It is hard to overstate the courageous contributions students and teachers make towards building a functioning multiracial democracy. Notably, it was students who energized national movements like March for Our Lives, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock/No DAPL, Occupy Wall Street, and more. Eight year-old Mari Copney called national attention to the Flint Water Crisis that got President Barack Obama to visit Flint, Michigan in 2016. In the immediate aftermath of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, X González gave a viral rallying speech that foreshadowed new leadership around gun violence control. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers unions were often the stopgap that worked to ensure classrooms stayed open in line with public health best practices.
Audrey Kuo credits their time as a student and later, a youth worker, as foundational to their movement organizing today. They are a member of the 2024 Changemaker Authors Cohort, where they are working on their fiction manuscript.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Narrative Initiative:
How did you get started as a movement organizer?
Audrey Kuo:
I would say I started holding so-called “leadership roles” as a young person – I was nominated to student council as a first grader, and then kept getting re-elected as an incumbent. So I learned from a young age what it looked like to take people’s concerns to an elected body, and was on student council through my freshman year of college.
But my shift toward organizing as a means of building power to confront systems of oppression came directly from working in middle schools in Los Angeles. Being in the classroom was such a clear picture of the impacts and reality of systemic and structural oppression. Seeing my sixth graders being treated with carceral logics—treating sweet 11- and 12-year-old kids as if they were just numbers—is probably the most radicalizing thing that happened to me.
I was in classrooms with under-resourced teachers, and seeing a system that prioritized behavior management over learning.
It was really upsetting to see young people treated that way. Getting to work on leadership development programs and having deep conversations with young people really shifted my idea of what was possible with youth organizing and building power, and also what are ways that we learn outside of systems.
Narrative Initiative:
In what ways do you think youth are included in organizing, left out of organizing, and leading organizing?
Audrey Kuo:
I think, broadly speaking, young people are left out. It’s something that I both witnessed as a young person and as an adult recognizing that I had very different opportunities in my own youth.
Hearing other peer adults talk about young people was super tokenizing and didn't actually center young people's choices, except in tokenizing ways. And I think it's been moving out of the nonprofit industrial complex and being in actual organizing spaces where I'm actually seeing youth be centered and youth take leadership. If you look at the simultaneous criminalization and infantilization of young people in high school and on college campuses protesting genocide, you can see how the establishment aims to discredit young people’s work.
There are some nonprofits that hold youth organizing work well and with a lot of care. But very broadly speaking, yes, there's a lot of ageism in both directions, and a lot of disregard for not just young people, but all marginalized people.
There's always the presence of colonial mentalities and who knows best and acting on behalf of people, instead of letting those impacted lead, which does also relate to the work that I do as a consultant through Freedom Verses. My business partner and I are always bringing conversations back to who is the most impacted, and how are their voices being used? How is their leadership being developed, and how are they able to actually guide conversations and use their knowledge of and lived experience to guide strategic conversations and direction?
Narrative Initiative:
How do you concentrate on collective liberation through your work at Freedom Verses?
Audrey Kuo:
That's a great question. Freedom Verses gets asked to do a lot of diversity, equity, inclusion work, and I think very easily can be part of maintaining systems and structures of oppression. So we are trying to be attentive at Freedom Verses to recognize that the ways in which we view power and liberation inform all of the work that we do. And DEI is just one of the pathways that we approach our core belief that the most marginalized should always be at the center. How are we thinking about access, coming from a disability justice lens and the idea that all bodies matter, that all people, all body, minds, and all people matter? What are we doing to make spaces where people are able to be their whole selves, if they want to be? I think there's also room for people to not have to bring everything to the workplace because they're allowed to have privacy. And also, how are we thinking about all work as interconnected and chipping away at different parts of the imperial structures?
Narrative Initiative:
How are these questions around liberation and connections showing up in your fiction?
Audrey Kuo:
I think I'm just not interested in violence as spectacle, and this is actually a conversation I've got to have in this program. A lot of my time in the Cohort has been about trying to write a book about colonization in this particular historical moment— the genocide of Palestinians, the spectacle of anti-Black violence, of anti-trans violence. It's clear that showing the spectacle is not moving people, it’s actually desensitizing. I don't think it's necessary from a realism front. One of the main questions I've been grappling with this year, especially when I thought this book was YA, is how to write about colonization and the cruelty of it, without turning it into spectacle and without centering gore, when what I want to center is resistance and the ways in which people are pushing against colonization.
Where are the examples in what you're reading about how to be soft with each other, about how to repair harm, about how to heal from violence? Those are the themes that I'm most interested in, alongside interdependence and food justice and who gets to tell stories and understand our movements as ecosystems. I would like to be able to show the beautiful things that I've learned from organizing and working in community organizations and groups as a consultant over the course of my career. All the ways that we are soft and kind to one another are part of our revolutionary work, because it keeps us in community together and it keeps us able to resist.
You can find Audrey Kuo on Instagram.