[[link removed]]

THE YOUNG ORGANIZERS SURVIVAL CORPS  
[[link removed]]


 

Liz Theoharis and Sam Theoharis
February 3, 2026
TomDispatch
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Can the Young Wrest This Nation from the Clutches of Full-Throated
Authoritarianism? _

Dozens of Hillgrove High School students protest against the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement during a school walkout Friday.,
Jack Lindner [email protected]

 

Here’s a small suggestion from the two authors of this piece (us):
don’t be young in Donald Trump’s America if you can help it. Being
young in America right now means you’ll have to contend with
stalling job markets, rampant inflation, deep political and economic
instability, and impending climate disaster. If you point these things
out, you’re labeled a dangerous (and misguided) radical. If you’re
too busy trying to make ends meet for you and your family, you get
labeled as lazy, apathetic, and defeatist.

This is not to say that older generations are doing okay. They’re
not. But at least they’ll get to receive (and not just pay into)
social security
[[link removed]], which has
to make the fascism go down easier. Before we explain or suggest what
the young can do about all that, let us start by introducing
ourselves, since one of us is indeed still Gen Z. 

The authors of this piece are both co-workers and family members.
“Theohari,” as some of our colleagues like to call us. Liz is
Sam’s aunt and a long-time antipoverty organizer, mother, pastor,
and theologian. Sam is a recent college graduate, student organizer,
and law nerd. Recently, we were roommates at The Young Organizers
Survival Corps boot camp.

Gathering in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains on a 157-acre farm
[[link removed]]
owned and run by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), The Young
Organizers Survival Corps [[link removed]] kicked off a
six-month leadership development program to help prepare the next
generation of leaders to resist authoritarianism — something all too
crucial in Donald Trump’s America. A hundred young people converged
from more than 22 states, representing dozens of campuses and
grassroots organizations. Most of them had already been struggling
around issues of tenants’ rights, peace and militarism, immigrant
rights, abortion rights, mass incarceration, homelessness, healthcare
access, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and so much more in this increasingly
disturbed country.

In our days at that farm, we studied the hard-won lessons of past
social movements, trained young people in the tactics of nonviolent
resistance and grassroots organizing, practiced hands-on skills in
arts and culture, and learned new methods for and reasons to reclaim
the power of our faith traditions.

MOVEMENT EDUCATION

Haley Farm was the perfect setting for just such a boot camp. The farm
once belonged to Alex Haley
[[link removed]], the Pulitzer
Prize-winning author of _Roots_
[[link removed]]
and _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_
[[link removed]].
Both of those masterpieces educated millions of Americans about
African-American history and the importance of genealogy, as well as
radical political organizing and thought. Urging readers to
investigate their own heritage, Haley used storytelling to make the
country’s history accessible and inspiring.

The educational mission of Alex Haley and his farm has endured for
decades, long past the era in which he and so many others struggled to
discover their own political bearings in the Black freedom movement.
Since the Children’s Defense Fund bought the Haley Farm in 1994, it
has hosted trainings for CDF Freedom Schools, deepened and inspired
faith-based child advocacy, convened children’s authors and
librarians, hosted the “National Council of Elders
[[link removed]]” (where young activists and
civil rights veterans are able to strategize about the future), and
gathered working groups for the Black Community Crusade for Children
[[link removed]] and the
Black Student Leadership Network
[[link removed]] — and that’s just to
begin a list of its work. A couple of months back, for instance,
movement elders and Black organizers convened there for training in
how to resist this deepening Trumpian moment of growing violence and
authoritarianism.

For decades, the leafy folds of the Great Smoky Mountains in the
southern Appalachians have housed other epicenters of movement
training as well. Haley Farm is just towns away from the Highlander
Research and Education Center (once the Highlander Folk School),
another freedom training ground. Highlander was founded by popular
educator Myles Horton, whose thinking has shaped the work of
generations of grassroots leaders, including both of ours.

The Highlander Folk School first emerged as a cradle for organizing
during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Led by the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO [[link removed]]), it became the
official education arm of the industrial labor movement in the South.
Over the next two decades, it played an even bigger role in supporting
the civil rights movement. Highlander was where the “mother of the
movement,” Septima Clark
[[link removed]], first
experimented with the literacy programs that would become its
“citizenship schools
[[link removed]]”
— a network of some 900 community-based schools that taught tens of
thousands of Black Southerners to read and pass Jim Crow literacy
tests. Highlander was also where a young Rosa Parks studied before the
Montgomery Bus Boycott, where the civil rights anthem _We Shall
Overcome_
[[link removed]]
was popularized, and where generations of organizers and leaders —
especially those from the South and Appalachia — discovered the
world of activism into which they had been born.

At the Young Organizers boot camp recently, we adorned our classroom
with quotes from various movement elders and ancestors, including
Black Freedom movement giants who had spent time at Haley Farm and
Highlander. One quote from Highlander founder Myles Horton stuck out
to us for its prescience. In his autobiography, _The Long Haul_
[[link removed]]_,
_he writes:

“It’s only in a movement that an idea is often made simple enough
and direct enough that it can spread rapidly. Then your leadership
multiplies very rapidly, because there’s something explosive going
on. People see that other people not so different from themselves do
things that they thought could never be done… They’re emboldened
and challenged by that to step into the water, and once they get in
the water, it’s as if they’ve never not been there… During
movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go
from one community to the next, start a conversation in one place and
finish it in another.”

At our boot camp, it was clear that, amid much pain in this country,
young leaders could start conversations about hope and suggest new
strategies for community care and social protest. These conversations
were possible only because of the leaders’ clarity around
connection. From places like Richmond, Indiana, and Ithaca, New York,
to Atlanta, Georgia, and Portland, Oregon, they understood that, no
matter their backgrounds, they faced many of the same brutal
conditions.

A TURNING POINT?

Consider the social, political, and economic environment that’s
producing the multi-layered crises faced by today’s younger
generations. In this rich land of ours, about 45 million people
[[link removed].]
regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly 80 million
[[link removed]]
are uninsured or underinsured when it comes to healthcare, and close
to 10 million live
[[link removed]]
without housing or on the brink of homelessness, while our education
system continues to score near the bottom compared
[[link removed]]
to the other 37 countries in the Organization for Economic
Co-operation and Development. Even before Donald Trump reassumed
power, young people were affected disproportionately. One year into
his second term as president, he and his billionaire lackies have only
deepened this suffering.

Indeed, the conditions for discontent among young people are now
boiling over. Young workers, students, and children are poised to lose
more than any other age group from the Trump administration’s
“austerity” policies (which, of course, are anything but
“austere” for his billionaire buddies and him). Minors
[[link removed]] make up
two in every five people currently receiving Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, and the young will
disproportionately go hungry as that program is further eroded. (The
Trump administration is already threatening
[[link removed]]
to withhold such benefits from some Democratic-controlled states!) Low
economic growth, rising inflation, and deepening unemployment are
hurting everyone. However, young workers, regardless of their
educational background, are seeing a steeper rise in unemployment than
the average worker. Compounded by increasing costs of living, mounting
debt, and ever more ecological disasters, Gen Z
[[link removed]] and Gen Alpha
[[link removed]] are projected to be
distinctly worse off than their parents.

It’s been this very real pain and insecurity that the MAGA crew and
Christian nationalist organizers have successfully leveraged to build
a strong base among young workers and students. Organizations like
Turning Point USA are now leading massive organizing drives
[[link removed]]
on high school and college campuses, tapping into the real fear and
instability experienced by students and other young people. Those
groups fob off the real problems of this country (only intensified by
Donald Trump) on scapegoats like trans athletes
[[link removed]]
and Somali childcare workers
[[link removed]],
while offering an alluring vision of an authoritarian Christian
future. It matters little that, for most Americans, the vision on
offer will be impossible to achieve. And were it to be achieved, it
would benefit only the whitest, wealthiest, and “most” Christian
Americans. Therein lies both a contradiction and an opening.

Historically, we know that once fascism solidifies power, it can take
years of unyielding resistance to revive a democratic society. That
means we need mobilization now, while preparing for the fight already
at hand that’s likely to stretch on for years to come. Tending to
real-time crises while preparing for the long haul will require
leadership from many in both Gen Z and Gen Alpha. To stand any chance
of successfully fighting back, we must offer a competing and more
attractive vision of the future — one in which young people come to
believe that they will not only survive, but lead secure, fulfilling
lives. And on-the-ground organizing infrastructure must be built up to
make that vision a reality.

THE KIDS AREN’T ALRIGHT. BUT THEY COULD BE.

This moment offers us a heartbreaking reminder of just how vulnerable
most young people now are. The young organizers gathered at Haley Farm
talked about not being able to afford the basics of life, while some
who lived close to the farm asked us to bring leftover food to
community members and church friends because so many of them are now
living hand-to-mouth.

And such vulnerability and economic precarity are anything but the
exception. Dozens of young people indicated that they are hurting in
so many ways: by family members being abducted by ICE, by being unable
to acquire the healthcare they need, or even by being harassed by the
feds for protecting their neighbors from state violence. Avenues of
traditional politics feel inaccessible as a means of addressing so
many of their problems and, where accessible, regularly proved
critically insufficient.

We were astounded by the diversity of people and struggles in that
room, but we were even more surprised by the ease with which those
young leaders grasped their interconnectedness.  They hardly needed
convincing that some lessons one might draw from the difficulty of
running an abortion fund in the midst of attacks on women and the
right to choose could also apply to the needs immigrants have in
facing ICE’s militarization of their communities. They knew such
things to be true because many had lived through them.

Despite a seemingly endless barrage of think pieces bemoaning the
fickleness and apathy of the young, teenagers and young adults have
been at the forefront of every significant struggle of this moment. 
Indeed, young people have long taken leadership roles in bottom-up
social movements because they so often bear the brunt of our
nation’s social and economic inequalities, with few avenues for
relief in traditional American politics.

It’s an underappreciated reality of this century that young people
have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading on-the-ground
movements to ensure that Black lives do matter
[[link removed]], dealing vividly
with the onrushing horror of climate change
[[link removed]], while defending economic justice
and living wages [[link removed]], not to speak of abortion access
[[link removed]],
LGBTQ rights
[[link removed]],
and an end to gun violence
[[link removed]]. Just this month, inside
Dilley Detention Center in Texas, hundreds of imprisoned children led
their families in righteous protest
[[link removed]]
after learning of ICE’s kidnapping of five-year-old Liam Conejo
Ramos and his imminent transfer to Dilley.

The stakes are only getting higher for those of us coming of age at a
moment when this country is changing from something like a democracy
to Donald Trump’s chilling autocratic version of America. Yet if we
know anything from decades of antipoverty organizing, it’s that the
unfettered imaginations, moral clarity, and capacity for decisive
action of young Americans can always triumph over the misguided
political liaisons of their elders. As our communities struggle
righteously to wrest this nation from the clutches of full-throated
authoritarianism, isn’t it time to cultivate the untapped might of
those potentially dispossessed generations?

We need their courageous leadership now more than ever. We have no
time to lose!

==

Copyright 2026 Liz Theoharis and Sam Theoharis

_Follow TomDispatch on __Twitter_
[[link removed]]_ and join us on __Facebook_
[[link removed]]_. _

LIZ THEOHARIS, a _TomDispatch_ regular
[[link removed]], is a theologian,
ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Director of the Kairos
Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice
[[link removed]] and co-chair of the Poor People’s
Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
[[link removed]], she is the co-author of the new
book _You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the
Movement to End Poverty_
[[link removed]]
and author of _Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor_
[[link removed]].
Follow her on BlueSky at @liztheoharis.kairoscenter.org
[[link removed]].

SAM THEOHARIS is the Director of Communications for the Kairos Center
with a background in data communication, public policy research,
social media management, and decarceral community organizing. Prior to
working for Kairos, Sam worked as a research associate at Brown
University’s Justice Policy Lab studying the racial and political
economy of prison proliferation and at Stop Torture Rhode Island
organizing students to advocate for an end to solitary confinement.
Sam is also a hobbyist editor/ghostwriter with a distance running
habit.

* Young Organizers Survival Corps; Leadership Development; Alex
Haley;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]