Young Voices Action Collective

The Young Voices Action Collective (YVAC) is a Black youth-led organizing cohort of young people with the drive to build power, share space, and make change in communities across the country. YVAC uses a hybrid (relational organizing and Mutual Aid) model to most effectively elevate youth voice and meet basic needs. YVAC’s mission is to lift up young voices and drive social change on the issues that young people care about, while also meeting basic needs for youth we engage with. 

YVAC is a cohort of youth organizers and volunteers who consistently engage with young people about community needs, social justice issues, and upcoming elections. YVAC values youth leadership and investing in that through relationship building and story-telling. 

YVAC’s organizing team--founded, facilitated, and managed by youth of color-- are dedicated to creating a “leaderful” movement, or a movement that gives other young people the opportunity to take ownership of the work they are doing and enhance their professional and leadership skills to affect change in their community. YVAC frequently circulates their “State of the Young” survey, an ever-changing collection of the societal issues that young people see as the most pressing and in need of urgent addressing. Through this survey, YVAC recruits new community leaders and provides them with the training and tools needed to address issues of community violence, abolition, food insecurity, immigration, mental health, etc. 

In addition to the organizing portion of the organization, YVAC also provides a variety of direct mutual aid services for the communities that we work in. Through partnerships with our state arms (AL-PA) and other community organizations, YVAC can provide services including: free haircuts, direct food distribution, tutoring and college application assistance, and assistance with application for government benefits (SNAP, WIC, LIHEAP, etc.). Using this innovative hybrid of organizing and direct mutual aid, YVAC intends to build deeply rooted community relationships that will empower young voices and lift up communities across Pittsburgh, Huntsville and in other communities around the country as well. 

We aim to bridge the gap between young people, resources, and social-economic justice by refocusing our relationship with the community and how we advocate. We seek to meet basic needs for the youth who engage with our program. The status quo of engagement is to lift up those at the top, we want to destroy the status quo. We use a mud-roots model to effectively reach the currently impacted. We believe that our most impactful solutions come from the bottom, so we have to focus on those at the bottom of our respective communities. We aim to raise the floor instead of breaking glass ceilings.

Y-VAC’s mutual aid approach distinguishes the organization from the traditional approach for political organizing that involves brief, transactional interactions during the election season to instead provide comprehensive services to the community while building relationships and leaders throughout our work year-round.