RYSE’s annual Be a Kid! fundraiser is made possible by our generous sponsors. This year, we are honoring our lead sponsors by sharing a little bit about how each organization collaborates with RYSE. We are grateful for the contributions made by our community to help us create a space to benefit our youth.

A mid-March conversation with RYSE’s Community Health Program Manager, Fahima Zaman, was filled with an electricity reflective of the dedicated, forward-thinking energy felt at our Health Justice Center. Threaded into RYSE’s core values, we took some time to discuss health for femme-identified youth, including cis, trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming youth in 2024. A generation is coming of age amidst an old struggle in a new landscape and Fahima noticed one pattern: members just want access to knowledge.

This Black Future’s Month we reflect on Black joy, laughter, healing, togetherness, rage, creativity, community, solidarity, food, fashion…all things past, all things present, and imagined futures. If you strike up a conversation with young people here on campus, you are bound to hear about their dreams: some explain theirs at a whisper, some exclaim theirs loud enough for the area to hear, and regardless of which, this expression is why we’re here. Young people and their futures are unwritten and full of possibility…

Dear Beloved Community,

As we reflect on this past year, we are reminded that we are all healing. 2023 was a year upon years of new experiences and relationships, of joyful music and creative leadership, of profound loss and grief within our community and world, and of navigating and working to reshape the systems we live among.

Young people's experience at RYSE, the relationships between members and with staff, and whether young people feel safe, loved, listened to, powerful and like they belong are the most important measures of whether RYSE is successful in meeting our Theory of Liberation goals. 

Every year, RYSE asks young people to share their feedback - this informs our programs and work in the year ahead. 

In May 2023, for the first time since we have been back in person in RYSE's new campus, 86 members shared their opinions.

As RYSE honors our ancestors for Dia De Los Muertos, we invite the community to participate in our digital Altar here. On our hearts and minds in the RYSE community are the members and staff we lost over the years, the ancestors listed below, as well as the community members whose names never got lifted up. From November 1st through the 10th we will have an altar in the space for community members to visit and add the names of their loved ones who have passed away.

RYSE centers the liberation of  all Black, Indigenous, Youth of Color. We believe that no one is free until all Trans, Black, Indigenous Youth of Color are free - locally and globally.  

According to a 2022 WHO report 2.17 million people live in the occupied territory of the Gaza Strip. Within the occupied Palestinian territory, children aged 0-17 comprise 44% of the population; youth aged 18 to 29 comprise 22% of the population. 

This means 66% of those being targeted by bombs are children and young adults. 

We launched the Fall season at RYSE with more workshops, activities, and events including OUR 8TH ANNUAL LA FERIA DE SEPTIEMBRE!! Many many appreciations to all who participated. This year’s theme was In La'K’ech: You Are My Other Me, based on the poem to the left by Luis Valdez. And appropriately so, the his words emblematic of the togetherness RYSE fostered this past month as well as the start of Hispanic Heritage Month. You are my other me. If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself. If I love and respect you, I love and respect myself. Words of togetherness, of community. This sentiment expresses so well what this is all about, how we are all linked, and the commitment we must all have toward each other, in safe space. Scroll below to see how our Fall season kicked off!

“Young people are whole already. Let’s start there.

RYSE is guided by our Theory of Liberation to ask how are schools and education systems responsive to young people's needs and priorities. Our Education & Economic Justice (EEJ) department’s holistic approach to this question has only deepened over time. We do not speak for youth, we instead figure out what tools they need in order to speak for and advocate for themselves. Because young people know what they need. They are already whole...”