Description

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A powerful guidebook for healing and resistance for young girls and gender-expansive youth of color on how to unite, heal, protect, and lead their communities.

Turn Up For Freedom helps youth leaders hone their skills to build personal, emotional, and collective freedom. It centers youth leadership through principled positions, such as being a healer, a protector, a scholar-activist, a community organizer, and being radically joyful, in order to build personal emotional and collective freedom. Through memoir, story telling, and political education, E Morales-Williams grounds these principles in the material experiences of working-class youth and reflects on the possibilities and challenges in practicing them as a collective in under-resourced communities.

These were the principles of leadership and lessons learned from a Black and Brown girls and gender expansive youth-collective called TUFF Girls (Turning Up for Freedom), based in North Philadelphia. Morales-Williams carefully guides young readers through the challenging issues that confront their lives, helping to identify the traumatic impact that structural violence has on Black and Brown communities, restoring traditions of healing and collective care, and recentering leadership in community as an abolitionist and decolonizing practice. Turn Up For Freedom calls on young people to unite, heal, protect, and lead.

About the Author

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E Morales-Williams is a Black queer nonbinary organizer from East Harlem and the Bronx, based in Philadelphia for the past fifteen years. They are a long-time youth worker, an abolitionist, and a survivor of sexual assault and police violence. Morales-Williams is an award-winning teacher and founder of TUFF Girls, a founding member of the national organization Black Youth Project 100, and was the Program Coordinator for me too International, where they supported programming and facilitated the Survivor Leadership Training Program.