By Kiran Katira, Vanessa Apodaca and the AYLI Team
The Antiracist Youth Leadership Institute (AYLI) is a collaboration of community based organizations who collectively nurture anti-racist organizing skills of young people, while fostering wellness, networking, and relationship building between youth and adult anti-racist organizers in Albuquerque. These organizations co-design and deliver curriculum with youth from previous cohort years through a year-long process that includes an intensive summer institute followed by six month of civic engagement as a collective, followed by six months of planning for the next cohort. AYLI is the formalizing of a decade long initiative by the Community Engagement Center (CEC) to develop the knowledge, facilitation and communication skills of youth who have a calling to develop as anti-racist organizers. AYLI is a collaboration of community based organizations such as NM Dream Team, Community Engagement Center, Families United for Education,NM Asian Family Center, Together 4 Brothers, NM Learning Alliance/VIA, Young Women United, Outcomes, PATH, Native American Community Academy, andLa Plazita Institute. The experience impacted the youth in various ways. Some of which we hope to share here.
When the participants reflected on the program, they would tell stories of the ways in which they took the lessons back to their own lives, including their life in school, “AYLI was an incredibly refreshing place for me. It was a space where I learned a lot about the history and practice of institutionalized racism, from people of color, something that is very important to me, since I go to school in a place where I have to learn about oppression from white teachers and where I have to discuss it with white students. Now I can take a lot of the icebreakers that we did and utilize them at school as a way to further educate my classmates about race and racism. Learning about the various organizations was also incredible because it gave me a lot of faith in how many of our community members truly try to better the community and fight institutionalized racism in more ways than one.”
Once we have been given a chance to unpack our own history and the legacy of racism, we often see the world with new eyes. The ways in which racial literacy impacts our critical thinking skills was beautifully captured by one of the youth, “Being part of the AYLI program made me aware of the different ways racism has deeply impacted me and the lives of people in my community. Learning through this lens has made me question everything being taught in schools and how much we’ve been misinformed. Through the power of sharing our individual stories we’re able to heal from some of the historic trauma from past generations and continue to deconstruct racism within ourselves and our future communities. I’ve already started to integrate this experience in the work with my organization.”
The insights from one of the participants helps us see the deep impact undoing racism dialogue has on our own identity and sense of self, “AYLI provided a safe environment for me to not only share experiences with facilitators and peers of varying racial backgrounds, but to also understand and sympathize with their experiences as well; I had the great privilege of learning the historical events that led to the conception of racism, along with an AYLI sponsored trip with my peers to the People’s Institute Youth Agenda and Whitney Plantation. My AYLI experience has sparked a series of emotions that I am still processing, but ultimately has ignited thinking and action towards viewing myself as an individual who holds self-autonomy and a deep responsibility to humanity to help bridge the gap that historical racial trauma has incurred.”