Photo by Zoe Graham on Unsplash
In October 2025, the Partnership for America’s Children welcomed Dayvon Love, co-founder and Director of Public Policy of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, to our annual retreat for network leaders. In this blog, Dayvon Love shares some insights from his presentation at the retreat.
In the mainstream nonprofit sector, there is an unspoken assumption that Black young people live in communities that are marked and defined by pathology. So many of the human services institutions, agencies, and organizations that have come to shape Americans’ response to poverty and racial inequality are built on a white fascination with Black pathology; a focus on fixing what is “wrong” with Black youth. Across our human services sector, you see white ideas and institutions being used to solve Black people’s problems.
There is an often-unstated belief that the way to create opportunity for Black youth means to remove the young person from their communal social context, and place them in mainstream situations where they can have access to sympathetic white folks. Unfortunately this perpetuates a harmful fiction that the greater distance you create from your own community, the more successful you can become.
It is incumbent on youth development, advocacy, and social service practitioners who work with Black youth to resist this narrative and reeducate themselves. This blog is a jumping-off point, presenting strategies anchored in the intellectual history, traditions, and educational approaches of Black elders and scholars.
Intentionally cultivate a network of Black elders with movement history to consult with
Too often in our education and social services systems, Black youth and other youth of color are being educated and ministered to by adults who mean well, but who don’t have the benefit of a movement history. There is often a paternalism infused in the interaction, a presupposition that there is something wrong here that should be fixed with specialized (white) expertise. Such a framework does not create an environment where that young person can reach their highest potential.
At Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), our intellectual foundation and our strategic approach is drawn from a long history of Black-led institutions and traditional African and indigenous societies with comprehensive, meaningful, and ultimately more humane approaches to socializing youth. My hope for LBS, and for any human services agency working with Black youth, is that we can collectively recover many of those different practices and implement them in our daily approach to working with youth.
Central to my own story and journey are Black elders who went out of their way to make space for me as a young Black man. One of them is former state senator Jill P. Carter. I met her just as I was finishing up college. A lot of the other elders I was connected to at the time knew that I wanted to engage in political advocacy, and to do it from the vantage point of the Black radical tradition. They encouraged me to seek out Jill Carter and learn from her. As the daughter of Walter Carter, a giant in the civil rights movement in Baltimore, she is very much an extension of the city’s civil rights legacy.
Jill Carter was one of the only Black political figures in the early 2000’s to actually speak up against Martin O’Malley’s mass arrest policy in Baltimore. Many people were scared to say anything, because O’Malley was a white mayor in a Black city, a rising star in the Democratic party, so it was politically risky. I got to learn from her and experience her leadership at the height of her political isolation. She showed me what it looks like to operate with integrity in a fundamentally racist and unjust society.
Study educational approaches that reinforce the self-concept of Black youth against pervasive societal notions of intellectual inferiority
One of the most crucial components missing from contemporary programs working with youth, post-desegregation, is an emphasis on preparing youth for the assaults on their sense of personhood that they will have to face out in the world — particularly notions of intellectual inferiority. Theresa Perry lays this out in her book Young Gifted and Black, that prior to desegregation, much of the socialization of black youth was in the hands of black-led civic institutions. Central to their approach to education was carefully preparing young people to combat the societal beliefs of Black people being intellectually inferior.
Anybody working with young people, Black youth or other youth of color, you must address yourself to the psychosocial reality of all the images and narratives of Black inferiority that young people are forced to navigate. Those narratives deeply impact their ability to have the self-concept needed to be effective in high-level academic and professional environments. Any youth development program who fails to do this, in my view, is derelict in their duty to that young person, and is operating outside of what should be the industry standard.
Engage with Black intellectual history: A Liberatory Reading List
There is a massive re-education needed across fields that interact with young people, whether it’s social work, public education, or public health. And that re-education has to do with being exposed to the bodies of work that people of African descent have produced that are marginalized from many of the mainstream institutions that train and socialize professionals.
Most people in education or social service training programs don’t get the chance to read Black thinkers and educators like Fanny Jackson-Coppin, Carter G. Woodson, Na’im Akbar, or Joyce King. For professionals in a range of different fields, it is so important to avail oneself of those bodies of work and incorporate the substantive aspects of program design, institution-building, and the formulation of effective interventions that they promote. Learn from and use the tools in those bodies of work, many of which have been tremendously successful.
There is a very helpful reading list in the “Works Cited” section of When Baltimore Awakes, a document produced in 2019 by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. I recommend starting there. Don’t be taken in by the fiction that because it’s not a mainstream white institution, it’s not legitimate. There are many scholars who are African- centered, or centered in culture, whose perspectives challenge and subvert the hegemony of the white mainstream’s authority on Black youth – and these should be your guides in program design.
About Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle
Founded in 2010, LBS is a grassroots think-tank located in Baltimore, Maryland. We are a group of Baltimore residents dedicated to creating transformative public policy. Our vision is to drastically improve the conditions of Black people in the Baltimore-Metropolitan Region.