About Youth Rising Up

Youth Rising Up Leadership Development Program is an emerging 501(c)3 that targets Milwaukee area youth ranging from 14-25. We are youth organizing youth to create a powerful platform to inform and educate communities and incite people to ACTION.

We use our various platforms to bring diverse people together with dialogue, ultimately creating a fellowship of brothers and sisters. We ask each other "Y-R-U?" which challenges us to question our purpose. We strive to develop our own personal mission statements to share with each other with the goals of acquiring self awareness, self efficacy, and the ability to teach and inspire others.

At our meetings, we practice organization and structure and create leadership positions for participating youth. We talk about trending topics, current affairs, and news that did not make the news. YRU makes these topics interesting to the young audience and engages youth in a way that makes them not just want to care, but feel like they need to care.

YRU understands that YOUTH ORGANIZING YOUTH EQUALS POWER and that a unified youth movement in Milwaukee is missing. We plan and sponsor community events, fundraising events, and educational service learning projects. We also collaborate and partner with other community initiatives and youth programs.

Some of our primary topics of discussion and action include:

Reducing mass incarceration-restorative justice and alternatives to jail

Increasing job accessibility and job opportunities

Civic engagement-understanding politics and its impacts

Policy reform

In addition to our meetings and occasional events, we have a weekly hour slot on Riverwest Radio WXRW-LP 104.1 fm, a community supported radio station. Every week features new guests that are engaged in doing good things in the community. The youth enjoy this program and learn how to become a DJ, facilitate a live discussion, and run a radio show behind the scenes.

Aside from the radio show and weekly meetings, we host monthly community dialogue events that we call Youth Community Brainstorming Conferences. We also occasionally perform neighborhood clean ups, assist with elder care and comfort, mentor and tutor. We have a community garden on 19th and Chambers that we tend to during garden season, and a fitness program called YRU BLK FIT that meets weekly.