From Student Voices to System Change: How Youth Organizers Reshaped Educational Equity
For three decades, the National Equity Project has worked to transform public education by developing leaders who can create learning environments where all students thrive. From 2021-23, the organization established a Youth Organizing Coach role in the NEP-BELE District Network to more fully support placing young people at the center of educational change.
Building Power Through Near-Peer Mentorship
The Youth Organizing Coach role emerged from a simple but radical premise: students themselves are the most credible experts on their own educational experiences. These college-age organizers—many just a few years removed from high school—served as bridges between students and the adults who made decisions about their education.
The program operated on several key principles:
students need to feel affirmed in school to voice their experiences
they need opportunities to provide feedback on their holistic school experiences, not just classroom instruction
they need invested advocates who can help them navigate adult decision-making spaces
and schools must actively seek out students who are more reserved and not typically involved rather than relying on the same vocal, already-engaged students
Launched during the pandemic, the program was initially a virtual initiative that brought students together across school districts in the NEP-BELE District Network, a national cohort of school districts focused on centering student experience. Youth coaches facilitated monthly affinity spaces, coordinated with district staff, and planned a Youth Liberation Symposium—a week-long convening where students learned about the history of student-led social movements and identified their most pressing concerns.
“It was about connecting with students and finding ways to get these students from different backgrounds and different communities to all find stakeholdership in advocating for what they wanted to see in their education,” describes Ana De Almeida Amaral, who together with Izadora López, co-founded an Ethnic Studies program at High Tech High in San Diego, CA before becoming Youth Organizing Coaches with NEP.
Youth Organizer Coaches L to R: Ana De Almeida Amaral, Micah Daniels, Izadora Lopez
The Power of Seeing Yourself in Leadership
What made Youth Organizing Coaches uniquely effective was their proximity to the students they served. "There is value in having young people lead young people, because there is value in seeing yourself in the person that's leading,” Micah Daniels, one of the Youth Organizing Coaches, shares about the power of the program.
This near-peer relationship created space for authentic vulnerability and trust. Students who might have hesitated to share concerns with school administrators or teachers found it easier to open up to someone who recently navigated the same systems. "Students are the stakeholders of their schools," Daniels notes. "They're the ones who know what it feels like to be a student, and a lot of the time they don't feel comfortable talking to adults about that stuff."
Beyond facilitating meetings, Youth Coaches equipped students with organizing language, helped them understand administrative constraints and budgetary realities, and prepared them to navigate resistance from adults who might push back against student feedback. "It was important for the students to actually make demands of the educators because demands are made of youth every single day,” López, who’s now a field organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, recalls of preparing students for these dynamics.
To equip students with a blueprint for action, Youth Organizing Coaches also created two Liberated Organizing Zines—"By Youth, For Youth" (2021) and "We Need A Change" (2022)—that laid out the fundamentals of youth organizing and clearly articulated why and how young people should take an active role in transforming our world.
These principles and tools came together at The Youth Liberation Symposium, a virtual laboratory for student organizing. Over one intensive week, students from across the country came together to explore activist history, participate in affinity groups, and develop action plans for their schools. The experience was so powerful that it continued throughout the school year, with coaches supporting students to implement their visions.
Youth organizer coaches and program participants.
Legacy and Ongoing Impact
Now a producer and reporter at KQED and instructor at Stanford University, De Almeida Amaral sees direct lines from her organizing work to her current role helping students realize they have something worth saying. "I am not surprised that it was this generation who was able to mobilize one of the greatest and most widespread forms of resistance that we've seen on college campuses,” she says, pointing to the campus organizing movements of recent years as evidence of the seeds planted through this work.
For Daniels, now a Research Analyst at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, the experience reinforced the strength, capacity, and wisdom that young people bring. “[Student voice] is very rarely truly centered, and they deserve that. They deserve to be one of the main stakeholders in the decision-making processes in their lives,” she reflects. She now brings the lessons she learned as a Youth Organizing Coach about relationship-building, project management, and authentic partnership into her research work, where she still interviews students and analyzes their feedback about school experiences.
López continues the organizing work she began even before becoming NEP’s Youth Organizing Coach, now supporting working-class communities in California to build power around housing justice. "Our whole purpose is really just planting seeds everywhere we go," she reflects. "A lot of people are in survival mode—people are just trying to get from one day to the next. As an organizer, your purpose is really to ask people, ‘what do we do about it?’"
Carrying the Commitment Forward
As NEP marks its 30th anniversary, the Youth Organizing Coach program stands out as a testament to what becomes possible when an organization embodies its commitment to centering student voice. The Youth Organizing Coaches who honed their leadership with NEP are continuing to lead change in their communities, bringing youth voice and organizing principles to fields ranging from tenant organizing to journalism to research.
They share these thoughts for the next 30 years of educational systems change: "Lean into the discomfort," Daniels advises educators. "Do the hard and uncomfortable work of bringing students into spaces where students have never been before."
López adds a vision for building solidarity across roles. "I would love to see more teachers thinking about their own issues, then building a sense of solidarity with students,” she advocates. “Everybody's gotta organize everybody.”
The impact of the Youth Organizing Coach program continues to reverberate through the lives of the students who participated and the young organizers who carried those lessons into their life's work. As NEP continues its mission to transform educational systems, the program's legacy serves as both proof of concept and blueprint: when young people are genuinely empowered as co-creators of their educational environments, everyone benefits—and the ripples of that transformation extend far beyond school walls.
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