Youth Voices Rethinking the War on Drugs: a case study of transnational youth engagement for sustainable social justice

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Putting youth at the center of youth development: Lessons learned from youth engagement

Proposal

So many of the complex problems that threaten the sustainability of our communities and planet at present have roots that exceed the boundaries of individual nation-states. Aware of the limitations that national solutions offer to such transnational problems, Catalyst is an innovative educational initiative that is tackling some of the Western Hemisphere’s most pressing problems by forging cross-border networks of analysis and action between youth. In this paper I will present Catalyst’s first educational intervention, Youth Voices Rethinking the War on Drugs, a non-formal educational intervention that brings together youth from across the Americas around the issue of drug policy reform. After giving a brief overview of the program and its curriculum, I will share the results from the first qualitative assessment of the program that was conducted during 2018 and raise some of the questions our team is presently grappling with. Finally, I will offer a glimpse of future programming and research agendas so as to open the door for possible future collaborations.

For its first educational program, Youth Voices Rethinking the War on Drugs, Catalyst chose to focus on drugs and drug policy. Rooted in global black-market supply chains, transnational organized crime networks, international policy frameworks, and the complex geopolitics of US interventionism, the War on Drugs is by its very nature a cross-border phenomenon. As such, any truly sustainable response to such a problem must also be transnational in scope. Moreover, due to the taboo nature of drugs, we identified a glaring lack of educational programming that takes a comprehensive and critical look at the sociocultural, geopolitical, economic, and historical currents that underpin drug policy and the structural roots of drug-related violence.

The first two sessions of Youth Voices Rethinking the War on Drugs have brought together a total of 37 adolescents from communities affected by the fallout of prohibitionist drug policies in ten different countries across the Western Hemisphere: from coca-producing communities in the Andes and Amazon regions, through to communities plagued by militarization and narco-violence in Central America and Mexico, right through to communities facing the realities of mass incarceration and the opioid epidemic in the US & Canada. During an intensive, bilingual, three-week summer school in Mexico, these students come together to study drugs and drug policy through a critical, transnational, social justice lens and are given space to connect the dots between their different lived experiences so as to gain a more complete picture of the drug war. Upon their return home, our students participate in a year-long mentorship program designed to accompany them through the process of designing and implementing a community project inspired by what they learned during the summer.

Catalyst’s innovative curriculum will be of interest to the comparative and international education community, and to the Youth Development SIG in particular. Inspired by Actor-Network-Theory and grounded by principles of critical and social justice pedagogy, we have developed a transdisciplinary, problem-based approach to tackling complex transnational phenomena in ways that are accessible and engaging to a broad range of learners. The Catalyst team is guided by a belief that with the proper support, adolescents are capable of confronting issues that are often deemed too difficult or complex for them to understand. Accordingly, we do not shy away from topics deemed “difficult” and embrace the challenge of developing curricula that allow students and educators to navigate complex and contentious waters within the classroom.

Catalyst’s conception of youth citizenship will also be of interest to those working in the field of comparative and international education and youth development. Catalyst takes seriously the capacity of young people from frontline communities to analyze and address the structural roots of the situations they are living. Our strategy involves creating access to spaces of transnational exchange and analysis wherein such students can come together and collectively recognize themselves as subjects who are both crossed by and have stakes in conversations surrounding the history and geopolitics of (neo)colonialism, the global economic system and international policy frameworks. Simultaneously, our strategy consists in empowering our students to recognize themselves as agents of change and equipping them with the tools, skills and support they need to start generating locally-sourced responses to the problem under study upon their return home.

As a two-year-old initiative, we are continually learning new lessons and developing new strategies to ensure that each iteration of our programs are better than the last. Here, I will share some of the successes and shortcomings that were identified through a preliminary qualitative assessment of Youth Voices Rethinking the War on Drugs 2018 and touch on some of the lessons we’ve learned with regards to: outreach; access; working in a bilingual learning environment; curriculum development; teaching strategies; and mentorship. I also look forward to tapping the expertise in the room by raising some of the questions that the Catalyst team is currently grappling with: how do we bring Catalyst scale while preserving the element of transnational, experiential learning that makes the program so special? How can we involve adult allies from our students’ community so that we are not unfairly placing the burden of action entirely on the shoulders of the youth? How do we measure the program’s impact? How can we better keep our students engaged from afar once they return to their communities?

Given the success of the first two sessions of Youth Voices Rethinking the War on Drugs, the Catalyst team is looking to bring our model to scale and to develop new programming around other issues key to the sustainability of communities across the Western Hemisphere, including climate justice and indigenous rights, migration, and sexual health and reproductive rights . I will conclude my paper by giving a sneak peek at our five year vision which includes migrating portions of our curriculum online, including teachers and principals as participants in our summer programs, and creating a seed grant program to help our students get their projects off the ground back in their communities.

Author

• Theo Di Castri, Catalyst