The relentless flashpoints of 2020 ignited a searing flame that laid bare injustice and lit a path for collective resistance. For Yana Batra, then 16, it was a moment that sparked a movement.
“That year in 2020 and everything that came with it was so pivotal,” said Batra, now a senior at Georgia Tech.
“You saw immediately what was possible when people mobilized in contrast with what a failure of leadership truly does to the country, and that includes everything from COVID-19 to the denial of it and the spread of misinformation to the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of police,” she said. “It was really a year of startling contrast of how much our system is not working for the people and how strong people are when we can come together around issues that are impacting us.”
Georgia’s high-stakes elections that same year energized some young people into electoral organizing for the first time.
Batra said it was one of the first times that “many of us were engaged with politics in a way that felt hopeful.”
“That election was an opportunity to prove again that Georgia is a battleground state, and we can win,” she said.
The momentum of those victories, set against the shock of the Jan. 6 insurrection just a day later, was a motivating force for Batra and other young Georgians to form the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition (GYJC), a multiracial grassroots movement. What started as a few high school and college students organizing together has grown into a powerful nonprofit organization.
GYJC boasts more than 10,000 members in 123 of Georgia’s 159 counties, employs full-time staff and has become a key player in the state’s political landscape. After the election successes in 2021, GYJC organizers turned their attention to the state legislative session and the subsequent redistricting process.
“We knew that young people’s voices, especially young people of color, are often silenced during the redistricting process,” said Batra, now GYJC’s chief of staff. “Our voice and our vote are not valued by the people in power much of the time.”
Early visits to the Georgia State Capitol helped them figure out the basics, like tracking bills and navigating the process to speak on the record. Now GYJC runs a robust legislative program, bringing dozens of students to the Capitol every week during the session to meet with lawmakers and testify in committee hearings.
“It was a moment of realizing how, in some ways, easy it is to shake things up when you’re a young person,” Batra said. “Just your presence is impactful and powerful.”
Isabel Otero, the Georgia policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, collaborates with GYJC’s organizers and has witnessed the impact of their collective power at the state Capitol.
“To see young people show up in these spaces having developed their expertise and clearly explain an issue and what they want done about it is very, very powerful to witness,” Otero said.
Expanding with purpose
In 2022, GYJC established a 501(c)(4) organization to increase the organization’s lobbying power. In 2023, GYJC hired its first full-time staff member, Executive Director Melody Oliphant.
GYJC has since expanded its political organizing, developing the Young People’s Platform with input from hundreds of young Georgians. The campaign aims to ensure Georgia’s youth have access to fully funded public schools, affordable housing, health care, mental health support and inclusive education. The platform also calls for meaningful solutions to the gun violence and climate crises and ending overcriminalization of young people of color and young people who have disabilities.
“I would say our No. 1 goal is to build relationships with everyday Georgians and invite young Georgians into this work who have felt left out or left behind by politics,” Oliphant said.
In 2024, GYJC organized the largest youth engagement program in the history of the state. Collectively, young people knocked on 238,983 doors, made 285,887 phone calls and collected 14,243 pledge-to-vote cards from young voters across Georgia, Oliphant said.
“Through that work, we helped build an electorate where voters under the age of 30 were the only age group to see a turnout increase over the 2020 election while every other age group saw a decline,” she said.
A powerful plan
The Georgia Youth Justice Coalition’s (GYJC’s) organizers have identified a few keys to building power through their collective, drawing on wisdom from generations of community organizing they believe will sustain their movement. At the forefront are these strategies:
Through the cultivation of a network of local, state, regional and national partners, GYJC has been instrumental in securing early voting locations on college campuses and protecting the voting rights of out-of-state students. GYJC’s victories also include helping restore tens of millions of dollars to repair Title 1 schools and ensure compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, stop the passage of Georgia’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill and similar legislation and secure representative redistricting maps in Gwinnett County.
A model for community building in Cobb County
One of the most striking examples of GYJC’s power in action has been in the Cobb County School District (CCSD). In recent years, the school board has faced a series of high-profile controversies and legal challenges from the SPLC and partners, exposing patterns of censorship, racial discrimination and silencing of dissent.
Educator Katie Rinderle’s dismissal after reading a book that challenges gender norms and stereotypes to her class, restrictions on student speech at board meetings and resistance to mask mandates during COVID-19 all drew sharp criticism for disproportionately harming students of color and LGBTQ+ students. The SPLC and partner organizations represent Rinderle. GYJC, the Georgia Association of Educators, another teacher and a local trans student are now also plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit challenging anti-LGBTQ+ book bans in Georgia.
Concerns over fair representation and voting rights have brought Cobb County’s stakes into sharper focus. Legal challenges to the district’s 2022 school board redistricting map suggested that Black and Latinx residents were purposefully underrepresented, and a federal judge blocked the map’s use. The state Legislature later adopted a new map.
Former CCSD student and GYJC organizer Marli English said school board leaders attempted to silence youth through policies restricting student speech at meetings, including making last-minute changes to public comment locations and enforcing a rule that barred people under 18 from speaking without a guardian. Students also learned that district leaders were punishing educators at their schools for supporting their activism, English said.
CCSD has steadfastly attempted to silence educators, families, community members and, especially, students who speak out against racism and discrimination, said Ava Bussey, a former CCSD student who is now at Georgia Tech and serves as GYJC’s advocacy coordinator.
“It is very clear that they want to create an aggressive environment towards students who want to speak up in Cobb,” she said. “They do not want to hear from the people most impacted by their policies and decisions.”
Michael J. Tafelski, interim deputy legal director for the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team, began observing Cobb County school board activities as a parent a few years ago. He quickly realized GYJC and the racial justice organization Stronger Together were at the center of organizing resistance to inequitable policies in the district.
“There is a long history of white supremacy and racism on the board, and local organizers have been working for years in Cobb to fight it,” Tafelski said. “But I kept hearing frustration that organizers lacked local legal support.”
Local organizers, advocates, GYJC members and the SPLC’s lawyers began advocating together at school board meetings. The collaboration gave the young organizers a new level of confidence and strategic capability, while the students’ perspectives, stories and organizing bolstered the SPLC’s legal strategies.
“We grew to be as strong as we did because we had the legal support from SPLC, all the while being able to support SPLC’s legal work through our own organizing,” Bussey said.
In Cobb County, the public pressure from student organizers, combined with legal support from the SPLC, created a dynamic the school board could not ignore.
“The Cobb County school board and the superintendent will not listen unless they are forced to listen,” Tafelski said. “The organizing work, coupled with the legal support, creates the perspectives and voices for the board to hear, and it also has the power to force them to listen.”
The work in Cobb County has become a model, Batra said, for what GYJC could achieve by organizing a multiracial, intergenerational local coalition with the help of legal advocacy partners.
“The work that we have been able to do with organizations like SPLC with GYJC creating a coalition of students, parents, community members and teachers, and having SPLC come in and be the backbone of that with legal advocacy, I think has been so incredible, and certainly something that we want to see play out in other counties,” Batra said.
Sustaining the movement
GYJC’s young organizers have identified a few keys to build power through their collective, drawing on generations of community organizing wisdom they believe will sustain their movement. Their strategies include making activism accessible to young people with fellowships and staff positions, education and trainings; decentralizing leadership; centering those most affected in all work; building meaningful relationships and community; and using narrative work to change perceptions and amplify the stories of young people.
Oliphant, GYJC’s executive director, said the organization has also broadened its focus beyond high school and college students to actively engage with all young people.
“We intentionally go out to places where we think people are likely to say to us, ‘Oh, I don’t care about politics,” Oliphant said. “So often civic engagement organizations or nonprofits are only organizing the people who are already raising their hands to be part of the work. They’re not organizing new people into the movement, and that’s something that we are really trying to deliver on.”
Saif Hasan, GYJC’s former membership coordinator, said the organization’s power lies in its unwavering commitment to actively building a broad, interdependent and diverse collective of organizers.
“It’s really important to have a bunch of different people coming together when we do this type of organizing work,” he said.
English, the former CCSD student, is now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She said leaving the state for college made her realize how special GYJC is for young people.
“I can say from experience being on a college campus in an era of organizing and activism, there’s something that GYJC is doing in terms of bringing people in and empowering them that really is unique,” English said. “It’s hard to describe, but I don’t think it exists in a lot of other places.”
For the young organizers at the heart of the movement, the work is deeply personal and transformative. They are building a political home for themselves, proving yet again that young people have the vision, strategy and courage to lead.
“We are certainly not the first group of young people to organize around an issue,” Batra said. “But I think that it’s really important that here in Georgia we stood up and said we’re going to build a political home for young Georgians of every race and every background. We get to make decisions together about our futures and the future of Georgia, too.”
Image at top: Georgia Youth Justice Coalition co-founder Yana Batra, a student at Georgia Tech, poses in front of “Watermark,” an art installation by Deanna Sirlin at the Georgia Tech Library’s Crosland Tower. (Credit: Myisa Plancq-Graham)