The Young Activist

For many of us young people, activism is one of the most important aspects of our lives. But in a world filled with unrealistic expectations, how do we navigate this and avoid burning out?

By Gabriela Venegas-Ramirez

I always used to think there was something incredibly romantic about the young activist. I was particularly fascinated by the images of the New Left of the 60s, those students who flooded the streets and took over their campuses, triumphantly raising fists and banners and megaphones in a fiery demand for change. But, throughout high school and college, I quickly learned that activism is not as romantic as I'd made it out to be.

It is tiring work. It’s sending countless emails, scheduling meetings upon meetings, writing and rewriting testimonials, petitions, and campaigns. It means schoolwork takes the back burner, it means consecutive all-nighters, and it means constant frustration - because it seems that no matter what we do, it will never be enough. And sometimes, from the darkest corner, the smallest voice begins to nag: “Is all of this even worth it?”

But it’s also beautiful work. It goes beyond stepping outside of the comfort zone, it’s working side by side with people you never thought you’d meet. It’s the beauty of solidarity, of collective resistance, of radical empathy. And in the time I’ve been at Brown, I have met so many incredibly dedicated young people, who work tirelessly to build the better world that we know is possible.

So is it worth it? Of course it’s worth it. Our hearts are too big, and our dreams are too beautiful, to allow them to burn out. So I took it upon myself to learn from other young activists: how do they keep afloat?

So I began to reach out to other young activists around me, asking about their experiences, their challenges, and the advice they’ve received.

For Aboud, it’s not so much a question of burning out. Activism, he tells me, is an inherent part of his life. “It's been a part of my life, it's not a thing I can separate. It's the same thing with many people who come from marginalized identities and marginalized environments, you can't separate it. It's like oxygen.”

Oxygen. Activism is like oxygen, Aboud says.

Aboud came to the United States from Palestine in 2021, amidst the 73rd year of the Israeli occupation. “The environment I grew up in, everyone was politically involved. My parents were protesting since they were kids. I was protesting since I was a kid,” he says. “I grew up post Second Intifada, and the Arab Spring. You know, with the siege on Gaza, my whole life was just surrounded by politics and the question of Palestine.”

Upon arriving at Brown, he immediately became involved with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). SJP is calling for an end to Israeli apartheid against Palestine, and for Brown University to divest from companies that are profiting from these human rights abuses. Thus, Aboud’s involvement in SJP, he tells me, is something that “just naturally flowed.”

Because activism is our oxygen. And it’s true. It’s true for him, it’s true for me, and it’s true for so many other marginalized communities, precisely as Aboud puts it.

Because I, like Aboud, come from centuries of marginalization, exploitation, and displacement. And just like him, I was raised around politics. My dad and my grandparents, Communists in Chile, survived the bloody concentration camps of the dictatorship. They spent nearly two decades in exile, fleeing from country to country. My mom survived the violence of poverty in Colombia, and of discrimination in the United States. Ever since I can remember, then, politics has been everything. I grew up surrounded by political meetings and demonstrations, raised by the Zapatistas, the Sandinistas and the MIR, nurtured by revolutionary folk songs of the Andes, and brought up by worker power and Occupy Wall Street. People’s liberation, anywhere and everywhere, is what I learned growing up, whether it was Colombia, Chile, or Palestine. My own name, Gabriela, comes from Gabriela Silang, the Filipino military leader who led the Ilocano independence movement against Spain.

So when Aboud says that activism is oxygen, yes. Because activism and politics is a part of who we are. We live and breathe resistance, day in, and day out.

But we are still young, and we are still learning as we go along. I think a lot of us student activists, particularly those of us who are BIPOC, are expected to have an inherent ability and understanding of political organizing. But, like everything, this is not a linear process. It requires equal parts learning as it does unlearning. Niyanta, co-president of Students for Educational Equity (SEE), got involved in activism in high school, but she tells me that she learned “a thousand other things about what organizing actually looks like” when she got to college. “I didn't realize how much I had to grow,” she says.” I always thought that I had developed a good understanding, but I came here and that was demolished. There was a lot of humbling myself.”

This is something I myself experienced. Since I got to college, and started working with local Rhode Island organizations, I have been humbled again and again. I have been doing a lot of tenants’ rights work with Reclaim RI, recruiting tenants to our union in order to help them hold their abusive landlords accountable. But a lot of the conversations I’ve had while canvassing have shown me that I still have so much to learn. These are people living paycheck to paycheck, facing mold, gas leaks and lead poisoning, and the constant threat of eviction. So yes, I have been humbled. Because I know how to speak at a rally, but what do I say when a woman, who just broke her leg on the job, is now behind on rent and is facing an eviction? I thought that in having a politically aware, working-class background, and in being a woman of color, I would have a bit more leverage, a bit more relatability, with the tenants I was talking to. But in these spaces, I am a privileged, sheltered Brown University student. A student from College Hill, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, coming into apartment complexes and telling these tenants what to do. This is a process Niyanta also mentioned. “I had to think a lot about my positionality as a Brown student in the spaces,” she explains.

As president of SEE and one of the principal leaders of the Brown Activist Coalition, Niyanta is one of the most dedicated activists I’ve met. SEE is a group dedicated to promoting racial and economic equity in education by supporting local youth organizations, holding Brown accountable to Providence’s public schools, and addressing on-campus student body issues. Leading an organization like this one, as well as the Activist Coalition, is a lot of work. But Niyanta loves the work she does. “I’ve loved being here in Providence because there's this amazing youth-based organizing scene,” she says. And it’s true. College is an incredible space to organize youth, a space with so many of us in one place, with so many ideas and so much passion.

But as a college student, I’ve also had to learn to lower my expectations and to be okay with slow progress. The road to justice is a long one, and although it’s been paved by those who came before us, it’s up to us to continue this work. But it’s not easy, and it’s often quite frustrating. Especially when you’re in an environment that represents everything you’re working against. Take Brown, an institution that was built on stolen land and on the backs of enslaved Black people. Brown, which continues to be dominated by white students from America’s wealthiest elites - many of these students who cannot even fathom what life is like at the bottom of the social pyramid. This is a frustration that Alec, a sophomore and a leader of Resource Generation (RG), explains. “I think it's been a lot harder than I was anticipating. it's just really hard to organize wealthy people, they’re very reluctant,” he says. RG is a student group dedicated to creating class consciousness among Brown’s wealthiest students. Most of the work is centered around praxis, or political education groups, that discuss, as Alec explains, “where our money came from, demographics that our families might have profited off of, and how can we undo the harm that's been caused by this accumulation of wealth.” Building off of this, participants are then expected to make an actionable plan to give away some of their wealth and participate in advocating for social justice. But as Alec explains, this is usually not what ends up happening. “I think a lot of people will just repost things on their story and call it a day, like they’ll talk the talk, but they won’t walk the walk,” he says. “ I just think it's frustrating knowing how much more we could be doing if people were more responsive”

Mobilizing people became even more difficult when COVID hit. Activist groups were forced to retreat behind screens and into Zoom breakout rooms. Others simply fell apart. This means that coming into Brown, new students found themselves having to build many of these organizations back up, mostly from scratch. Simone, a junior also working with Resource Generation, tells me that the lack of mentorship was very difficult. “We didn't really have people to teach us this stuff at the beginning,” she says. “Now we’re just picking up the pieces with what we were given.” I myself, a high schooler at the time, was struggling to keep my own club afloat. Solidarity at Work, as the club was called, was dedicated to supporting local workers and their efforts to unionize. But for the first few months, our meetings were all over Zoom. And although we established horizontal leadership in an effort to distribute responsibilities more evenly, most of it, if not all, ended up on me.

Jada, who was a freshman at the time, says that 2020 was, simply put, a “shitshow on campus.” Jada is a junior and president of the Black Student Union, who just this semester stepped down as co-president of SEE. A lot of the clubs fell apart, she tells me, mainly due to their structures. “A lot of the organizations made a switch to horizontal leadership, which in my experience is very difficult,” she says. “If some people think about organizing as something they live and breathe, something they have to do as students of color, and some people, particularly white students, think of organizing as a hobby, I feel like it's very difficult to maintain horizontal leadership.” This is another aspect of student activism that is felt throughout campus and beyond: the different expectations we have for ourselves because of our race.

Organizing isn’t easy, no matter what, and it becomes even harder when you’re a student of color. Oftentimes, the students of color are the most invested in these anti-racist, anti-classist movements, or feel the most pressure to do so, because we are the ones that are most hurt by these systems of power. “When you were the one kid that was really dedicated to it, you were expected to take on a lot of leadership right away,” Niyanta says, “and that's a lot of pressure for one kid, to take on this much responsibility.” Not only do we bear the brunt of racism - we bear the responsibility of fighting back. Now we have a double burden on our shoulders. Double the expectation, double the pressure. “I feel like I have high expectations of myself,” Jada says. “And part of it is race and gender. Growing up, I'm told you have to work twice as hard to get half as much. So of course, I'm going to put extra pressure on myself.”

This means that we usually end up taking on more than we can manage.

And while much of this pressure comes from ourselves, a lot of it can also come from external sources. Tripp, a local 20-year-old organizer focused on homeless LGBT youth and cannabis justice, brings this up. “I think a lot of organizations put a lot on their young activists,” he says. “They see them as a really great way to have involvement in the organization in the future, and while I think that's great, I feel like sometimes there's too much leverage put on them and too much expected of them at such a young age.” Recently, the media has seen the emergence of the superstar youth activist - faces and names that are catapulted to fame amidst a movement. From Greta Thunberg of the climate mobilizations, to X González and David Hogg of March For Our Lives, they have become celebrities within the activist world. But often this means that their voices and images are too often tokenized, used to garner media attention and support, but not actually heard or taken seriously. And this can be especially true for young activists of color, who give campaigns and movements the attractiveness of diversity. This tokenization also ends up placing so much emphasis on images that garner attention, images of the “rebellious” youth - the ones speaking at rallies, heading nationwide campaigns. But this also contributes to a very white-centered narrative of youth activism. “The rallies, the marches, those big things are important,” Jada says. “But a large part of activism is just community building, particularly as black students in this PWI and in this racist society.” And this is true. So much of activism work also consists of the nittier grittier work - the quiet, behind-the-scenes work of organizing and community building. For example, Jada has spoken at multiple rallies, but most of her work is dedicated to teaching dance in community spaces and providing mentorship to other Black students. And although this work might not be as attractive to white media, it is essential, particularly for BIPOC activists. Because being able to build up our communities, in an environment that has for so long tried to suppress Black and Brown joy is, in and of itself, an act of protest.

But Tripp also brings up the fact that activism, at times, can become isolating. “As an activist and as a volunteer, there's a lot of time that you dedicate to what you do, that typically during our age you wouldn't be expected to do. It’s definitely isolating.” This is something I myself have definitely felt at times. Particularly because a lot of the organizing work I do is off-campus and with local adults, meaning I sometimes feel out of loop with my peers. And in Providence in particular, the difference between Brown’s campus and the rest of the city is so stark, at times I feel like I am navigating two worlds. It can be a jarring experience, volunteering at a community library with students from local underfunded schools, or meeting with tenants and hearing their stories of rats and mold - and then coming back home to College Hill, where we have everything we could ever need, and more. Where we have roofs over our heads, all you can eat dining halls, and even free laundry in our own residence halls. Where so many students roam without a care, belonging to a world where poverty is not even a thought that crosses their minds. Even with my own friends, at times it feels like we navigate completely different realities. “There is frustration sometimes when I’ve been organizing these things, and it's a completely different world,” Niyanta says, “for people on the outside it feels like another club, whereas in my head it’s so much more than that.”

And while these separate worlds can be rocky to navigate, Niyanta also finds beauty in this separation. “I had to take a step back and remember that the work I'm doing is not necessary for everyone else to do,” she says. “I don't think I would be sane unless I had people who didn't completely do this work around me.” I really appreciate Niyanta’s perspective. Because it's true, we cannot expect all our friends to be as invested in this work as we are. And, like Niyanta, I now realize that if I didn’t have friends separate from my activism, it would become incredibly overwhelming. So having this separation is also, in a sense, like a breath of fresh air, a way to balance out the often heavy work that is fighting for social justice. And I am incredibly grateful to my friends, in how they’ve been there for me through thick and thin, in how much they listen and show up and remind me to stop and rest every now and then. And I have only just begun to realize how lucky I really am to have them. This is something Niyanta also expresses. “I have the beauty of my friends caring about the fact that I care, and having them support me,” she says. “I've found a lot of comfort because they're willing to listen and engage in those conversations with me.”

And friendships are fundamental to balancing our lives, particularly when it feels like activism and advocating for others is the utmost responsibility. Because for those of us who live and breathe this work, for those of us whose oxygen is our activism, it can be quite difficult to acknowledge other aspects of our life as also being priorities. “I have always been someone who's very passionate about this work,” Niyanta says. “And I think sometimes that can come to a fault, where it’s really hard to balance it with other things in my life.” Because this work involves real people, with real issues, who are oftentimes genuinely relying on us. So when we make a commitment to something or someone, it is imperative that we follow through. “There are gonna be moments when I have to put this work above other things,” Niyanta says. “I can't give them half my time, I can't balance them with everything else. They deserve the fullness of myself in that moment”

But we also cannot spread ourselves too thin. Because if you’re trying to follow through with eight different organizations or causes - as I learned at the beginning of this semester - you are bound to crash and burn. This is where Alec’s advice comes in. “I have to prioritize the things that are most important to me,” he says. “And be able to give those things my all and just, you know, like half-assing a bunch of different things.”

Oftentimes, we want to do it all. At one point, I myself was part of the Student Labor Alliance, Students for Justice in Palestine, SEE, HOPE (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere), Food Not Bombs, Reclaim RI, and was managing a tutoring program for local public school students. And the thing is, all these groups, all these causes we care about - labor rights, racial justice, educational equity, freedom for Palestine, and so on - are so intrinsically linked, traceable to the root causes of capitalism and imperialism. But in being a part of so many different organizations, not only was I working myself to the bone, I was also not giving each group the full time they required and deserved. I needed to, as Alec explains, sort out exactly what I wanted to dedicate myself to - and give that my all.

This is where the importance of carefully considering our priorities comes in. For Jada, it’s about community impact, as well as her own well being. “For me the community work is the most important because I know other people are relying on me,” Jada says, “but I’m also prioritizing mental health.” And in prioritizing both, we have to also learn to be okay with letting some things go. We have to remember, we are young people, students, with jobs and academic responsibilities and friendships and our own selves to take care of. Not everything is going to be executed just the way we want it to be, we won’t be able to dedicate every waking hour to activism, and this is okay. “We're not told enough that it's okay to not be able to do everything,” Jada says. “We have to accept that not everything's gonna get done.”

Ultimately we have to remember that the processes of change are slow; they are difficult, and they are frustrating. We ourselves cannot fix the centuries-old world order we’ve inherited. Remember that we are young people, with a long, winding road ahead of us, a road that is only just beginning. We’ll make many mistakes, and we’ll learn as we go, and we’ll find so much beauty in each step. “The whole world is not gonna end if we do it wrong right now,” Niyanta reminds me. The best we can do is try, and this is what we’re here to do. And if I leave you with anything, it’s an Arabic phrase that Aboud taught me: “thawra hatta’l nasr.” In English, it means “revolution until victory.” In Spanish our version is “hasta la victoria siempre.” Because we know that a better world is possible, one that we’re slowly building, brick by brick, hand in hand. So have courage and hold on to hope, and remember that this journey is a long one - but you are not alone.

Gabriela Venegas-Ramirez, a freshman at Brown, is looking to concentrate in Political Science and Economics. She is very passionate about workers' rights, and in her free time loves to be with her fri.

Commentary:

I chose to write this article out of a more personal whim. I myself was facing a bit of “activist burnout” by the end of the semester, so on one hand, I chose to write this as a way to learn from other young activists about their strategies and coping methods. On the other hand, I really wanted to share with readers the nuances that youth activism is riddled with. Particularly, I think, with today’s media coverage and the unrealistic expectations that we and others set for ourselves. I wanted to show that it’s not easy work, and it’s not as romantic as it might seem from images - there’s lots of learning and unlearning to do, lots of frustration and challenging emotions. But I also wanted to show the beauty in our solidarity and the fact that we are not alone, that our work is valid and it is worth it. The article was challenging to write in terms of scheduling with the students, who are all incredibly busy, but it was most challenging in terms of structuring the actual article itself, interweaving snippets from interviews, my own experiences, and maintaining an overall flow.

Sources:

Interview with Aboud - May 4
Interview with Tripp - March 11
Interview with Niyanta - May 9
Interview with Jada - May 10
Interview with Alec - May 9
Interview with Simone - May 9