About Us
Founded in 1994, Youth As Resources, (YAR) is a youth-led grant making, community organizing and leadership development non-profit organization that helps youth address our most critical community and institutional challenges on our own terms.
We believe that those who are directly affected by unjust systems and
structures have the best insight into how to change them and should
control the resources to do so. We are governed by a high functioning
Board of Directors currently comprised of 23 youth and young adults (ages14 -24).
OUR IMPACT
- Grant making: Completed 53 funding cycles distributing over a million dollars to 525 youth-led community organizing projects.
- Workforce development: Provided employment to 175 youth and young adults year-round and in the summer through our Task Force strategy. Task Force is the group of highly skilled and motivated YAR youth Board members who are employed to organize and train their peers to bring about community and institutional change.
- Leadership Development and Organizing: Facilitate school climate clubs Baltimore City High Schools and Middle Schools. We believe that schools can only be strengthened with consistent youth voice and organizing.
- Advocacy: Organized our peers to get the school district to institutionalize the school police report card, a student rating tool on school police/student interactions and relationships. Organized to have additional youth demands included in the school police polices and general orders around force and youth-led training. Added our strengthen to other grassroots organizations in successfully opposing the arming of school police officers.
- Disability Rights: Facilitated over 30 workshops for our peers, youth development practitioners and others around disability awareness, trauma and inclusion.
We couldn’t do it without you! Youth As Resources is supported by: The Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Baltimore Community Foundation, the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund, Go Start Small, the Self-Development of People, the Fund for Change, Betty Lee and Dudley P. Digges Memorial Fund, the Elbow Fund, fee-for-service and many individual donors.