Who Decides? You Decide
Julián Donas Milstein, 17
Who makes the decisions in our world? If you ask a kid, they’ll probably say their parents. If you ask a teenager, they’ll probably still respond with some version of “adults.” It’s still my instinctual response as an almost-adult myself. It’s what I think because it’s what I’ve been taught — what we’ve all been taught — since childhood. Through my experiences as a Workers Circle’s Youth Stand Up for Justice (YSUFJ) teen activist, I’ve started to unlearn that. At YSUFJ meetings, we learn that we have power. We can take decisive action to change our lives now, secure our future, and make our communities stronger. Learning about that power is the first step towards harnessing it, and for me that started at YSUFJ.
I’ve been a part of the Workers Circle since middle school, and the commute from my home in Harlem to the midtown office is familiar. The thrumming energy of 42nd street can be a lot for a Sunday, but on my way to YSUFJ I always remember that that energy is power. Each crowd makes me think: we built this city. At a typical YSUFJ meeting there are young activists bringing energy from all over the city.
We start our meetings in a circle, where I always see familiar faces and usually new ones too. Our introductions are often timid, but the atmosphere in the room gets warmer as we share food and learn about one another. Before long Amanda Miller, The Workers Circle’s Manager of Youth Education and Organizing, introduces the day’s activity and our session starts. Our space is a long rectangular room with a smartboard at the front and a long wall that doubles as a whiteboard on one side. We spend a good portion of each meeting filling the wall from floor to ceiling with thoughts, ideas, and sometimes doodles.
During our sessions, we learn about all sorts of things. At the beginning of the year we did training for running high school voting pre-registration drives. One Sunday we wrote postcards to voters in Georgia. Another day we learned about protest songs, and composed a song together with activist and songwriter Jean Rohe. In each workshop we learned from the material presented, but we also learned from each other. You see this in the writing on the wall which, by the end of each session, looks as intricate as a Jackson Pollock painting. Words snake around each other and overlap in a web of different colors and handwritings.
In the writing on the wall, I see our passion. Words like justice, peace, and solidarity seem to jump out. I see our dreams in the word “sustainability” and our demands in an all-caps “ACCOUNTABILITY.” But most of all, looking at that wall I see our power. The air in the room after a long workshop is electric, and for me the spark continues as I rumble through the tunnel back home.
A few weeks after our voter pre-registration workshop, I started organizing my school’s annual “Human Rights Day” with a friend. We invited keynote speakers, organized student panels, and had student clubs create booths with activities. One of the booths was a voter pre-registration drive. When I saw people find out, incredulous, that they could pre-register to vote at sixteen, I recognized that spark. They were discovering their power, our power, as young people. At the Model UN club’s booth we had people add their own articles to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) with sticky notes. Later this year, when our Model UN team visits the UN, we will bring the UDHR we crafted collaboratively.
With each of these actions, I hope to bring that spark that I first saw at the Workers Circle to as many young people as possible. As a young activist, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with feelings of desperation and defeat. But I always leave these meetings feeling hopeful. I am grateful to YSUFJ for being the space in which I discovered my power and giving me the tools to use it. It’s a space that’s open to all young people who seek to find their power and harness it for positive change. If that sounds like you, then you can join us at our next monthly meeting — sign up here.
I’ll leave one final message for the young people reading this: The next time someone asks you who makes decisions in our world you know the answer: YOU do.
To find out more about our student activism, please visit: www.circle.org/student-activism
