The newest Mapping the Left network is the Student/Youth Training Network. While this new network is not an ‘education’ network in the sense of public schools and higher education, it feeds on the liberal agenda pushed in public schools and colleges and universities across the state.
The lessons learned in North Carolina’s public schools and colleges indoctrinate students with ideas from the progressive agenda: extremist notions of racial diversity; the need for safe spaces in lieu of freedom of speech; the elimination of gender roles; the drumbeat about purported institutional racism; white privilege and guilt; the importance of the child over parents and family; explicit sex education demonstrations; and assignments that promote Islam and debase Christianity. The organizations in the Student/Youth Training Network use the “lessons” learned by students of public and higher education as a foundation to begin to build the practical skills liberal activists employ to push their agenda, such as community organizing, voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts.
Included in the new network are groups like UnifourOne, an organization out of Greensboro that claims to help and mentor at-risk youth. This organization appears to use the young people drawn into the group to help in voter registration efforts. As part of their “Youth Engagement” mission, they focus on voter registration, get-out-the-vote (GOTV), community organizing and training. Always claiming that it is non-partisan, UnifourOne imposes the language and tactics of the activist Left on the youth they engage. The group indicates on their website that “community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless.”
Then there is the Youth Organizing Institute (YOI), a group organized in 2010 to protest the newly- elected Republican majority of the Wake County Education Board. Its website suggests it was created to support low-income youth and youth of color and to ‘oppose the education policies that would harm them.’
What YOI actually did was join protests that disrupted the county board meetings. Interesting to note, the leader of those protests was none other than William Barber, the president of the NC NAACP who is best known as the leader of the ‘Moral Monday’ protests in 2013. The Wake County Board of Education protests turned out to be a breeding ground for the Monday events and a training ground for young activists who learned how to chant, sing and organize the protests.
Since 2010, YOI has changed its emphasis. Today it offers ‘grounding in an analysis of systems of oppressions and an understanding of the history of grassroots resistance and struggle.’ Its leaders now ‘focus on school pushout and discipline, LGBTQ rights, and the struggles faced by undocumented youth.’ YOI hosts a series of activities and events such as Teen Convening, Queernival, and Freedom School. The Freedom School is where YOI “covers topics from environmental racism to school to prison pipeline, sexism to homophobia, indigenous land reclamation to reproductive justice and much more.”
It seems that most of YOIs focus is either on LGBTQ or related issues, but a current campaign is to ‘Get Cops Out of Schools.’ The Institute believes that Safety Resource Officers should be eliminated from all public schools in North Carolina.
Many of the Student/Youth Training groups receive their funding from the same mega-foundations that fund the rest of the progressive activist groups in North Carolina. Z. Smith Reynolds and the Triangle Foundation lead the way in sustaining these groups. You can also find funders like the Tides Foundation, which gave UnifourOne $60,000 in 2012.
By using Mapping the Left in our research, we discovered that Elena Everett is a key figure in the new Student/Youth Training network. Everett has connections to many of the groups in the new network. She is the Director of the Southern Vision Alliance (SVA) a group closely linked to YOI. This is what Mapping the Left has to say about SVA:
“The Southern Vision Alliance (SVA) is a group conceived of in 2014. The group sees themselves as a grassroots intermediary organized for the purposes of providing infrastructure, capacity building, and assistance to youth-centered programs and organizations. They also engage in providing stipends,trainings, and other resources to youth. Other groups SVA is associated with are NC HEAT and the Youth Organizing Institute.”
Everett is also the founder and director of Action for Community in Raleigh (an organization based in Durham) and linked to YOI also. According to Mapping the Left,
Action for Community in Raleigh (ACR) was founded by Elena Everett and is a member of the Blueprint NC Network as a community organizer group. Blueprint NC is the left-wing group that gained infamy with their memo to ‘eviscerate, mitigate, litigate, cogitate and agitate’ the state’s leadership in 2013.The group ‘seeks to enhance efforts to achieve social economic racial and environmental justice’ and is closely aligned with NC Vote Defenders, NC Heat and the Youth Organizing Institute. Interesting to note, ‘Action for Community in Raleigh’ is based in Durham.
Moreover, Everett is closely associated with several of the major liberal activist groups in the overall network in Mapping the Left. Formerly a program assistant for the Institute for Southern Studies, Everett also held a position in communications with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and is currently a Blueprint NC board member.
The Mapping the Left Student/Youth Training network will attempt to expose the indoctrination practices of the Left in its effort to create the next generation of progressive activists. The rising generation of Leftist activists will soon learn that they can get what they want through bully tactics and screaming foul. We have watched the ‘adult’ activists wield their power through rallies and protests. Even though they represent a small number of citizens, their tactics have intimidated lawmakers and government administrations throughout the state.
Click here to visit Mapping the Left to find out more about the newest network of liberal/progressive groups, because learning more about them is the first step to stopping their agenda.
Civitas would like to thank the users of the Mapping the Left website who contact us with information and even emails about the groups in Mapping the Left, that’s where we got the Kick Out Cops Not Kids ‘artwork’.
Civitas is familiar with many of these student/youth groups, every so often they stop by the office to give us a chant or two. Here is a blog with video from October 2010 and here is a great picture of a protest from 2013.
