Past Programs

FCYO's Youth Speakers Bureau is an assembly of five passionate and diverse youth organizers who are looking to build out their communications skills while serving as an advocate for the field of youth organizing. FCYO’s Youth Speakers Bureau is designed to support participants through their professional development as organizers. Foundational organizing topics center on thought leadership and communication - practices that are critical to community-based youth organizing.

At FCYO, we have identified a need for opportunities for newly mobilized young leaders to come into closer connection with one another and the youth organizing field as a whole, and to develop their capacity for strategic thinking while building in collective ways. And we are so excited by the possibilities of expanding our community in this way, which is why we are launching the Take Action for Power Fellowship.

Through the Youth Organizing for Climate Action and Racial Equity (YO-CARE) Capacity-Building Fund, FCYO will directly provide grantmaking and capacity building resources to young people of color and young people from other frontline communities who are collectively organizing to address the climate crisis. As part of a year-long learning community, we are looking to support youth organizers from both racial justice and climate justice organizations to deepen their analyses of the root causes of climate injustice and racial inequality, develop and sharpen their organizing capacities, and build and strengthen relationships.

In November 2016, FCYO made one-year grants to 24 youth organizing groups working in 14 states across the country. These Moment to Movement Fund grants support youth and intergenerational work that responds to the current moment in ways that build long-term power for low-income young people, young people of color and their communities. Grant sizes ranged from $10,000 - $20,000. This is a onetime grant program that will not be repeated in 2017.

In 2015-2016, FCYO sponsored a capacity building project focused on helping youth organizing groups integrate social media and communications technology into their organizing models. This project supported seven youth organizing groups who were already doing excellent face-to-face organizing and who demonstrated an interest and a readiness to incorporate a greater level of media and technology into their work in order to engage a larger audience and build power.

The Funders’ Collaborative on Youth Organizing recently established the Learning and Exchange Fund to provide support for shared learning opportunities, and to respond to organizers request for support to refine their organizing strategies considering the current political moment. We are excited to support over 40 learning opportunities and exchanges of youth organizing groups across the country. The Learning and Exchange Fund is part of FCYO’s Youth Community Organizing Resource Exchange (Youth CORE) program.

Powerful Transformations: Strengthening, Evaluating, and Funding the Impact of Youth Organizing on Individual Young People. This capacity building initiative supports ten well-established youth organizing groups to understand, strengthen, and measure how they support young people’s social/emotional, academic, and basic needs as they organize. In addition, groups receive training to reach new funders, especially those funders that focus on outcomes for individual young people.