2020 NYRA Virtual Conference: Age of Youth

Ageism against young people is a form of systemic oppression that isn’t talked about often. Yet it underpins a lot of other social and societal issues. Imagine if young people could vote, could run for office, could take charge of their own education, could make decisions for themselves free from parents who don’t always understand their needs and desires, could full participate in community and in democracy - how much more powerful would movements for climate justice, for racial justice, for economic justice, for queer liberation, for political reform - movements that are already often driven by young adults and sometimes even younger people - be?

Now is THE age of youth — we are rising. We want change, we are fighting for change. And we need to break down ageist laws and institutions to rise to our full potential.

Sign up for Age of Youth now! There’s a lot to do, a lot to learn, a lot of fun and joyful connection - potentially for creative collaboration!

Day 1 (Friday, October 2nd) Sessions

#16ToVote Phone/Text Bank

Facilitated by Neil Bhateja

4:00 PM-6:00 PM EDT

With Holly Cordeiro from Vote16SF, we will reach out to San Francisco voters via phone call and/or texts to encourage them to vote “yes” on Prop G. Prop G would make San Francisco the first major American city to lower its voting age to 16. Together, we can make history!

Opening Remarks

Margin Zheng & TBA

7:00PM-8:50PM EDT

A welcome from NYRA’s President, an introduction to NYRA, and an overview of the conference. With a brief presentation by a special guest!

Self-Directed: Exploration, Experience, & Equity

Facilitated by Margin Zheng

8:00PM-9:00PM EDT

A conversation about how low-income students can benefit from having control over their education and the steps we can take to advance the movement and coordinate more closely between youth activist organizations, students who are already directing their own learning and the educators who support them.

Panelists:

Kat Farr: unschooler, Peer Unschooling Network , NYRA Research & Writing Lead.

Jerry Mintz: founder of the Alternative Education Resource Organization and a leading voice in the alternative school movement for over 30 years.

Marley Richards: an unschooler of eight years, focusing on the intersectionality of ageism and racism in educational spaces.

Ayana Smith: Storytelling Program Co-Coordinator at Student Voice and a current sophomore at Cornell University studying urban and regional studies and education; passionate about accessibility, school integration, and transportation education.

Day 2 (Saturday, October 3rd) Sessions

History of NYRA

Facilitated by Alex Koroknay-Palicz

11:00AM-12:00PM EDT

An overview of the last 20+ years of NYRA’s fight against age discrimination. Expect exciting bullet points, nostalgia inducing pictures, and funny anecdotes from four of NYRA’s longest serving board members.

Panelists:

Keith Mandell: Former NYRA Board Member (1999-2000, 2004-2015). Keith is an attorney with a practice in insurance coverage. He has been involved in the youth rights movement for over 20 years and was an organizer for YouthSpeak’s campaign to lower the voting age. He has researched, written and spoken on efforts to lower the voting age.

Katrina Moncure: Former NYRA Board Member (2005-2015), founder of the #16toVote on the 16th Twitter campaign. Katrina runs the I Support Youth Rights page on Facebook.

Stefan Muller: Former NYRA President, former NYRA Board Member (2007-2010, 2012-2013). Stefan has been a NYRA member for about 20 years, and helped lead a successful fight against a local curfew law. He is currently an assistant professor of computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Fighting the “Troubled Teen” Industry

Facilitated by Brian Conner

12:30PM-1:30PM EDT

This workshop will be a conversation about the successes the movement has had shutting down abusive behavior modification facilities and the steps we can take to coordinate more closely between the various groups involved, including survivors, lawyers, state legislatures, and organizations focused on intersecting issues such as LGBTQIA+ rights.

Content warning: This panel may include mentions of child abuse, cults, brainwashing, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, sexual assault, and death.

Panelists:

Wayne Besen: LGBTQIA+ rights advocate and founder of Truth Wins Out and the Center Against Religious Extremism; has helped lead the fight to ban conversion therapy in 20 states.

Sara Gelser: a state senator from Oregon who focuses her efforts on advancing the rights of children, youth and people with disabilities and ending the use of restraint and seclusion.

Gabriel Joseph Gonzalez: a survivor that educates and advocates for young people's rights in The Troubled Teen Industry and has worked on various projects promoting legislation creation including a recently co-facilitated collaborative campaign to congress to regulate controversial care practices and challenges in TTI, as one of the organizers / liaisons of a grassrooted group, the Freedom Village Experience.

Amanda Householder: founder of @exposingcircleofhope on TikTok, exposing the abusive boarding school her parents own.

Shain Neumeier: an attorney based in Springfield, Massachusetts who uses the legal system to protect the autonomy and prevent the abuse of youth, people with disabilities, and transgender people; in particular, they have worked on issues of bodily autonomy and freedom from coercive interventions in the name of treatment.

Miranda Sullivan: host of Troubled, a podcast by survivors of institutional child abuse with the intent of exposing the open secret of institutional abuse in the US, from the Assimilation of the Indigenous through the cult-spawned “toughlove” industry to today.

Birth of a Postcolonial Perspective on Parenting

A Raising Free People session with Akilah S. Richards

2:00PM-3:30PM EDT

I’ll start with my story and share a few short sections from Chapter 5 of the Raising Free People book. My intention is to invite your insights as we examine the ways that some of our relationships to Blackness, decolonization, and healing work can form relationships and enable community healing strategies rooted in unschooling practices.

Akilah S. Richards is passionate about mindful partnerships and parenting. She uses audio and written mediums to amplify the ways that unschooling in particular, is serving as healing grounds and liberation work for Black, non-Black Indigenous, and People of Color communities earthwide. Her recent experiences within the intersection of privilege, parenting, and power are detailed in her latest book, Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work (PM Press).

A Case for Intersectionality in Youth Rights

Sebastian Barajas

4:00PM-5:00PM EDT

A brief overview of how I've encountered the concept of intersectionality as a grad student and youth rights advocate, and why I believe it is essential for understanding and fighting against ageism.

Sebastian Barajas: a former NYRA intern currently working towards his PhD in childhood studies at Rutgers Camden.

Ageism in the Workplace

Jacob Dennis, Andrew Lerner

5:30PM-6:30PM EDT

A discussion of discrimination against youth at work and where current age discrimination laws often fail young employees.

Jacob Dennis: an 18 year old activist and member of NYRA's research and writing team who joined at the age of 16 after feeling the need to take a stand against discrimination against young people.

Andrew Lerner: venture capitalist and author of “Thank You For Being Young”, a book illustrating the age discrimination young adults face in the workplace.

NYRA “Speed-Dating”

NYRA Staff

7:30PM-9:00PM EDT

You’ll be assigned to a Zoom breakout room with 1 or 2 other conference attendees and have the opportunity to get to know one another through prompts and unstructured conversation. After about 10 minutes, you will be assigned to a new room and a (hopefully new!) person to chat with. After another 10 minutes, you’ll switch to yet another room...and so forth. A great opportunity to meet other folks interested in youth rights activism and perhaps generate future collaborations!

Day 3 (Sunday, October 4th) Sessions

Lowering the Voting Age

Facilitated by Ashawn Dabney-Small

10:00AM-11:00AM EDT

A conversation about the successes the voting age movement has had and the steps we can take to coordinate more closely between the various groups involved, including activist coalitions, voting rights groups, school boards, researchers, and organizations focused on intersecting issues such as climate change.

Panelists:

Tay Anderson: youngest ever member of the School Board of Denver Public Schools, the school district he attended and graduated from.

Joshua Harris-Till: president of the Young Democrats of America.

Emanuelle Sippy: a high school senior in Lexington, KY, an organizer with Future Coalition, co-director of the Prichard Committee Student Voice Team, a founding member of the Education Justice Collective and its Move School Forward Campaign, and an editor of a feminist art & literary magazine.

Rose Strauss: Sunrise Movement Fellow. Asked PA gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner in 2018 about campaign money received from the fossil fuel industry. In response, Wagner labelled her “young and naive”, causing an uproar.

John Wall: professor of Philosophy, Religion, and Childhood Studies at Rutgers University Camden and author of several books and numerous articles on political philosophy, children’s rights, and child voting.

Fighting Age Discrimination Against Youth

Isabel Hope

11:30AM-12:30PM EDT

A student’s experience fighting against age discrimination and learn more about how young people can be a part of combatting this discimination which, although not illegal, ultimately harms all of us.

Isabel Hope: an 18-year-old autistic student activist from Tuscaloosa, Alabama; her experiences with ageism led her to found Meddling Kids Movement, an international youth-led media organization highlighting young people who are changing the world and encouraging those who want to, and Yellowhammer Youth, a student-run digital space for young people in Alabama to share their voices through opinion writing.

Developing an Advocacy

Brookie Chaney

1:00PM-1:30PM EDT

A presentation about the speaker’s own work advocating for anti-racism and for awareness of inequities in maternal care for Black women

Brookie Chaney: Crowned Miss Black Teen International Ambassador in May. Tenth grade student from Atlanta, Georgia. Founded Leading Initiatives to Save the Existence of Black Women Now (L.I.S.T.E.N.), a community service organization teaching young people ways they can support women facing disparities in health care.

Ageism in Social Justice Movements

Aarushi Pant

1:30PM-2:00PM EDT

Although youth are the ones who are often directly impacted by issues such as LGBTQ rights, gender equality, racial justice, and more, they’re often discouraged from taking action and playing a role in the movements that they’re passionate about. In this talk, you’ll learn about what ageism looks like in social justice movements, how it impacts our community, and what we can do to put an end to it.

Aarushi Pant: a 17-year old activist from Houston, Texas; her passions for LGBTQ and women’s rights led her to found spectrum, an online platform for the LGBTQ community, and WISH, a grassroots community organization that hosts free annual summer camps and yearlong mentorships for underprivileged middle school girls.

TBA (Personal Story)

Margie Sanderson

2:30PM-3:30PM EDT

Description coming soon!

Closing; Share and Ask!

Ashawn Dabney-Small; Vice President/Action Lead

NYRA Staff

4:00PM-6:00PM EDT

NYRA Vice President gives some closing remarks, and then it’s YOUR time to share! Sign up to present a project you're working on and want help with, an idea you have that you want to develop with others, a skill or product you have to offer -- anything generative for social justice work! Young people are especially encouraged to sign up as a way of breaking down ageist norms -- YOU shall teach the older folks! Sign up to present here.

All sessions will be on Zoom. You will receive the meeting links after registration, shortly before the conference.

Tickets for the conference are by donation, so pay as much or as little as you are willing and able. Eventbrite requires donation tickets to be at least $1; however, if that does not work for you, please email nyra@youthrights.org and we will accommodate you.

Want to get involved even before the conference? Join NYRA conference Discord server, Age of Youth! We will be encouraging conference attendees to connect informally on the server in between conference sessions.

Note: You do not need to attend all conference sessions to register! Picking and choosing is completely fine. We encourage you to attend the ones that you can.

If you have any accessibility needs for the conference, please email nyra@youthrights.org. We cannot guarantee being able to fulfill every request in an ideal way; however, we will work with you to find the best solution available.