More and more young people from recently arrived families are participating in campaigns for global justice. The transnational identities and loyalties of YouthBuild s own stakeholders are driving an interest in exporting the program abroad. At the University of California, Richard Flacks reports growing activism among Asian-American and Latino students, which he analogizes to first generation Jewish students during the 1930s at schools like the City College of New York. On the one hand, then and now, there is a great hunger for self-improvement through education, and not just for reasons of upward mobility in an economic sense, but out of yearning for full development as an individual human being. This commitment, this yearning, broadens out to a sense of community responsibility that is often internationalist in its scope.
Global issues strike home.
They are not exotic and remote. The most influential youth organizing is being carried out by groups bound together by opposition to concentrated corporate power, support for democratic accountability at home and abroad, and willingness to experiment with a range of tactics, including civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action. Its mission statement, quoted in part below, resonates with the values and political premises animating much of youth activism as a whole. Corporate influence within our government, our media, and our universities has shifted power away from the people. The relentless pursuit of profit without conscience or regard to consequences has inflicted countless wounds on our people and our environment.