OUR 15 BELIEF STATEMENTS &

DEMANDS
1. Every young person and their family deserve to receive quality
healthy care. Including quality prenatal health care.
2. Every young person and their family deserves a community that
is responsive and in tune with their emotional and mental health
needs.
3. Every young person deserves centers where they can be
creative, respected, and safe. They deserve sanctuaries where they
know their spiritual quests and desires for a deeper purpose, and
ultimately self-realization can be attended to. Relatedly, every
young person deserves to be regularly taught and shown the
multitude of ways they can positively express and expand
themselves in areas such as music, sports, writing, poetry,
performing arts, and social justice.
4. Every young person deserves to know that past trauma in their
lives can be used to expand their souls power and potential and be
utilized to forge meaning and fulfillment.
5. Every young person deserves for the law to work for them, not
against them.
Relatedly, every young person deserves to know that missteps and
mistakes can be part of their continued growth and advancement
and not their destiny.
6. Every person deserves an education that teaches them to do
more than just conform and memorize. They deserve an education
that allows them to examine themselves and both our society and
world in a critical and socially conscious light. Relatedly, they
deserve to realize their unique and essential ability to contribute to
social change and to better their community.
7. Every young person deserves deep connections with adults who
can be trusted, depended on, and looked to as role models. Every
youth deserves good parents, ministers, teachers, friends, coaches,
mentors, and ultimately unconditional love.

8. Every young person and their family deserves to be regularly

taught and shown that the constant and overwhelming stress
around them can be managed in positive constructive ways.
9. Every young person and their family deserves to have quality
food to eat when they are hungry.
10. Every young person deserves for others to see the best in them,
not the worst.
11. Every young person deserves to experience the world outside
their neighborhood. They deserve to experience nature- to know
what it feels like to be on top of a mountain or to have feet in the
sand of a paradisal beach. They deserve to experience other
cultures- to know that differences make us radiant and beautiful.
They deserve to experience the potential their lives hold- to know
what it feels like to be in the offices of one of the most powerful
companies in the world.
12. Every motivated, hardworking, and ready to learn individual
deserves systems of training to help them learn valuable digital,
business, and communication skills so they can advance their
current job prospects.
13. Every community deserves not to be completely abandoned by
our economic system and big business.
14. Every community deserves to have numerous quality
businesses owned by members of the community. Relatedly, every
community deserves to have a thriving environment of open doors
and options for entrepreneurship and business training.
15. Every big business should and can have social mission weaved
into their mission. More companies should be incentivized to follow
a concept as simple as companies like TOMS or Warby Parker where
product and capital is directly donated to those in need as a result
of every sale.

Young people, even in the midst of a society rife with fear,

anger, and hatred, exhibit a great range of spiritual, artistic,
and intellectual powers, as well as extraordinary resiliency.
For years Ive sat across from convicts and kids, some of

whom have done some terribly destructive things, helping

draw out their poetic and artistic spirit. Ive looked them
straight in the eye and said, I can see your beauty. And
just those words, minimal though they are, have allowed
some of the most hardened psychic shellsmostly
constructed out of the sinews of their survival strategiesto
crack. Perhaps these shells will close up when I leave. But if
the intellectual, social, political, economic, and spiritual
forces were attuned to these needs, I believe that shell
would be hard pressed to continue imprisoning the demons
within. Few ever do this kind of work. Few have had a large
enough imagination.
- Luis J. Rodriguez; Best Selling Author & Youth
Activist