Homegrown Youth Collaborative is a peoples school based in the Southern California and Tijuana border region. We are made up of young people and workers organizing political education with other working-class youth, families, and educators.
Our work is grounded in the belief that education is a site of struggle. US schooling is shaped by capitalist development and settler colonial state formation. It organizes labor, enforces social discipline, and reproduces racialized and classed hierarchies. We develop collective study rooted in an analysis of these conditions and in the struggles already taking place in our communities. Our political education helps young people understand the social, political, and economic forces shaping their lives while developing the knowledge and political capacity to participate in movements for liberation.
We are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. We study traditions of national liberation, socialism, anti-colonial struggle, and revolutionary organizing as tools for understanding the world and changing it. We learn from movements across the world—in Palestine, Congo, Puerto Rico, Iran, the Philippines, and beyond. We understand political education as part of the broader struggle against exploitation, dispossession, borders, policing, and U.S. imperial domination and as preparation for the forms of resistance that struggle demands, including direct action and armed struggle.
What we do:
- We connect political theory to collective action through teach-ins, study groups, workshops, and other learning programs
- We produce our own workbooks, curricula, and learning tools
- We facilitate international learning spaces and language exchanges
- We support young people to build long-term political homes: helping young people build relationships with workers and organizers engaged in local struggles; providing political education and study for youth already organizing in other groups; and supporting young people who want to take up political education themselves
Support our work
Resourcing pays youth organizers, funds political education programs, and sustains our spaces and materials for study.
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