According to its new organizational direction, Youth Pride Services (YPS) last week hosted a discussion on adultism—what it means, what its effects are, and how it affects youth organizing. YPS, which recently ended its relationship with Affinity Community Services over differences in principle, is an activist group for queer youth, particularly queer youth of color.
Holly Chernobyl, who co-facilitated the meeting, said that participants started by attempting to define adultism, which she said is the “devaluing, invalidating, and silencing of youth.”
“We were talking about the ways in which adultism affects us as adults, and how it affects youth,” Chernobyl said.
In terms of organizing, said Chernobyl, who is YPS’s health education director, the group talked about the “kinds of power” that adults have, politically and socially. Chernobyl said that within political work, adultism often expresses itself as a lack of solidarity and a lack of empowerment of youth.
One of the challenges of confronting adultism, Chernobyl said, is reminding adults that “we were all young once”—which complicates the idea of organizing around a youth identity. “We were not all black once, we were not all female once, we were not all transgender once.”
Chernobyl also said that Youth Pride Services had received a grant to do a leadership training on adultism. That training, part of a staff retreat, will take place later in the month. In a recent e-mail discussing its change of direction, representatives of YPS said that they had “turned the running of the day-to-day operations to young people.”