ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ongoing efforts to determine the meaning and potential impact of “youth organizing” in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Here, youth organizing is in a nascent, transitional stage focused primarily on youth service and youth development. This chapter will identify and analyze a small yet noticeable critical impulse toward empowering youth—particularly youth of color—to make institutional and structural change. While Minneapolis and St. Paul are two distinct urban areas containing their own unique histories and constellations of neighborhoods and communities, this chapter will consider the two cities together as a metropolitan region. In this region, as in other parts of the country, structural inequalities such as poverty, cutbacks in public schools, urban gentrification, suburban sprawl, criminalization, and incarceration have left many youth—particularly poor youth, immigrant youth, and youth of color—supermarginalized from power and resources in their neighborhoods.
