The Challenge
When you organize across New York City neighborhoods, differences in trust, communication, access, risk, and decision-making can weaken coordination and strain relationships under pressure, as BYP100’s current challenge illustrates. These barriers can exclude participants, disrupt momentum, and limit a movement’s ability to turn collective action into lasting change.
Challenge Question
How can we create a practical tool that helps organizers draw on Black resistance traditions to navigate challenges in organizing today?
Learning Partners and Clients
Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) will serve as the primary client, identifying a real challenge in sustaining coordinated youth organizing across New York City neighborhoods and providing feedback during prototype testing. Students will collaborate with BYP100 to research the need, develop a historically grounded field guide, and refine it for practical use. They will then present the prototype and handoff report to The People’s Forum’s Hidden Histories of Rebellion in the United States series for feedback on historical grounding, usefulness, and next steps.
Phase Overview
| Phase | Key Experiences |
|---|---|
| Discover | I can act as a community engagement specialist in a neighborhood-network simulation and BYP100 organizer briefing to identify root causes of challenges in sustaining trust, communication, safety, coordinated action, and momentum across New York City neighborhoods. |
| Examine | I can work as an archive researcher to evaluate primary and secondary sources about maroon communities, abolitionism, the Underground Railroad, self-emancipation, and Black political organizing. I can compare how the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X organized networks, shared information, coordinated action, and managed risks. I can trace the goals, methods, effects, successes, and limitations of Black resistance and another twentieth-century reform movement. I can act as a curriculum designer to translate evidence-based historical principles into accurate case examples and planning prompts without treating past and present conditions as interchangeable. |
| Engineer | I can develop an accessible digital or print field guide for BYP100 and a public-facing prototype and brief handoff report for the Center for Urban Pedagogy and The People’s Forum, using historical cases, planning prompts, and reflection questions to support youth organizing across neighborhoods. |
| Do | I can facilitate a scenario-based planning session with BYP100 organizers, safeguard participants and sensitive information, collect data on the field guide’s usefulness, clarity, accessibility, historical accuracy, and ethical design, and use the findings to assess its effectiveness and recommend refinements. |
| Share | I can share the field guide, handoff recommendations, learning journey, and what I learned about my strengths and growth through an interactive session in The People’s Forum’s Hidden Histories of Rebellion series with BYP100 organizers, civic-design partners, peers, families, and community members. |
