YOUTH MAKING A CHANGE
(Y-MAC) is the youth organizing project at Coleman Advocates for Children & Youth. Since 1991, Y-MAC has been a dynamic, multi-ethnic, youth-led organization that builds the leadership and power of low-income youth and young people of color in San Francisco.
Nationally recognized for our groundbreaking work over the last 13 years, Youth Making a Change has become one of the most consistent and effective youth-led advocacy and organizing programs in the country. Since 1991, we have intensively trained over 200 youth leaders, engaged over 50,000 youth in the civic education/mock election project YouthVote, provided peer-led leadership skills and political education trainings to thousands of students, and helped to build a vibrant community of youth activists in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
We are dedicated to making sure youth voices are heard wherever decisions about young people are being made! We have organized to increase young people's participation in city policy-making, by creating the San Francisco Youth Commission and by getting funding and stronger representation for the SFUSD Student Advisory Committee. We have advocated for youth-led citywide services like YouthLine and YouthSpace, and were one of the first groups in San Francisco to organize large citywide youth events to bring young people from around the city together.
As Coleman's youth-led youth organizing arm, Y-MAC has an impressive number of organizing victories: winning $1.4 million in annual city funding to create 7 school-based health centers; winning a school district "Safe Schools" policy that regulates police on school campuses; taking an active role in the youth-led fight to defeat Proposition 21; getting the School Board to add a second Student Delegate who is democratically elected by students through Y-MAC's annual YouthVote project, and winning a groundbreaking juvenile hall policy reform that has already reduced San Francisco's juvenile hall population by one-third!