The Power in the Room Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment

Following in the rich traditions in African American cooperative economic thought, educator-organizer Jay Gillen describes the Baltimore Algebra Project (BAP) as a program in which students are paid to tutor their peers in disciplines such as algebra, drama, music, and language instruction. The young people of the BAP and similar programs have structured their work under this ideal model as paid employees in an enterprise they run for themselves. Gillen argues that this is a proactive political, economic, and educational structure that builds relationships among and between students and their communities. It's a structure that meets communal needs--material and social, economic and political--both now and in the future. Through the story of the Baltimore Algebra Project, readers will learn why youth employment is a priority, how to develop democratic norms and cultures, how to foster positive community roles for 20-30 year-olds, and how to implement accountability from below. Foreword by Robert P. Moses, author of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project.