StrongHER TogetHER - YARD (Youth Anti Racism Discussions) Leadership Team

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YARD (Youth Anti Racism Discussions) is an initiative we started five years ago to understand more about racial inequities. For the first 1.5 years, we focused on Black Lives Matter and after receiving a grant, we expanded to include a focus inequities experienced by the Native American, LGBTQIA+, Asian and Hispanic American communities. For the last two years, we have evolved to systemic studies. We studied the criminal justice system first, meeting with Durham's District Attorney, an NC Rep who was a former juvenile court judge, a bail reform specialist and a former Durham Deputy Chief of Police. We ended this study with a couple of capstone projects that involved the purchase, assembly and distribution of supplies to unhoused youth in an effort to break the shoplifting / jail / bail / repeat cycle. We also created a virtual game for high school students to learn more about the criminal justice system in our city.

For the last eight months, we have now been focusing on social democracy. So far, we have had a session on voter suppression, a session to understand the connection between the bills legislators vote on and the girls / their families (particularly families of color) and most recently, we visited the NC Legislature, sat in on a session, talked with two of our representatives and toured the chambers. This study may have one last session and then we will have a capstone project as created and implemented by the girls, under the leadership of the YARD Leadership Team.

Once we finish the capstone project, we will be starting a study of the Financial system and understanding not only how the various parts of the system work, but most importantly, how parts of that system present inequitable circumstances for people of color.

The YARD Leadership Team currently has four members, but we know that some are planning to rotate off. If you would be excited to join this team as we work on the next phases of our social democracy study and help us as we take the girls through the financial system study, please connect and help us with this important work. Through YARD, our hope is to educate the girls about processes, impact, inequities and opportunities for their voices to be heard now and in the future.