IN OUR PALENQUE…

We impact youth by being the example we would want to see. • We create change and liberation through understanding our own identities. • We value relationships with one another over transactions. • We build relationships and shatter hierarchies among teachers, parents, staff, administration, and students. • We provide a safe environment for youth to take care of each other. • We create opportunities for students to learn about their communities and become advocates for change. • We bring youth into our Palenque. • We center peace and joy.

Our youth are not just our future, they are our present. They are brilliant and powerful. Our promise is to empower young people by uplifting them and their voices.

The world needs creative solutionaries like you!

Youth leaders’ analyses and experiences with gentrification, violence, resource-starved schools, and deportation guide our leadership development programming and advocacy for policy change and have urged us to form an organizing model that combines healing practices with policy change and direct action.

In the past 10 years, Palenque LSNA youth leaders have helped organize to end punitive punishment discipline practices in our state, created community conversations about stopping gender based violence, helped win temporary driver's licenses for immigrants, documented their families’ migration stories as part of our racial healing work, wrote a new ordinance to develop a community fund for affordable housing along the 606 Trail by charging developers for tearing down existing apartments, learned ancestral healing practices they can integrate into their self-care routines, worked with local aldermen on community-driven zoning processes to slow down luxury developers from buying up the barrio, and so much more.

Our Programs

YOUTH SUMMER JOBS

Palenque LSNA hires youth ages 14 to 24 years old for Summer Social Justice Internships. High schoolers can earn a stipend while developing leadership and community organizing skills with the Youth Leadership Institute through creating and implementing their own community action research project.

Youth engaged in the Institute have an opportunity to reimagine their community by creating new and exciting solutions to social issues impacting our city. They get to choose whether they want to work on solutions to social issues like gentrification, school budget cuts, or interpersonal violence. They receive support from experienced community organizers and educators to learn how to be confident and compelling agents of positive change in their neighborhood and school

Since 2007, Palenque LSNA has trained over 1,300 youth leaders to work within our barrios developing people-centered solutions to community issues like affordable housing, immigrant rights, ending punitive discipline, and education equity.

YOUTH COUNCIL

Our Youth Council is composed of a diverse range of active students from across our many programs, including the Northwest Side Presente Palenque Fellowship and Palenque LSNA Committee Members. The Youth Council meets multiple times a month to exclusively connect and share what youth view as priorities that need to be addressed in our communities. Council meetings are structured to ensure youth feel brave and safe sharing their vision for a just world. Members of the Youth Council attend focus groups and other organization events to continue their learning journey and leadership development. Currently, the council is working on a strategy plan to spread support and awareness on the practices of Treatment Not Trauma.

LA RESISTENCIA FELLOWSHIP

This fellowship is an immersive experience, and paid opportunity, for 9-12th graders to explore their identities through social and cultural learnings. As our youth leaders engage in restorative and transformative justice practices, they discover how to unlearn what they have internalized from oppressive and harmful systems that consider their minds and bodies as disposable; they begin to narrate their own identity and origin stories that uplift their ancestral traditions and lifeways; and they practice the non-linear and messy journey toward accountability, vulnerability, and healing. As a result of youth doing this work, they become active agents of change and learn how to turn their organizing actions into impacts of self-determination for themselves and with their communities. Our Resistencia Resitiencia fellowship empowers young teens in the city to enact systemic social change on issues they're passionate about and that directly impacts their daily lives.

Leadership Development Projects

In partnership with educators at Kelvyn Park and Schurz high schools, we have created restorative and student-centered leadership development projects engaging thousands of young people, parents, and community members organizing for positive futures for their neighborhood schools.

SERVICE LEARNING AS CULTURAL HEALING AND URBAN PLANNING

Through our community partnerships, we have worked with students across the city's neighborhood schools. We have engaged with students by having Community Fridays in which we do acts of kindness and appreciation with treats and affirmations. We bring love and joy intertwined with our work around urban planning, equity, and community building.

Building Sanctuary through Social Stories

The social stories that we shape through this project are being used as an organizing strategy to educate new arrivals about the history of movement work We hope these tools can offer opportunities to grow love and understanding between established immigrant communities, African American and asylum seekers (many of whom are of Afro-Latine and Native American descent). Learn more and download our social story tools here.

Treatment Not Trauma

The pandemic affected our communities deeply and youth pointed to mental health as a key issue, especially related to the difficulty of returning to school for a variety of reasons. Through youth-led conversations they realized that there is a lack of mental health resources available within their schools and neighborhoods. Further, due to the stigma this issue carries, there were not many conversations about it occurring in their homes either.

In response to these concerns, a group of Palenque LSNA youth decided they wanted to bring mental health conversations to the community with a focus on making it intergenerational. Our Palenque youth have worked around implementing Treatment Not Trauma ideals and practices, which have included seeking to create a 24-hour crisis response hotline for mental health-related emergencies and to reopen Chicago's mental health clinics. Throughout the past summer, youth worked in partnership with Grassroots Collaborative art fellows and created a Treatment Not Trauma 101 zine to begin spreading awareness widely.

The efforts of youth have not stopped with this one focus area. Our young people have also been advocating and organizing for safe and just practices in our schools and neighborhoods in order to heal, alongside the Cops out of Schools movement. Young people are forced to interact with a system of policing in school that views them as potential threats and not as students. Creating a safe environment in schools in which young people can thrive has been top priority. Palenque LSNA youth are connecting the dots on how safety, mental health, learning, and healing are all intersected and are demonstrating that the power of youth leads toward impactful community change.