Youth Leadership Project

In 1996, CAAAV launched an exciting organizing project in the Bronx called the Youth Leadership Project.

The Northwest Bronx is home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in New York City. These refugees fled their homelands in the aftermath of the US invasion of Vietnam and its covert bombing of Cambodia -- these were devastating wars that resulted in years of civil unrest in Vietnam and Cambodia, including the rise of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields."

Millions of refugees escaped war-torn Southeast Asia, and many are now building new lives in the United States. Yet America has hardly been a safe haven or a land of opportunity. Instead, the majority of refugees were literally inserted into urban poverty and then abandoned by refugee resettlement agencies during the 1980s.

In the Bronx, most Southeast Asians were resettled in crumbling buildings owned by slumlords, and many were placed on welfare rolls when refugee assistance programs no longer offered support. Meanwhile, Southeast Asian children attend some of the most overcrowded schools in the city.

In 1996, the Youth Leadership Project (YLP) was established in an attempt to address the many forms of poverty that Southeast Asian community residents struggle with each day. Over 60 percent youth of the Vietnamese and Cambodian community are youths (this is due largely to the fact that many who would today be in their thirties and forties lost their lives during the wars). But aside from the large numbers, youth from the community are ideal community organizers and leaders because of their bilingual and bicultural skills; their commitment of time
and energy; and passion for justice.

The mission of the Youth Leadership Project is to build the power of a new generation of Southeast Asians -- the children of refugees -- to fight for self-determination in their communities. At the same time, it seeks to build solidarity between Southeast Asians of the Bronx and all communities facing injustice and systemic oppression.

Programs of YLP: Summer Institute: Each summer a new set of youth join YLP as "trainees" who enter the Summer Institute: An intensive 8 week summer program that engages the youth in basic organizing skills training; workshops of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, colonialism, and other systems of oppression (as well as the freedom movements to fight these oppressions); and, finally, it provides an opportunity for the trainees to develop and run their own community-based summer project. The Summer Institute has been the cornerstone of YLP since the program first started. After successfully completing the Summer Institute, the trainees become official "Youth Organizers."

Welfare Rights Campaign In the wake of welfare "reform" the Youth Organizers began surveying their communities to assess the impact. What they found was startling: The vast majority of their community (nearly 80%) were receiving some form of public assistance; Many families were being removed from welfare without due process; Children and the elderly were being cut from Food Stamps despite laws protecting them from such cuts; Kids as young as nine-years-old were providing translation at welfare centers (a violation of civil rights law); and welfare moms were being sent to unreasonably harsh "workfare" assignments where they were forced to in unsanitary and unsafe environments, usually without supervision.

The Youth Organizers launched a campaign to fight these many abuses. Through a combination of legal action and direct action protest at local welfare centers, the campaign secured some key victories: Bilingual caseworkers were assigned to Cambodian and Vietnamese clients; Many women were able to choose training and education over workfare; and Welfare centers were monitored to ensure that unjustified cuts to welfare grants did not occur.

The welfare rights campaign was documented in a groundbreaking documentary film created by the Youth Organizers titled Eating Welfare.

More recently, the welfare rights campaign has focused on ensuring the abolition of workfare programs in New York City. Youth organizers are fighting to fully implement a law that seeks to replace the workfare requirement with training and education hours or high school and college classes.

The Food and Crafts Cooperatives: The welfare rights campaign was a collaborative effort between the Youth Organizers and the adult community members. This signaled the need for building political partnerships between youth and adults that went beyond the shorter-term direct action campaign. Recognizing that securing benefits in the welfare state was only one aspect of a much larger goal of building community self-determination, the youth and adults also sought to build community-run economic justice institutions. These institutions took the form of a Food Cooperative and, later, a Crafts Cooperative. Drawing upon the everyday skills of women in the community, the Cooperatives produce Southeast Asian cuisine and traditional crafts. The cooperatives are a means of supplemental income for families surviving the welfare state. Meanwhile, the process of building the cooperatives allows for the ongoing political development of the Youth Organizers and adult members. Together, they are creating principles of collective work; designing socially and environmentally responsible production systems; and envisioning the long-term future of the Southeast Asian community of the Bronx.

Public Education Campaign

In 1999, the Youth Organizers began community surveys on the state of Asian immigrant children in Community School District 10 schools. They soon learned that Southeast Asian children maintained some of the highest "left-back" rates of any race or ethnic group in the District. The factors behind this troubling situation were many: Southeast Asian parents could not access the schools because of language and cultural barriers -- this prevented them from finding ways to help their children as well as participate in school governance; School were also negligent or outright discriminatory when it came to the particular needs of refugee children, failing to diagnose serious learning challenges and placing all Asian children into ESL classes if they failed to meet the standards; and very often the curriculum failed to culturally resonate with the students lives.

From 2000-2002, the Youth Organizers led an accountability campaign against District 10. In 2000, they were able to secure a fulltime parent translator who would work with Vietnamese and Cambodian parents across District 10 Schools. In 2002, following direct action campaigning at the District, they secured significant funding for a Southeast Asian Achievement Program. This is an after school program that matches Southeast Asian children with bilingual tutors who help them in various subjects as well as provide them with workshops on Southeast Asian history and culture. The tutors also double as community organizers, meeting with parents about changes in the school system, and encouraging them to exercise leadership in school governance.