How to revive student activism after a year of loss and trauma

School is back and so are extracurriculars — kind of. It’s still being figured out.

Some clubs are staying virtual, others have gone on pause and lost members, and some extracurriculars have disbanded entirely. Student activists in particular have struggled with an additional test — how can they re-energize and sustain their movements after a year filled with anxiety, financial uncertainty, and a lack of in-person connection?

Prior to the pandemic, older youth were already dealing with an intense pressure to retain a sense of financial, social, and emotional stability amid growing national mental health concerns. Now, these students are heading into a new school year with the loaded weight of pandemic anxiety.

Last year’s school closures and hybrid in-person schedules left these movements without physical organizing spaces. The pandemic’s effect on national employment impacted many teens, as well, from parents and caregivers losing income sources to plummeting rates of student employment last summer.

On top of that, are mental health concerns. According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy research group, the number of children utilizing mental health services has only worsened since spring 2020.

The problems posed by the pandemic disproportionately affect communities of color, as well as low income communities. Black teenagers still have the lowest employment rates in the nation. And non-white communities continue to have higher rates of COVID infection and death.

Joseph Williams is the director of operations and campaigns for Students Deserve, a racial justice and education advocacy group partnered with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. He said that the members of Student Deserve chapters around the city are at a particular risk for disengagement from their form of youth-led activism. “Some of our most vulnerable students have been some of the most affected by this shift. Folks who are either dealing with housing instability, or don’t have quality internet… or have had to step into breadwinner roles because their parents or their caregivers have lost jobs through the pandemic,” he explained. These students have had the hardest time “plugging back in” to consistent activism.

But the last year and a half has offered an opportunity to evaluate what’s needed to re-energize student movements, and how to integrate those lessons into new hybrid club settings.

Student activist groups have adapted to the changing world and are heading back into the school year with new lessons for other youth leaders.

Invest in student leadership

Justin Funez is a second year student at the University of Chicago and a leader for Students Demand Action’s Summer Leadership Academy, a youth-led program that mentors local activists. Funez helped with the expansion of the academy mid-pandemic, which, before 2020, had hosted only one session in Los Angeles. Funez was an attendee, one of the first things he did after moving from Mexico that same year. Now, the academy has sessions in five cities, with the hope to double that amount by next year.

He said that the academy had to change its priorities because of the pandemic, moving away from getting more people on the ground advocating and rallying in their own communities, and shifting to expanding the education and mental health resources already offered to members. It also tailored sessions to the specific needs of the city, student leaders, and gun violence survivors who participated.

Rather than just finding and developing new activists, it now invests in student activists who already felt committed to the cause. The sessions cover what it means to be an activist, the history of the movement, building a community that will support each other, and keeping your activism sustainable.

The Leadership Academy also allocated resources to help lower-income participants, which the organization recognized have been significantly affected by both rising gun violence and the global pandemic. Students Demand Action, with support from its parent organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, offered paid opportunities and internships for the academy’s leadership team, as well as laptops or other technology for those who normally rely on school resources.

For Students Deserve, city-wide leadership stepped in to figure out how to support the needs of students at each chapter to ensure their steady participation, including the recognition that they might need help outside of the movement itself. “There was a necessity to shift towards more of the invisible work with the pandemic, having to figure out different the different needs of our students,” Williams explained. “Students are coming back to school after being out for a year and a half or more during this global pandemic — when family members have lost jobs, housing, or their lives. They’ve been dealing with massive amounts of interpersonal, familial, inter-communal trauma… There’s going to be trauma.”

Establish peer-to-peer connections

Always a community-centered organization, Students Deserve continued strengthening its network through local and city-wide meetings with community members intended to connect a wide variety of voices. Williams witnessed different chapters coming up with unique ways to continue safely having direct conversation with each other going into this school year, from hosting outdoor meetings on school property to continuing with virtual meet-ups outside school settings.

“One-on-one outreach is always more effective, whether it’s calling somebody up, texting them, group messaging them.”

“Things are in different stages of transition in different places,” he explained. “But, definitely, one-on-one outreach is always more effective, whether it’s calling somebody up, texting them, group messaging them.” Many of the students involved in Students Deserve already face hurdles to their participation, and were at more risk of dropping out of the organization as things moved to virtual spaces that felt like less of a commitment. Creating deeper personal connections builds a sense of responsibility and safety in Students Deserve spaces.

Students Demand Action also began reaching out to members through text and phone banking. “We utilized texting and phone banking to continue engaging with our students and making sure that, even though things were going through a drastic change, students who were able to prioritize their activism could still get in contact with their local chapters,” Jeannie She, member of Student Demand Action’s national advisory board, explained. She joined the organization in 2019, after her father survived a random mass shooting in her hometown.

This ensured that both new and dedicated members didn’t feel estranged from the networks that used to meet in-person before the pandemic. These relationships can now carry into chapters that are meeting in school settings.

Make space for mental health conversations

She believes that one of the most important parts of reenergizing student activism is giving students space to step back from the movement for their own mental health. She, like many of her peers, is taking a gap year before starting her undergraduate degree at MIT. She doesn’t view this pause as a hindrance to her involvement, but rather an opportunity to dig deeper into what it means to fight for national gun reform. “I definitely had a moment where I was like, ‘OK, I need to reevaluate my priorities,’” she said. “I know that I need to show up for myself before I can show up for other people, especially in a movement where people rely on my leadership.” For She, that means spending the next year thinking about things other than school, finding hobbies that take her mind off of the country’s gun violence crisis, her own family’s trauma, and reconnecting with the friends she’s made in Students Demand Action groups.

Students Demand Action will strengthen its mental health support moving forward, as She and her fellow leaders create more virtual and in-person spaces to discuss and share student experiences of the pandemic and beyond. “These last two years, we have created spaces for students to come together, to speak with others who are going through similar situations. And that can look like our calling team, our texting team, the summer leadership academy, or affinity groups,” She explained.

Affinity groups are spaces created by Students Demand Action chapters for students with similar identities to connect, share their experiences, and bond over their particular needs and goals in the movement. This is particularly important to She as a young Asian woman, as she dealt with both racism and targeted violence towards her community this past year. “It made me realize how important it was for every person in the gun violence prevention movement to really own their identity. It impacts us all differently and we need to recognize that,” She said.

Funez said opening up spaces for mental health conversations during the summer leadership academy strengthened the organization’s activist network. “It really created a safe space where we could connect with other volunteers and understand how we feel — just be a team together…” he described. And, like She, he said this should be incorporated into the larger movement. In addition to a 10-week training session for core leaders, which includes conversations about community relationships, mental health, and sexual assault, this year’s city sessions (such as Detroit) have made a point to center mental health discussions across their programming, Funez said. These initiatives will remain and hopefully grow moving forward.

“During the pandemic, it was very easy to be able to step in and step back when it was necessary. So we thought people were way more invested in this because they were also able to take some time for themselves, and know that as a community, as a group, other people also have their backs,” Funez said.

Incorporate hybrid and virtual approaches

In February, Students Deserve and a citywide coalition of racial justice and education advocates, convinced the Los Angeles Unified School District to cut $25 million from the school police department budget and allocate $35 million to a Black Student Achievement Plan. In September, Students Deserve successfully advocated against a new proposal that would allow schools to bring back police this school year.

Williams credits these wins with the flexible organizing student activists learned during the last 18 months. “I think the pandemic has opened different opportunities for folks to plug in,” he explained. “Being virtual has allowed a lot of those folks to plug in even more to our citywide stuff, to build connections between folks from different schools in ways that we haven’t always been able to before.”

This has also allowed chapters to start outreach with younger populations that couldn’t participate before, Williams said, like middle and elementary school students whose parents might not feel comfortable sending them into citywide student gatherings. “They can literally sit in on meetings with their kids and see what their middle-schooler is engaging in, what they are a part of,” he explained.

Students Demand Action has taken advantage of a two-pronged approach, engaging as directly as possible with individuals and local chapters on the ground, while continuing to use the digital strategies forced on them during the pandemic. Most of their national leadership offerings are virtual, including the Summer Leadership Program, and local events and virtual field offices are still hosted online. It’s a result of the weird nuances of teens navigating the pandemic, social anxiety, and virtual schooling, who might prefer the comfort of a device.

“We actually saw a slow decrease in recruitment when we were reaching out for students who wanted to get involved,” Funez observed. “But on the other hand, we had other students that said ‘Since I’m virtual, I can do more.’ And they were more passionate and way more involved than they would have been in an in-person setting.” He said that the leadership will continue to include virtual programming since their generation is all just “one click away from each other.”

“Over Zoom, we’re literally at the same head level. There’s a sense of equality there.”

As a national leader, She agrees that the pandemic’s reliance on digital activism — from social media campaigns to Zoom meetings — was helpful for younger activists. She said that while the lack of in-person meetings is a kind of “double-edged sword,” things like virtual town halls and meetings with lawmakers are still beneficial to young people. They break down some of the barriers between the activists and officials.

“I had experiences in person, where I was speaking to a representative and I felt a layer of judgment between us. Whether it was due to the fact that I was like a teenager or I couldn’t vote, they didn’t really consider me as a constituent — maybe it was just the environment that we were in. But then, we looked to having these conversations over Zoom. And over Zoom, we’re literally at the same head level. There’s a sense of equality there,” She reflected.

The new school year proves at least one thing: the resilience of youth movements. Young people, already in a period designed for change, have navigated a year and a half of extreme transition, and are emerging with new ideas, new motivations, and a desire to reconnect with those around them.