet and entered graduate school to advance both vocations. He was struck by the privilege associated with writing and the pretense of poetry readings.
“I was sick of boring poetry readings,” he said. “There was an arrogance.”
He felt elitism silenced too many voices, so he decided to give young people the only tools they ever needed: pen and paper; a voice and a microphone.
“Writing is not a privileged act,” he said.
But it wasn’t just “writing for writing’s sake,” Kass said. It was using words and language and voice as tools to raise awareness of social issues, along the lines of Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but from kids of all colors and maybe a hip-hop vibe.
“We never just wanted to be a rinky-dink nonprofit that does creative writing classes for kids,” Kass said. “This is about shifting the perceptions of kids; this is about shifting the future of this country.”
While the international poetry slam competitions and a 2010 HBO series on slam competitors often get the most attention, Kass said his favorite moments are when magic happens in small classrooms.
In schools and community programs across the country, the organization’s staff — and those trained in the instructional methods — work with young people, pushing them to write about whatever is important to them.
Array of topics
For some, that might be what they had for breakfast, Kass said. For others, it’s global warming, obesity, sexual assault or absent parents. And for many, it’s guns and people dying too young.
The kids can say whatever they want, using whatever words they choose — profane, slang or inane.
The Youth Speaks instructors push them and guide them to focus their words on finding a better future.
“Let’s get angry about the dead, but let’s celebrate life,” Kass said of the message offered to the young people.
The results are entertaining, emotional, sad, funny, gut wrenching, interesting and often profound.
And so needed, said San Francisco school board member Matt Haney.
“At a time when young people in San Francisco are facing new and more profound challenges, we need Youth Speaks more than ever,” he said. “Listen to a young person that has participated in Youth Speaks, and you will hear a student that has found her voice. Once that happens, anything is possible. We’ve learned that firsthand in San Francisco schools for nearly 20 years.”
Still Kass, a married San Franciscan with 3-year-old twins, never saw himself as a visionary. His vision was just the simple goal to give young people a safe place to find their voice.
And yet, that vision has led Kass to the White House, an HBO series, and a friendship with Redford, among a long list of accomplishments and accolades.
But his eyes sparkle when he recounts what Beat publisher and poet Ferlinghetti, whom Kass read as a teen, said of the hordes of young voices shouting poetry in every corner of the country.
“I love Youth Speaks,” the founder of City Lights Books told Kass. “I’ve been waiting for you for 50 years.”