Note: Jenelle is offering a new course, Healing as Revolution: A Healing Justice Practitioner Training - Application. Learn more here.

Feminist Youth Programming Description: This training is for advocates and practitioners who work with youth and want to better align their values around power, agency, and play with the design, implementation, and evaluation of youth programs. The course will translate feminist values into tangible principles and practices for how to build those values into youth spaces. Participants will explore a feminist approach based on an ecological model that has unique positive outcomes like high community engagement and change, improved mental health, increased self awareness, and quality relationships with adults.

This training will center spaces that serve 14-21 year olds. Training methods include interactive activities and pedagogical examples that participants can replicate in youth spaces. Participants will also explore obstacles and barriers to the work and collectively brainstorm solutions. You will walk away with resources, a community to dream with, and having experiential learning that can be replicated for your youth spaces.

Why take this training? Although most communities and NGOs know that youth development is important for our present and future, many programs can leave youth with an instilled colonial perspective of their lived reality and without transferable skills. Whereas traditional models of youth development emphasize building individual assets, a feminist youth approach emphasizes values-driven, critical consciousness-raising programming that can have high immediate community impact and high long-term individual impact. Feminist youth programming positions youth to walk into the future prepared to lead change.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will interrogate personal and structural values that are barriers to youth agency

• Participants will ideate tangible practices to make spaces accessible and inclusive to youth with a diversity of intersectional identities

• Participants will understand approaches to critical consciousness raising

• Participants will receive external resources further explaining best practices and internal resources for curriculum development

• Participants will cultivate creativity to envision new and just spaces that center young people within their organizations

• Participants will embody a youth-centered praxis

Download the program agenda and flyer here

About the Trainer: Jennelle Ramdeen(they/she) is a Healing Justice Practitioner and Founder of Lavender Veil Consulting, where they consult and coach to steward healing justice models as the foundation for liberation and systemic change. With 8+ years in the youth work world, currently Jennelle supports a youth-serving organization to develop healing based approaches to community violence prevention and responses. Previously, they led a youth policy research and advocacy fellowship. Jennelle’s approach to co-creating spaces to reimagine ways of being, while practicing joy, has made the work their young people do vibrate throughout youth and activist communities, including New York City policy change. In their Black queer feminist praxis, these social justice education spaces are also honored as sacred ground for healing —as youth start to name themselves and the world around them. Over the years, Jennelle has studied and created spaces for politicized healing to transform relationships to accountability and harm, starting while they were community organizing with Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) followed by their work with the NYC People of Color Healing Circle. Since then, they have held a range of roles in the field of healing justice from researcher to trauma steward.