Stick Talk Leadership Incubator
Peace friends,
We hope you are caring for yourselves and your communities. We are writing to introduce you to our survivor-centered youth leadership model and to ask for your help to sustain it.
Stick Talk is committed to scaffolding homegrown leadership across our network of firearm harm reduction hubs to ensure that young Black and Brown people who are gun violence survivors continue to guide our organizing. For the last year, we have employed 8 homegrown Youth Organizers on a part-time basis. They model, in ways that are most accessible and within reach for other young people, what it means to build self-determining communities without punitive systems or carceral logics.
Our homegrown Youth Organizers requested further, deeper engagement with Stick Talk in 2025. Next-level support for emerging youth leaders who are intimately affected by community and police violence is an ecosystem-wide need. This year, we are building out the infrastructure to begin to address it.
The Stick Talk Leadership Incubator scaffolds leadership development, political education, organizer training, and skillset building for a cohort of emerging youth leaders from our organization and beyond.
The Stick Talk Leadership Incubator...
- builds upon cohort members' lived experiences, imagination, existing capacities, and instincts for safety.
- uses a popular education methodology, linking participants' individual experiences to structural conditions, to mobilize them around transformative justice and the abolition the prison industrial complex.
- supports participants to assess their conditions, strategize together about changes they want to make, identify and practice the skills they need, and take collective action.
- connects cohort members with additional mentors and experiential learning and economic opportunities within and beyond their communities.
We activated the Leadership Incubator with an initial cohort this winter. Please help us continue this project into the summer by making a one-time gift or becoming a Stick Talk monthly sustainer at any level.
Thank you for investing in young Black and Brown people as instruments of growth, safety, and accountability in their families and neighborhoods.
With gratitude,
Brandon Daurham + ethan ucker
Stick Talk Co-Executive Directors
Our goal is to add 100 new monthly sustainers at any dollar amount. Thanks to you generous support, we are one third of the way toward our goal!
Thank you for being on this journey with us!
By reassessing urban gun violence through the prism of harm reduction, Stick Talk builds capacity for survivor-centered community safety beyond criminalization and abstinence.