Youth & Millennial Board

STLCCB will be a stronghold for engaging our youth and millennials within the community, building a political process of city governments. Building relationships with City Government by spending a lot of time in mayors’ offices, helping them to have a different way of working with communities. Working with communities creating what we will call Public Safety plans, comprehensive public safety plans. Looking beyond law enforcement and looking upstream. Looking more at prevention and intervention. Looking at how we re-allocate our dollars.

We’ve also got to think about on how cities reallocate their budgets, the way the school systems think about their budgets, and how all that plays in making sure that we’re creating communities that are safe, descent, and just for all of our youth. When we think about investments in our youth and millennials, we also have to think about who they’re hanging around with.

Organizations spend a lot of funds on programs. We’ve got to think beyond that. Organizations have to begin thinking in terms of who our youth and millennials are with, whether it parents, grandparents, or maybe raising children, taking on a two-three generation approach when comes to investing in our communities and looking at things from a community as a whole and not just the individual.

We must spend our resources, time and energy looking at the issues around home ownership, capital ownership, issues around investments in businesses, asset building, health and creation in jobs, and how they can really make a difference in their communities and their families. Helping mayors and city government in looking long term on how we get to a place were as a collective body we can help our youth and millennials live out their dreams and aspirations.

We want to put our youth and millennials in a position with city governments to help mayors in making decisions on their policy agendas, including mayors, superintendents, and others on really focusing in on thinking about, what it is that young people need to succeed and how to build a youth adult partnership, where young people are at the center of that conversation, especially the young men who are impacted by systematic challenges. Let them help guide the work.

We must incorporate that within the community, build partnerships with the mayor’s office, and spend time with them, think through the process, and really look at helping the young men and women to help lead the work in a way that’s authentic to them, not try do work ahead of them but really make sure they’re working in partnership.

As you think about young people and how they move in the world and create leadership opportunities for them, at least get out of the way so that they can create their own and make sure that we’re investing in their growth and development, not just in the classroom but also in their communities. Make sure that we’re molding and shaping the next generation of young people who want to help lead their city, the country, the world.

We must find ways to invest in the community, without displacement setting the foundation for those community members who have experienced redlining and other systematic racial barriers that have destroyed and disconnected them from resources within their communities.