Earlier this year, The Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan’s (CFSEM) Youth Advisory Council (YAC) announced $125,000 in funding to support several organizations working on youth and racial justice programs.

The programs work to:

• Educate and engage youth through youth-led dialogues against racism and injustices.

• Empower immigrant and refugee youth.

• Elevate the voices of Black and African American youth who have Autism.

• Expand efforts to develop Southeast Michigan student voices through journalism.

• Engage youth in racial justice research opportunities. 

The community foundation recently shared a video highlighting two members of CFSEM’s YAC discussing the grants which are focused on advancing racial equity. 

In a virtual interview, Gracie Grady age 16, and Akhila Mullapudi age 17, spoke with Harmony Rhodes, program associate at CFSEM about these grants.

“We recognize that the racial divide in our country was prevalent and youth wants to do something about it,” Mullapudi said. “We wanted to expand our grant (making) to include projects that demonstrated both youth leadership and working towards easing the racial tensions in our community.”

According to Rhodes, this was one of the largest grant cycles in their YAC's history. 

“We worked really hard to make sure that our grants were going towards organizations that are working towards racial justice,” Grady said.

Mullapudi shared that the work is important to build youth leadership skills.

“It’s really important that no matter what we do that youth is always at the forefront because in the future it will be us making these big picture decisions and so our community looks the way we want it to,” Grady said.

The members discussed how the grant decision process has shifted during the pandemic and what they learned throughout this process.

“Communication and adaptability were the most important lessons that we’ve learned through this process. Learning to communicate how we feel, how we review grants and what we expect was important because we got a lot of grants,” Mullapudi said.

CFSEM’s YAC, which includes 20 middle and high school students from across the region, oversees this fund and makes grant recommendations to the community foundation Board of Trustees on grants ranging from $2,500 to $50,000.  

Want more?

Watch the full conversation.

Learn more about YACs in the 2020 YAC Databook.