Why We Do What We Do
We are the I Have A Future Movement!
VIDEO
Story of Our Transformation
Since we began in 2009, I Have A Future (formally known as the Youth Jobs Coalition) had worked to make a larger impact around structural racism and how it affects young people of color in MA. Despite our youth employment victories, the youth unemployment rate for low income young people of color is still double that of white teens. Despite the power we have built, young people of color are still being suspended and locked up at alarmingly high rates. IHAF is focused on two types of change - narrative change and policy change. We seek to use IHAF to change how young people of color are seen in Massachusetts - not as future criminals, but as the state's future workforce and leaders. We also focus on changing specific policies connected to juvenile justice, the school- to-prison pipeline, and the ways that young people of color are criminalized. This movement is also motivated by the historic moment we are in both nationally and across the Commonwealth. Throughout the nation, the BLM Movement has pushed people to think about structural racism in a way like never before and we hope that our narrative change work can build on that.
Our Theory of Change
Our goal is to create structural change related to the racist and economically unjust structures that criminalize and limit the employment opportunities of young people of color in Massachusetts. We believe that to create this structural change we must change the political weather around the issues of youth employment and youth criminalization by moving the public. We must change the dominant narratives surrounding how young people of color are seen. We must win specific policy victories so that young people of color are no longer oppressed by the criminal justice system and are instead given employment opportunities.
We will accomplish this change and build our movement through:
Training and engaging IHAF members,
Recruiting, training and engaging teens in local schools, churches and the wider community,
Engaging our personal networks,
Taking increasingly escalated direct action
Developing and spreading powerful stories about young people and the future they deserve,
Engaging with elected officials and other stakeholders,
Registering and engaging current and future voters.
Spiritual Transformation
Spiritual Transformation encourages us to understand more about how spirituality is connected to our lives and how to merge this understanding to our lives as community organizers.
IHAF believes in Spiritual Transformation as a process that happens when deep reflection takes place and we are able to heal from the pain and trauma we store as stress in our physical bodies.
For summer programming, we offer weekly workshops dedicated to spiritual transformation for the youth we employ on the local organizing team. The workshops include mindfulness and meditation, yoga, non-violent communication sessions, resonated storytelling, and team-building exercises.
Breonna Taylor Rally and Vigil
IMAGE GALLERY & PRESS COVERAGE
#ihaveafuturema
Massachusetts is one of the most economically unequal and racially unjust states in the country. The thousands of wealthy, white people who move to Massachusetts for college attend some of the best universities in the world and then have access to jobs in the growing fields of Life Sciences and high tech. Low-income young people of color grow up in a different state. Resources in their cities are poured into police harassment and the state invests in their incarceration. With our I Have A Future movement we are trying to tell the story that young people of color are marginalized in Massachusetts and #ihaveafuture is a way of posing a question to the institutions that are denying them that future - such as the criminal justice system. For most, their economic opportunities are incredibly limited as they are systematically denied access to good schools and to the state's growing fields and well-paying jobs.
The numbers make this clear - low-income young people of color face an unemployment rate that is five times higher than their middle class white peers. The City of Boston spends $4 million a year to support youth employment and $414 million a year on the police.
In order to change this, we must make it clear that this situation is fundamentally unjust and is caused by systemic racism. We call on the state, the private sector and the non-profit sector to invest in our future, not our downfall.
