Youth Perspectives on Community Activism: From the Personal to the Political

Abstract

This chapter presents findings from the Toronto Tikkun Youth Project participants about their community and civic engagement activities. Data was gathered through interviews with sixteen participants who were between 16 and 24 years old and were of varied ethnic and racial backgrounds. The chapter contributes to literature that challenges notions of youth apathy and shows the varied ways in which youth contribute to the development of their communities and to civic society, generally. Data from the project show the different ways that youth define community and civic engagement, as well as the divergent forms and motivation for participating in these activities. Notions of belonging to their community, desire to contribute, challenge stereotypes, and create meaningful futures for themselves, were mentioned as some of the reasons youth chose to engage in community life. The youth voices echoed in this chapter can be used to combat the ongoing notions about youth apathy and the decreasing level of youth community engagement. The data also shows the need for a more systematic mapping of youth engagement and their contribution to society. In this chapter, we present findings from data collected with youth in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), as part of the broader Tikkun Youth Project (2014-2017), with sites in Canada, Kosovo, and South Africa. The discussion presented herein is part of ongoing public and scholarly debates about youth civic engagement or lack thereof. In this chapter, we offer narratives that 189 | Youth Perspectives on Community Activism describe youth community activities alongside youth discussions of empowerment, advocacy, and their growing career/academic pathways through and because of their activities in community spaces. We define community engagement as activities that "engage youth in the civic life of their communities" (Zeldin, 2004, p. 632) and as "how an active citizen participates in the life of a community in order to improve conditions for others or to help shape the community's future" (Adler & Goggin, 2005, p. 242). We also work with Berger's (2009) categories of engagement, while acknowledging his stance that the notion of "civic engagement" per se is muddled and lacks scholarly clarity. Berger retains the notion of "engagement," whilst distinguishing between political, social, and moral engagements and between engagement in (activity without attention); engagement by (attention without activity); and engagement with (attention and activity). We find these categories helpful in discussing the ways or levels of engagement that youth referred to as part of their community life. Cammaerts, Bruter, Banaji, Harrison, and Anstead (2014) reported that a significant portion of youth channel their political activities towards their social movement and civil organizing; therefore, any discussion about youth community engagement must intersect discussion on political participation. By including discussions on Tikkun youth's political engagement, we also strengthen the debates about the diverge...