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Middletown Futures Collective:
Organizational Imagination and Metaphorical Analysis
By Sonya Hadley
Key Words
Youth, organizing, community, abolition, vision, mission, social justice, empowerment, organization, future
Executive Summary
Young people have a key perspective that can transform our communities for the better. Middletown Futures Collective is a fully youth run organization that was founded in response to a need for a space for young people to learn and practice community organizing. Throughout this paper we explore ways to address organizational challenges and next steps for MFC with the help of the metaphorical organizational lenses of organism, political system and brain. Through sharing our process of building and shaping our organization with our values of interconnectedness, collaboration, and imagination at the center, we can help other young people build their own youth centered organizing groups.
Introduction
The Middletown Futures Collective is a group of young people from Middletown, Connecticut who are committed to making our community one that is safe, loving, and inclusive for all current and future Middletown community members. MFC was founded in the summer of 2021 by a group of eight recent Middletown High School graduates interested in empowering young people to know that their voices matter and that collectively we have the power to shape our community’s future. Our group is committed to creating long term change through uplifting community voice, sparking conversation, and meeting community members’ direct needs.
Middletown Futures Collective was founded at a critical moment — in the midst of a global pandemic, a national reckoning with racial injustice, and tragedies within our own community, including the loss of young people and other valued community members to accidents, violence, and illness. We came together to give young people a space to use their voices, be creative, and cultivate organizing skills to help create long-lasting community change.
Throughout this page we will explore the Middletown Futures Collective in the context of the broader Middletown community and why it serves a unique and important role in empowering young people to get involved in transforming the conditions of the community. We will analyze MFC through the three organizational lenses of organization as organism, political system, and brain in order to evaluate both strengths of the organization as well as key places for growth. We will then introduce the pathway forward for Middletown Futures Collective in a way that will help us achieve our vision of a safe and equitable future as well as help other communities build similar youth organizing structures.
Setting the Scene: Middletown Futures Collective in Context
Context
In Middletown there are a lot of organizations dedicated to young people but not a lot of spaces for young people to organize. Middletown Futures Collective was founded by a group of young people in our community who were interested in justice work and were looking for a space to do community organizing in a way that was truly youth centered and independent from the political ties of the groups that already existed. Most of the youth organizations that existed before the founding of MFC were either connected to the local high school, the local university, or to the city government. All three of these situations introduce dynamics that have the potential to impact the way the respective organizations operate.
Middletown Public Schools
The groups that were run through the local high school were ultimately under the control of the school and the school district as well as their faculty supervisor. Everything clubs do has to be approved by the school administration or else risk garnering repercussions. Having the high school as an organizational home also means that as young people graduate and begin post-high school life they can no longer be involved with any of those groups. This leaves out a key population and a key opportunity for knowledge sharing — young people who have grown up in our community and gone on to either college or the workforce. This is a key group of people because they are young enough to still have direct experiences with the local school system and connections to people within it, as well as wisdom and lived experience from both their time in school and from their experiences post-grad that can be passed down to younger folks trying to continue to push for a better future for our city. For example, there are important lessons MFC founders learned about organizing in college that would have been transformative to know while we were still in high school.
Wesleyan University
Another institution with a great deal of influence on our city is Wesleyan University. A lot of amazing organizing work happens at Wesleyan and as a result of Wesleyan students, but it is important to note that the majority of students who attend Wesleyan are not rooted in the Middletown community. In other words, aside from a handful of people, the vast majority of students who attend Wesleyan did not grow up in or around the area. This changes the dynamic of how people organize and how they understand the context of our community and our community issues. It is important that community work is always guided by people rooted in the community and who fully understand the dynamics and nuances that shape the situation.
City of Middletown
One of the other major categories that has influence over young people’s lives in the city is the local government. In fact one of the leading community organizations doing youth empowerment work is our Youth Services Bureau. The YSB leads restorative justice work and is on the frontlines of building youth empowerment. However, they are also tied to the city, which limits their ability to speak out against decisions that the local government makes, for example, the mayor, the common council, or the police department. Because they are a city department, they operate within those politics and have to be careful to maintain working relationships.
Local Organizations
The last major category is Middletown’s local community organizations. There are many organizations in the city that do important work in our community. Before MFC was founded, they were run entirely by adults. These spaces can be intimidating for young people to enter without prior organizing experience.
Where Middletown Futures Collective fits in
MFC was founded to provide both empowerment and mentorship for young people in our community who are interested in organizing, as well as a space for transitioning young adults to be able to apply and share their knowledge and experiences while remaining rooted. We are grounded in an explicitly abolitionist framework and are dedicated to long term thinking. We are intentional about who we take money from and who we tie ourselves to. As an organization we made an intentional decision to create an organizational identity that was not affiliated with many of the dominant power structures already established in our city for the sake of our autonomy and a desire to voice our opinions uninhibited by local politics.
Projects that MFC has focused on so far
- Launching a campaign to get police out of our schools based on youth demands
- Providing summer programming for elementary and middle schools students in the community based on community asks
- Partnering with local organizations and establishing an organizational presence
Main challenges and problems
As a new organization that has been around for less than a year, we are working hard to establish a sustainable structure that will be able to outlast our own participation in the organization. As young people who are balancing jobs, school, and other commitments, there are several key challenges and problems that we will have to face this coming year. These include:
- Navigating funding
- We are currently focusing on how we can get funding for both programming and to pay our core group of organizers.
- Many of us need to be working throughout the year so the best way to ensure that we have time to dedicate to our organizing work is establishing a way for the lead organizers to be paid for their labor and the considerable amount of time they spend keeping the organization running.
- We are also navigating whether we will officially have to declare ourselves as a non profit organization as a part of accepting funding and donations as an organization.
- Securing a permanent meeting location
- Maintaining longevity as a youth centered organization
- Short term: Locationally many of us leave Middletown during the school year, competing time commitments during the school year
- Long term: How to pass it down beyond us
- Maintaining safety for our members while growing our numbers and sharing what we are doing
- Navigating power differentials as young people in our community
Aspirations and dreams:
As an organization we are engaged in our work precisely because we are hopeful for the future of our community and are dedicated to bringing that future into fruition. Our mission and vision are as follows:
Mission Statement
We, the Middletown Futures Collective strive to help build a community that is safe, loving, and inclusive for all current and future Middletown community members through empowering young people.
Vision
We envision a Middletown where all people’s needs are met including quality access to healthcare, education, equal opportunities, mental health resources, healthy and nourishing food, clean water, affordable housing, and green infrastructure. We envision a community that has the capability to empathetically respond to and heal harm without the use of policing and incarceration — by bringing people closer rather than pushing them out. We envision a community that is centered on strong relationships, where community members drive long term decision making and there is shared accountability for community wellbeing.
Metaphorical Analysis: Middletown Futures Collective through the Lenses of organism, political system, and brain
In less than a year this organization has made its presence known to the community through collaborating with local organizations, showing up at community events, establishing youth programming, connecting through social media, and launching a campaign. We are constantly reimagining our community and working to build it to be more inclusive, safe, healthy, and happy for all of our community members. We aspire to change our community, and in doing so to change our world. To achieve this goal our organization will have to look at both our strengths and growth points in order to continue to adapt to the needs of our community. Below we will explore these through the lenses of organism, political system, and brain.
Organization as Organism:
So far in MFC, we have been operating in a non hierarchical, horizontal form of leadership. We all meet and make decisions as a collective through consensus decision making. One of our considerations as we expand is how we can grow our numbers in a way that brings people in while also maintaining equal power structure.
Many of our core elements and structures draw from the environment. In designing our logo we used the seed of an oak tree, in part, inspired by a quote from Naima Penniman that reads:
This idea of interconnectedness and collaboration is key to our organizational identity. We are dedicated to meeting people’s needs within our organization, and as an organization to our entire community. It is important for us as an organization to be conscious of our environment, looking at both how it changes us and how we change it.
Organization as political system:
There is room for us to grow in terms of organization as political system. Org Studies Fall 2021 said that this metaphor “acknowledges that everyone has their own form(s) of power, interests, and resources.” As this indicates, spending more time doing analysis about where power lies in our community will help us with our actions in terms of both identifying who has the power to make changes happen and also who are important people and groups to build relationships with based on shared interests. When dealing with bureaucracy and things like city governments sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint exactly who can make the needed change. This often results in getting passed around to various people without being given a solid answer. Because of this, power mapping can be a really helpful activity for organizations to do when they are thinking about how to best make change happen. Another useful strategy is coalition building which is centered on building collective power through uniting with other people and organizations with shared goals and beliefs. Collective power can be leveraged to help ensure people’s voice and choice are honored and that everyone gets fair representation.
Organization as brain:
Organization as brain is an important metaphor as we think about maintaining flexibility and growth as we continue to evolve as an organization. This will involve always coming back to our true values while being able to take in new situations and needs as they occur, process them and grow with them. This lens will help us to ensure we have space for creativity and growth. Org Studies Fall 2020 wrote that this metaphor “emphasizes being flexible and embracing difficult situations and breakdown. We must learn from mistakes and learn, as a brain does. Being imperfect spurs creation. We must work together and understand each part in relation to the whole so we can support each other and help create a culture and environment in which everyone participates.” Org Studies Fall 2021 wrote that “the brain metaphor stresses not only adapting to the environment, but creating a culture in which continuously adapting is the norm.” This especially resonates with me because it takes away the pressure of having to always get it right by acknowledging that since things constantly change we will consistently have to change and grow and learn. This reminds me of the One Million Experiments project that was started by Project Nia and Interrupting Criminalization.
Another key idea within the brain metaphor that Org Studies Fall 2021 identified is the “idea of distributing ability/ knowledge throughout orgs, so that if one section fails or encounters issues, another can make up for it.” This will be important for our organization as we continue to think about how we want to structure our organization. We have been trying to establish a working group structure because we acknowledge that people have differences in experience level, interests, and capacity. Anyone is able to join any working group and from there we try to break up tasks based on people’s capacity levels and which areas they either feel strong in or have an interest in growing in. In those teams we collaborate and then present what we have to the rest of the group for feedback before moving forward. The brain metaphor encourages us to think about ways we can distribute the knowledge that each person is gathering throughout our organization and possibly beyond as well. Documenting our journey as a youth organization might help others do the same and learn from our process.
The Path Forward: A Reimagined Future
As the Middletown Futures Collective continues to grow and evolve with the needs of our community and as our members continue to learn and change, at our core will remain a vision of a community centered on care and hope. As we move forward we will continue to evaluate which projects and campaigns are speaking to us and find creative ways to meet community needs.
We will establish a financial structure that allows each of the core organizers to be compensated for their work as well as support the costs of our initiatives and campaigns. We will establish a regular meeting place and a meeting schedule.
We will continue to grow in numbers and to spark critical conversations in our community about youth related issues. We will continue to bring in new people and younger people because all voices are important in shaping community change.
We will maintain our dedication to relational organizing — focusing on relationships as the center of everything. One of our key strengths as an organization is our ability to maintain having fun while simultaneously learning and tackling hard issues. We take our relationships very seriously and are sure to spend time with each other outside of the work that we have to do. We are young and all like to have fun too :)) Making sure our meetings are joyful places to come to is all part of the practice of making the movement irresistible. We ask that people that are a part of the Middletown Futures Collective come as their full and authentic selves. We acknowledge that society often fragments our identities and that there are rarely places that accept people in their fullness. Even when it is uncomfortable we ask people to try their best to be true to who they are, where they are at, and what they believe. People may come because they are interested in the topic of organizing and helping the community, but they will stay because of the strong sense of community we build as well as our dedication to change making.
We will remain committed to creativity because we see imagination as our most powerful tool. We will focus on building alternatives and modeling how we want to be in the world. In the journey towards the future we hope for, we must practice and build the systems and practices that we want to be central in that future. This is the only way that we will be able to restore or build new ways of being. This means practicing structures that fulfill each of our needs and protect people’s labor and energy in a way that is sustainable. Focusing on this will allow us also to build connections across the community. Many people have the shared vision of wanting better solutions, and this focus on abundance is a powerful way to build hope and support within the community.
As we continue on our path, one of the most important things that we can do is document our journey to share what we are learning in our process. This will allow other people to see what lessons might help them engage in youth organizing in other places. Organizing must be context specific to the area that you are organizing in like the organization as organism metaphor suggests. Because of this it is important to encourage people to experiment with community change making in their own local contexts instead of trying to provide a copy and paste template. Creating a network of young people who can share their experiences trying to organize in their hometowns is a good long term goal that connects the local up to the state and national context. With this vision we can picture Futures Collectives all around the world.
Because our vision in the founding of MFC was to keep it truly youth centered, we included a qualification that no one over the age of 25 can be a member. The mark of a good organization is if it can continue on past the time you are there. This will be a big challenge especially since this organization is not attached to any larger structure or adult position that could stabilize these transitions over time. It will rely on the interest, dedication, and developed skills of young people to come. However, it is important that we do take that chance and let young people continue to be at the core of this organization because as we age we will no longer be in touch with the school system or be able to keep up to date on youth issues and will no longer have the direct lived experience. Even if we can no longer be members we can be supports or mentors whenever young people in the community need us.
Conclusion
From the Middletown Futures Collective we have learned the importance of meeting people where they are with love and unconditional positive regard. Our first summer together was really rewarding. We built strong relational connections with each other and were also able to make our presence known in our community. Being a fully youth led organization, with no adults at all, is really cool. Prior to MFC, every organization we’ve ever been a part of, had to run what we wanted to do by some ”authority”, but now that we have full autonomy it is both really exciting and also scary. It’s up to us.
There is so much potential for growth for MFC as we come up on our first year mark. The metaphors of organization as organism, political system, and brain have helped give us valuable insights into Middletown Futures Collective by giving us the opportunity to look at the organization through different lenses. This helps us see aspects that might otherwise have remained unnoticed and pinpoint areas in terms of what is working well and what areas we can focus on in terms of improvement.
Social change can take generations of people pushing for change but the only way to get there is to keep going. Young people have always played a special role in movement work. This is an opportunity for young people to learn what it means to organize collective power and to have access to a space where their voices and experiences are valued. We are trying to create the spaces that we needed as we were growing up and continue to widen them until our entire community is safe and welcoming to all kinds of people and meets their underlying needs.
Works Cited and Additional Sources
Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2021.
Organizational Theory Class Fall 2020
Organizational Theory Class Fall 2021
Nia, Project, and Interrupting Criminalization. “1M Experiments.” 1M Experiments, millionexperiments.com/.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge all of the people who have supported me and inspired me in my journey to where I am today. I would not be in the same place without the loving care and support from my community and each and every person who has encouraged me, nurtured me, and pushed me along the way. Thank you for always being there to both laugh and cry with me and for making all that I do possible <3
First I would like to thank the Middletown Futures Collective. To Sebby, Stephen, Evan, Jade, Santiago, Mya, and Sophie, I am so endlessly grateful for your trust, time, energy and pure hearts. There is no one else I’d rather have spent my entire summer with. Thank you for always bringing me joy while also being the people I can always trust to throw down with me. Thank you for trusting me when all I had was an idea and thank you for all you’ve done to transform that idea into so much more. To Julia, Flo, Pilar, Devyn, Maamle, Gabby, Mikayla, Jewel, Joyce, and Emily, thank you for all of the energy and ideas that you’ve brought to our group so far. I cannot wait to continue to grow with you all and see what we can build together. You have all inspired me in so many ways and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to continue to work alongside you.
I also want to thank the people who have instilled in me the values I hold dear and who have taught me so many essential lessons I will carry forward with me for the rest of my life. To my mom who taught me how to care for everyone and everything around me, thank you for always inspiring me to be the best version of myself. To Mr. Geary who taught me that my voice was powerful and worth hearing, thank you for not letting me give up. To Justin who taught me that I could help change my community, thank you for always believing in me and for every opportunity you’ve ever given a young person to be heard. To Bonnie and Katie who taught me that a workplace can be loving and nurturing, thank you for all you have done to support me throughout the years. To TKim and Tessa who taught me what it truly means to be an organizer, thank you for helping me realize I can dream bigger and teaching me what collective power really looks like.
To barbara and our entire org studies class this semester, thank you for all your loving support and for teaching me more about what it means to think about organizations. I have been transformed by the care we have been able to cultivate.