Supporting the Next Generation of Activism

WHERE DO ACTIVISTS learn to be activists?

The sad reality is that most of us don’t. When most of us are faced with a problem in the world, we may decide that we want to do something about it. But how do we know what to do? Or how to do it well? How do we develop the courage to get out of our comfort zones? Or withstand the rejection, opposition, or heartbreak any activist will inevitably encounter along the way?

Ideally, we would be learning these things in school, but sadly that is typically not happening. In fact, schools often replicate the social injustices in our society. Schools can produce a culture of apathy, dissuade student engagement in subjects that administrations might consider political, and even whitewash and censor the history and experiences of marginalized groups.

In the absence of a support system, many caring people conclude early on that it’s too hard or overwhelming to tackle a problem, that they’re “just one person,” and maybe that “this is just the way it is.” Even under the best of circumstances, many people who do take the initiative and get started along an activist’s path often don’t receive the mentorship, training, or support they need to succeed and stick with their activism long-term.

Recognizing this dynamic, Youth Empowered Action Camp was created in 2009 as an intervention to reach compassionate and informed young people before they start down the road of apathy and disempowerment. For the past 15 years, YEA Camp has been running life-changing, overnight summer camps for teens and adults who want to make a bigger difference in the world. Staffed by inspiring activists and educators, campers are surrounded by like-minded peers and role models who are pulling for their success.

With locations on the East and West coasts, YEA Camp has become a destination for up-and-coming changemakers from around the country. At camp, they are trained to “get started or get serious” about the social justice causes they care about — all while making amazing friends, eating incredible vegan food, and having the time of their life.

YEA Camp’s curriculum is built on developing knowledge, skills, confidence, and community. With knowledge about different issues in the world, skills and confidence to take action, and connections to organizations and a like-minded community, YEA Campers are set up for success.

About halfway through camp, YEA Campers choose the Issue of Importance (IOI) that they want to focus on. By the end of camp, they each create an action plan for how they want to make a difference on that issue. Many campers go on to do incredible advocacy for social and environmental justice, often crediting YEA Camp with helping them along their path.

Take, for example, Leah Kelly, who spearheaded the successful effort to get Meatless Mondays implemented throughout her Connecticut school district. And Julia Clark, who led a successful campaign to change the name of her Virginia high school from that of a confederate general to Justice High School. And Ethan Lyne, who led the effort to get a polling site on his college campus, Haverford, to make it easier for students to vote in the swing state of Pennsylvania. And Tehya Casey, who led the successful campaign to get her school cafeteria to stop using Styrofoam trays for daily student meals.

Countless YEA Campers say their experience at camp helped them accomplish their goals and make a difference.

AFTER 15 AMAZING years, however, YEA Camp is reinventing itself. We are making a strategic shift in how we do our work — at least for now.

It really all started with the pandemic. Soon after quarantine began, a group of YEA Campers and staff started having regular calls to brainstorm how to pivot, given the circumstances.

For the first three months of the pandemic, YEA Camp taught live pay-what-you-can Zoom classes about activism, called the Changemakers Challenge. And when summer rolled around, we launched Virtual YEA Camp, a four-week version of our in-person camp that seized the opportunity of being online, allowing us, for example, to invite amazing guest speakers from around the country and have campers work on digital campaigns and fundraisers together.

We also released a free, 80-page e-book, The Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World.

While YEA Campers and staff, of course, looked forward to getting back together at camp in person, it had become clear that there were many creative ways to bring YEA Camp’s activist education curriculum into the online world.

We still had so many ideas and prospects for the future that we wanted to pursue. So, when YEA Camp started up again in person in 2022, we made the choice to downsize our in-person programs, which allowed us to develop more digital programming.

For a decade prior to the pandemic, we held three sessions per summer; in 2022 and 2023, we offered just one. Now, in evaluating plans for 2024, YEA Camp has decided to take a break from in-person camps and focus on creating other digital programs, which have the potential to reach exponentially more people in a more strategic and cost-effective way.

To learn more about this Earth Island project visit YEACamp.org

The mission of YEA Camp was never about running a camp. That was the format we chose way back in 2009 to fulfill our mission: to help more people make a bigger difference. Incredibly, so many technologies exist now that make it possible to reach more people than YEA Camp could ever have beds for, numbers beyond our wildest dreams at the beginning.

We see potential to create online mini-courses; to launch a podcast for changemakers to share their stories; to bring our curriculum into different formats for use by teachers, homeschoolers, and other camps; to create mentorship programs for aspiring activists who want more support; and much more. YEA Camp’s strategic planning process will determine which ideas to develop and implement.

Ultimately, we believe that as the climate catastrophe worsens and the foundations of democracy decline, more people will be looking for resources and training to help them learn, get involved, and take action. We will offer programs that can train and support more people of all ages, around the world — valuable tools to help nurture effective activists for the future.

At YEA Camp, we say, “We could all use a little help making a big difference.” Now we’re looking forward to using all we’ve learned over these past 15 years to help even more people do just that.