Even as schools shut their doors during the pandemic, Portland youths have continued their push for social justice
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, then-14-year-old Violeta Mata was nervous about the future of the country. While she’d always believed her peers at school handled race poorly, this time, it felt threatening.
“People were like, ‘Oh, you’re going to be deported now?’ I’m like, ‘What the? I was born here!’” recalled Mata, whose family is Mixteco.
Rather than brush off the comments, she sought out ways to fight against presidentially sanctioned xenophobia. Mata joined YEJA, or the Youth Environmental Justice Alliance Portland, the youth-focused wing of the climate justice group OPAL (Organizing People/Activating Leaders). In YEJA, Mata found community, solidarity and hope. She connected with peers who shared her experiences with racist remarks. She learned about the history of marginalized groups that had been ignored and overlooked by her high school.
She marched in the streets of Portland, eager to transform her newfound passion for environmental and transportation justice into action.
Mata said she remembers thinking, “Wow, we’re actually doing stuff other than just learning about it!”
By her senior year in 2020, Mata was a seasoned activist. She was excited about the work YEJA was doing for Ballot Measure 26-218, which included student public transportation funding.
Then, in mid-March, the pandemic struck. Everything stopped — or so it seemed. Even as businesses closed their doors, students cleaned out their lockers and planes stuck to the tarmac, one powerful force in Portland pushed doggedly ahead: youth activism.
“During COVID, switching everything, reorienting ourselves to Zoom, was not as unrealistic or unimaginable as some work could be,” said Taji Chesimet, the 18-year-old co-founder and executive director of Raising Justice, a Portland-based youth-run organization dedicated to combating racial inequities in policing.
Lane Shaffer, a 15-year-old activist who co-chairs the Transportation, Equity and Environmental Advocacy Committee for the Multnomah Youth Commission, echoed Chesimet’s sentiment.
“We very quickly transitioned to virtual meetings,” Shaffer said.
Today, a year on, the end of the pandemic feels within reach. Many youth activists are now looking forward with hope and reflecting on a year of tumultuous change. Street Roots spoke to several young people doing powerful social justice work amidst the pandemic to understand their sorrows and successes during the past year.
In the spring of 2020, many youth activists felt the most crucial work was ensuring the physical and mental well-being of their peers. Luis Alonzo Velasco, the 16-year-old board chair of the political advocacy-focused nonprofit Next Up, described how the organization quickly put together a survey to determine the needs of Portland youths.
“We were forced to adapt because we knew that we had to be there for our community,” Velasco said. As it turned out, he said, “we ended up doing just fine.”
The next hurdle was ensuring that youths remained engaged, even as normal life crumbled around them. For some, the switch to virtual gatherings made activism work more accessible.
Nico Emmanuel-Henderson, the communications director of Raising Justice and a freshman at the University of Chicago, was able to attend the Portland-based organization’s meetings from Illinois.
“Had we been constricted to a brick-and-mortar — this is where we are, and this is our location, and this is where we’re working out of — then that wouldn’t be possible,” Emmanuel-Henderson said. The switch to online meetings, he said, “allows for more collaboration across the country.”
Many activists found their work halted, however. Mata’s home Wi-Fi connection couldn’t accommodate the data needs of platforms like Zoom, so she often missed large portions of YEJA meetings. She found a better connection working outside but was pushed inside when poor air quality from the September wildfires made her lungs ache. One of her co-interns at YEJA was forced to quit in order to work full time to provide for her family, whose income was depleted due to the pandemic.
Nevertheless, the work continued. Following the killing of George Floyd in May, people from all corners of the country flooded into the streets to demand racial justice and an end to police brutality. The protests were an awakening for some, but many of the youth activists, such as those in Raising Justice, had been working on policing for years.
“We really took as much action as we could during that time, took as many phone calls as we could, answered as many questions as we could. We wanted to be a voice in this conversation,” said Chesimet. Raising Justice participated in the Hear Our Voice PDX zine, successfully pushed Portland Public Schools to end their contract with school resource officers, launched a storytelling project, and pursued other projects in public safety and community organizing.
Alana Nayak, policy director at Raising Justice and a senior at St. Mary’s Academy in Portland, considered the effectiveness of the organization over the summer as the result of careful, intentional planning.
“We have made an impression among the public safety spheres that is powerful, and people are interested in our work and interested in our mission. And so we’ve had a lot more opportunities to work alongside elected officials and really important stakeholders.”
During that time, social media was flooded with resources, news stories and graphics surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of the posts made it easier for activists to make connections and plan events, but the reliance on social media came with consequences. Shaffer, from Multnomah Youth Commission, believed that Instagram posts were replacing more lasting forms of activism.
“Creating an aesthetic around it, making it very performative and, like, it’s harmful and it doesn’t help,” he said. “Oftentimes it ends up diverting resources away or diverting attention away from the actual movements and the people on the ground who are supporting marginalized communities.”
Mata, from YEJA, personally struggled with the deluge. “Seeing the mistreatment of people of color was like a work thing, and also being a person of color — it’s now everywhere. I don’t want to see it,” she said.
Mata still believes it was her duty to share information but was overwhelmed and felt as though she “was being bombarded with all this stuff at once, everywhere.”
Many teenagers had to balance competing priorities as the 2020 general election in November loomed large. Velasco collaborated with the Next Up board to pick candidates to endorse, focusing specifically on younger candidates who would amplify youth voices. On the other side of the ballot, the youths working with YEJA and the Multnomah Youth Commission advocated tirelessly to raise public awareness about Ballot Measure 26-218, also known as Let’s Get Moving. The measure included vast upgrades to Portland’s transit system, improved accessibility for pedestrians, and broad funding for YouthPass, which would provide free year-round TriMet access to PPS students.
While the measure was ultimately defeated, Shaffer still views the work as a success and continues to push forward YouthPass legislation. As a result of youth determination, “we have more direct advocates for YouthPass in governmental positions than ever before,” he said.
In the 2020 general election, some older members of Gen Z were able to cast a ballot for the first time, which many youths saw as an opening for older policymakers to take more of an interest in their demands.
Emmanuel-Henderson, from Raising Justice, had a message for politicians: “You cannot continue operating within this political system without hearing our voices and without kind of bringing us into the picture because you’re not going to win.”
Chesimet, also from Raising Justice, added a note of optimism. “Young people are being considered subject experts on their own issues as opposed to needing adult conduits,” he said.
Not all adults have bought into this message. Each of the youth activists interviewed by Street Roots related similar stories of being underestimated or even disrespected by older legislators, bureaucrats and other professionals.
Sometimes, the patronization is outright.
“There are times that we will plan a meeting, we will invite an adult to a meeting, and then they will end up trying to take over the meeting,” said Shaffer.
Mata said that during the election, “people would prioritize talking to the adults before us because we’re high schoolers, you know, so that was frustrating.”
Other times, youth voices have been subtly excluded from the conversation.
“A lot of the adult spaces that we move through, a lot of their meetings are either earlier in the day and it’s often not accessible to high school students like myself,” said Nayak, adding that quarantine made it easier to fit into a “typical adult” schedule as meeting times became more flexible.
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To fight against the minimization of youth voices, the young activists have developed a variety of tactics.
One is wording: “We refer to ourselves as youth instead of like kids or children because that has been used as sort of a patronizing term,” said Shaffer.
Many have found the most effective strategy to be challenging stereotypes. “You have to present really well because adults already have expectations that you’re not prepared,” Nayak said. Chesimet added, “If we didn’t present well, then they wouldn’t think our voice and our perspective would be important.”
Unsurprisingly, the youth activists in Portland have been presenting exceptionally well and are embarking on new, wide-reaching projects. Velasco, from Next Up, is a co-state lead for Vote16 Oregon. With Next Up he is introducing a bill in the Oregon Legislature to lower the voting age in school board elections to 16.
Shaffer, still laser-focused on transportation, is working with Multnomah Youth Commission to secure federal COVID-19 relief funding for YouthPass. Expanding into other media, Shaffer is also co-leading the podcast “All In My Head: Real Teens, Real Talk,” which aims to improve the mental health of young adults who are LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous and people of color.
The youths in Raising Justice have undertaken a number of ambitious projects, including new partnerships with the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing, the Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon and the Governor’s Racial Equity Coalition. Through each of these connections, they and their coworkers explore alternatives to policing and ways to engage youths in police accountability.
A recent high school graduate, Mata is now a student at Portland Community College. She is giving herself space from activism to focus on her studies, but she has hopes of advocating for disability justice in the future.
Though youth activists may differ in their tactics and ideologies, backgrounds and aspirations, they unite in their belief that every young person should see themselves as an activist.
The first step in becoming involved in activism? “Educate yourself. Actually go out and learn stuff!” said Mata. “Being educated on the things I care about really made me more confident in talking about it.”
Velasco suggests that young people “be involved on a local level, tune into city council meetings, tune into school board meetings, what’s really going around you to see what you can do to impact on it.”
Selecting one issue to focus on out of the overwhelming number of important causes is challenging but important, Shaffer said.
“You don’t want to force yourself to work on an issue that you don’t care about, so think about something that you hold deep in your heart,” he said.
Nayak sees it as simple. “I don’t think you have to fit the traditional role of an activist to be an activist,” she said. “You don’t even need to have that title. You can just do what you love, and that might be a form of activism.”
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