Crawl Spaces/ Base Communities/ Organizing

• Grassroots youth enterprises create organizing bases for student insurgencies in schools of poverty.

• Young people come together to earn cash and share knowledge and skills. This “buys their time” to organize demand and to build strategies for political education and action.

• Youth enterprises use democratic practices (following Ella Baker’s teachings in the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]). This builds power as young people experience the process and consequences of decision-making, assigning tasks, action, reflection and accountability.

• Youth enterprise create “base communities”: “Small, intimate peer groups of a dozen or two dozen people, in which they can evaluate the day’s struggles, commiserate with one another’s failures, celebrate success, and plan for the next day’s fight. Citizens involved in public debate must also have a safe harbor in which they can try out their opinions and receive succor and support for bruising public combat…Families are not large or diverse enough. Churches are too large. The contact must take place in a new, smaller form of association.” (Harold MacDougall, Black Baltimore).

NOT JUST THEORY! Young people in Baltimore have used paid peer-to-peer employment as an organizing base to stop construction of youth jails, demand changes in school policing, and generate additional paid employment.