I want to improve my community! Despite stereotypes about teenagers, there are a lot of youth throughout the world that want to so something that will improve their community. They might want to do something with the environment or maybe with the people in their community. But when trying to change something, many stop because they don’t know where to start or how to keep something going. That’s where Youth Allies for Sustainability comes in.

Youth Allies is a program of Earth Care that helps youth from all over SF develop their leadership skills and take action to make the world a better place. The program started in 2006 in collaboration with the SF Mountain Center’s Native American Emergence Program. Youth Allies is made up of teens coming from different economic situations and different points of view. We come from Native American, Hispanic, immigrant, African-American, Anglo, and other diverse communities. Some of us are as young as thirteen. Others are as old as twenty. What we all have in common is a desire to better ourselves, our community, and our environment.

My name is Bianca Madrid (otherwise known as Lil B to distinguish me from Bianca Sopoci-Belknap, who runs the program). I’m 17 years old. I was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. I’ve lived in SF since I was 5. I joined Youth Allies when it first began because I thought it would be a great way to get more involved with the SF community, and I was right. I’ve worked with lots of different organizations on sustainability and social justice. I have friends that are really different than me that I probably would never have known if not for the program. We work together to break down stereotypes and cultural divides.

In 2008 for our Rio Grande Watershed project we visited with community leaders in Taos, San Ildefonso, Cochiti, and the South Valley of Albuquerque. We did service-learning projects on traditional agriculture, greenhouse growing, water harvesting, acequias, tree planting, and water monitoring. We got to learn about the people and the land in the region where we live and how we are all connected.

Bianca Madrid

In SF, Youth Allies connected us up with organizations like Somos un Pueblo Unido, an organization that helps the immigrant community. I got to speak at the International Worker’s Day rally in front of hundreds of people about my passion for immigrant rights. The rally was especially important at a time when ICE was conducting illegal raids that were breaking up families and making immigrants afraid to go to school and work.