Times they are a' changin'; a new wave of youth activism promises a broader approach to social change

Alternatives Journal, Summer, 1998 by Linda Geggie, Jacinda Fairholm

In the late 1990s social change activism may be in for a change. Traditional social movements - such as the environmental, labour, and women's movements - have usually focused public attention and their internal resources on their own core issues. Although there have been activists within each sphere who have worked to make links with like-minded people in other movements, social change actors have more or less stuck to promoting relatively narrow agendas.

But a new wave of activism has emerged, promising a broader approach to social change. This wave, loosely defined as the "sustainability movement", embraces a wide variety of issues such as poverty, environmental destruction and deteriorating communities. Activists in the sustainability movement see in these issues a common factor - unequal power relations among people and between people and the natural world. The strength of the movement is its ability to integrate a wide range of issues while addressing the structural inequalities that have led to our ecological crisis. For older movements, links with other issues were expected to serve a narrower agenda. For the sustainability movement, links to other issues is the core agenda.

The sustainability movement emerged in the late-1980s, coinciding with the publication of Our Common Future.(1) This was the final report of the UN Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Brundtland, then prime minister of Norway. While many criticized the report for not delving deep enough into challenging global economic liberalization, it introduced the concept of sustainability. Sustainability became a buzzword. The concept was rapidly popularized through novel mechanisms such as the internet and served as a central theme at a series of UN-sponsored summits that began with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and continued through to the 1996 Food Summit in Rome. As a sign of the growing interest in linking environmental, social and economic issues, groups such as Oxfam and Friends of the Earth began to step out of their traditional spheres of conservation and development organizing to embrace a broader approach to social change?

The evolution of the sustainability movement cannot be attributed to any one group in the social change arena. It is clear, however, that youth are playing a critical role in the growth of this movement.(3) Youth involvement in the movement found a springboard with the Youth '92 gathering in Costa Rica and the series of meetings leading up to the 1992 Earth Summit. The hundreds of organizers that participated in these conferences emerged with a commitment to build solidarity, engage in cross-cultural actions, develop new partnerships, plan well-rounded local initiatives, and encourage the participation of youth at local, national, and global decision-making levels.

LIFECYCLES

LifeCycles in Victoria, British Columbia, provides a rich example of the strategies youth groups are using to give life to the principles of the sustainability movement. Although the group began with the simple purpose of building a community garden, participants gradually came to see food as a link among pressing social, environmental, economic and health issues.

Thus, LifeCycles has moved to embrace a multifaceted approach - their vision now includes the need to increase access to locally grown food, raise awareness of food issues, increase urban agriculture and food production, and support community participation in food systems. Through workshops, public events, alternative marketing venues, training programmes, and local and global linkages, LifeCycles is working to bring food into the centre of a vision for healthy communities and environments.

The HomeGrown Gardening Program is a good example of how LifeCycles designs projects to tie issues together. Youth work with low-income families to create organic gardens in their backyards. This improves their access to healthy food and strengthens the connection between people and nature. Last year, 75 raised-bed gardens were created at over 25 sites. Gardens were also created at low-income, psychiatric, and seniors' housing sites. The youth involved in the programmes provided support for the new gardeners and also created a helpful gardening tips book, The Veggie Manual.

The participants in another LifeCycles and its community partners initiative, the Victoria Garden Training Project, are on social assistance and are mostly single parents under 24. They are working 604 square metres of raised beds for vegetable production and 93 square metres of greenhouse space for seedling production. On their individual plots they grow vegetables for their own use at home. The rest of the space is used in the production of vegetables for the Mustard Seed Food Bank. Greg Dowman, coordinator and trainer with the project says, "Gardening has proven to be an ideal vehicle to tackle low self-esteem issues at the same time as providing a unique skill set to the participant and ability to meet a basic need for nutrition."