Why YATC? Why now?

As a group with more than 30 years of collective experience working with young adults in traditional service learning programs, we have seen the landscape change as numbers decline and enrollment decreases. As we consider the reasons for such shifts, we’ve noticed something missing in that landscape –  young adult transformation unequivocally rooted in justice, anti-racism, and collectivism. Many service learning programs follow outdated models, based on the Doctrine of Discovery -based “mission” years that often cause more harm for local communities than they provide help. Young adults aren’t interested in those models anymore– they want real, transparent, and challenging opportunities to transform themselves in ways that impact them the rest of their lives, and empower them with tools to engage in a lifetime of justice work. 

Therefore, we see enrollment down not as “young adults don’t want transformation” but “these programs aren’t offering what is necessary in this moment.” So we seek to build a collective that challenges young adults in the new ways they are seeking and responds to the challenges of this moment.

And what is this moment? Climate chaos, ongoing but largely ignored pandemic, rise of fascism around the world, economic scarcity, etc etc. The world needs people who are creative, critically aware, and committed to justice. Young adults very often have lived knowledge from their lives and academic knowledge from their schooling - we envision a way to bring these things together in a living laboratory of service and community that empowers young adults to translate their knowledge into embodied action, build skills for engaging critically with capitalism, and grow into a lifetime movement toward individual and collective liberation.

Why collective? Why locally responsive? 

This work is inherently and essentially collaborative. We seek to model that in our structure, creating a collective that can more effectively recruit, fundraise, and support programs engaged in transforming young adults. We strive to center the voices of our communities, so that future work is based in the hopes and goals of local contexts.

Our goal is not to provide one unified program, it is to create a network that encourages localized community support and change through investing in young adults. Our values are guiding both the questions we’re asking and how we’re seeking the answers - bringing questions to local leadership, working to both create a “central” space for resourcing local programs and maintain the primacy of local, context-informed leadership and knowledge.

YATC has grown out of a group of transformation programs that are faith-based, and many of our programs root their work in the spiritual mandate to live lives of justice and loving our neighbor. We explore how our faith commitments inform our work, and how our experience informs our faith.

Many of us in this work feel called to it by a God who invites us into justice, into loving our neighbor, into committing ourselves to a life of communal wholeness. We also know that the name of God has been used to hurt and exclude. We strive to include and build a more loving community in all we do.

We invite both members (residential transformation programs) and partners (mission-aligned transformation organizations across a wide spectrum) to be collaborators and co-conspirators in this work —we are better when we build mutually supportive and sustaining relationships, and they don’t all have to look the same!