Homegrown Youth Collaborative is a peoples school rooted in the Southern California and Tijuana border region. We are made up of young people and comrades organizing across borders to take back our education. Together with insurgent youth, families, and educators of the Global Majority, we build collective liberatory knowledge projects grounded in struggle, not school.

We are anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and abolitionist. We believe in national liberation, revolutionary socialism, and the power of collective study to fight empire.

What we do:

  • We create political education programs that connect theory to action.
  • We host skillshares, study groups, and workshops.
  • We make our own journals and learning tools.
  • We run cross-border gatherings and learning spaces.
  • We support youth organizers through trainings and long-term political homebuilding.
  • We plug youth into local and international movements fighting imperialism, policing, borders, and displacement.
  • We build collective power through education, not for jobs, but for liberation.

Why we do it:

  • Schools aren’t broken. They’re doing what they were built to do: sort, punish, and prepare working-class youth to serve empire.
  • We reject the carceral logic of U.S. schooling.
  • We believe youth don’t need classrooms to be theorists, and don’t need degrees to fight for life.
  • Our way of studying looks different. We don’t memorize facts—we ask questions. We study contradictions. We study struggle. We take a dialectical and historical materialist approach to learning, rooted in the needs of the masses, not the rules of empire. We learn from movements across the world—in Palestine, Congo, Puerto Rico, Iran, the Philippines, and beyond—where people are fighting for land, life, and freedom. We honor all forms of resistance: everyday refusal, cultural survival, political education, direct action, and armed struggle. We believe in building people’s power, not making peace with empire.

Our learning is inseparable from care, from grief, from our neighborhoods, from our desire to live otherwise.
We are building something different. And we hope you’ll build with us.


Support our work

Resourcing our work helps pay youth organizers, fund political education, and build the collective infrastructure we need to keep organizing across borders and across ages.


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