Minnesota Youth Collective is a BIPOC-led nonprofit working toward the development of the next generation of movement leaders. Founded in 2018, MNYC is the state’s largest and most effective youth civic engagement organization alongside our sibling 501(c)3 organization, Minnesota Youth Collective Education Fund. MNYC is a hub for transformational organizing, popular education, and youth leadership development across the state. We leverage systems to change practices to invest in community-led policy solutions and provide heuristic organizing training for young adults to increase the capacity of our most vulnerable and underrepresented communities to advocate for the solutions that they need.
Built by and for young people, MNYC envisions Minnesota as home to a diverse generation of young leaders with the expertise, perspective, and imagination to build a more representative and just state for everyone. This means individuals from historically underrepresented and intentionally under-resourced communities must have access to comprehensive civic education, critical thinking skills to assess the roots of the problems that their communities experience, and power and agency to collaboratively identify and pursue creative policy solutions. We prioritize the equitable redesign of the social systems that have disempowered Black, Indigenous, and communities of color while empowering white communities.
In service to this vision, MNYC combines youth leadership development, community organizing, popular education, and civic engagement to 1) turn dense concepts into accessible and relatable material that strengthens democratic participation, 2) engage in coalition-based advocacy for creative solutions to our communities’ most complex problems, and 3) invest in the agency and political power of young leaders and their communities. Minnesotans between the ages of 18 and 35 are the largest voter bloc in our state, representing 46 percent of the eligible electorate. Young people have the highest potential to influence decision making around the issues that affect us and the generations to come. MNYC’s work expands the electorate by including more young people — making it more representative of our state’s population — and creating opportunities for them to make a positive impact.
When MNYC was created in 2018, the goal was to solve a problem and fill a gap. For far too long, youth organizing in Minnesota has been dependent on the whims and needs of particular election cycles, and as funding dried up between even years, so did commitments to engaging young Minnesotans.
Since then we have filled that gap, and been a center for ongoing youth organizing and leadership development. Our work is ongoing, it’s stable and secure in its funding sources, our leaders are on the ground, building with people, and seeing results. Engagement challenges among young people are often talked about dismissively, like young people don’t care. We believe, and our work has proven, that young people are underinvested in, and that with that investment comes engagement, results, and change.
But as one set of issues has been addressed, it’s shown light on another. Young Minnesotans don’t have near the political power we need, and that means our issues and communities are far too often left behind, with particular harm done to young BIPOC and LGBTQ people. We are charting a path to change that.
That means solving new problems and filling new gaps. It means expanding our reach and sharpening our focus and resolve. It means building and supporting leaders who are ready to change broken systems and create new paths, and it means developing a base that can use their voices, votes, and volition to build the Minnesota we deserve.
We were created in 2018, but, from our vantage point, we’re just getting started.