Chicago Desi Youth Rising (CDYR) seeks to empower Chicago youth to combat racial, economic, and social inequity. CDYR works with youth ages 14 – 21 who trace their heritage to South Asia and the diaspora, and who want to grow as changemakers. We do this through political education, intergenerational community-building, and youth-driven organizing.
Inspired by Youth Solidarity Summer (YSS) in New York, Bay Area Solidarity Summer (BASS), and D.C. Desi Summer (DCDS), CDYR was was founded in 2013 by two young Desi organizers and activists who were concerned about mental health issues among Desi youth and the lack of Desi participation in Asian and Pacific Islander (API) youth work in Chicago. Beginning then, CDYR organized an annual 3-day overnight summer leadership retreat for youth, where participants drew upon their diverse experiences and intersectional identities while they examined and challenged the underlying causes of their communities’ problems and conditions to become agents for social change.
As of 2018, participants also had the opportunity to participate in quarterly convenings and year-round mobilization programs, and could receive microgrants to organize community projects of their choice. In 2021, the CDYR organizing collective, previously all-volunteer and majority-adult, hired its first part-time paid position and began regularly offering stipends to its organizing collective’s youth members in order to increase and better support their leadership within the collective. Over the years, CDYR’s youth leaders have led actions, teach-ins, and mutual aid efforts, and plugged into grassroots abolitionist campaigns such as #NoCopAcademy, #CopsOutCPS, #StandWithKashmir, and #StopShotSpotter.
in 2023, CDYR is celebrating our 10-year anniversary, expanding our programming, and deepening our commitment to focused youth leadership development and sustainable youth-driven organizing. In CDYR’s new youth fellowship program, a small cohort of 8-10 participants meet throughout the academic year for a series of trainings, guest-led workshops, field trips, and relationship-building — alongside our continued youth-centered and intergenerational programming for our wider community.
Mission || History || Work
In its programming and organizing, CDYR aims to empower youth to:
Connect their personal identities as South Asian youth to historic and current social movements;
Develop an understanding of how intersecting systems of oppression shape our experiences and perception, and how intra-community issues like caste, class, and race have shaped our migration histories and current communities;
Cultivate a sense of belonging and solidarity across these intersections;
Access anti-adultist systems of care, mentorship, and continued learning with adult co-conspirators;
Build the technical knowledge and skills needed to create social change, such as critical thinking, communication, leadership, advocacy, and community organizing;
Work together to build community and act on the issues our communities face.
We welcome adoptees, desis of mixed heritage, any immigration status, all LGBTQTSIS youth, and residents of Chicago and Chicagoland suburbs.
Within our work, CDYR’s Organizing Collective aims. to continually and critically reflect on our convictions, challenge our own assumptions, evolve and iterate our praxis, and co-create loving spaces to heal, organize, and thrive.
Vision and Values
Additional Context:
While South Asians are the fastest growing racial group in Illinois and comprise the second highest group of undocumented Illinois immigrants, there are few spaces that bring young South Asians together to share their formative experiences, and build a politicized vision for social justice.
Segments of the Illinois South Asian community face challenges due to issues related to citizenship, English proficiency, joblessness, and isolation. However, this is a highly fragmented community, with identities across nations, religions, languages, immigration histories, and socio-economic statuses. We must build connections across experiences to mobilize as one and develop the next generation of leaders needed to address the evolving needs of our entire community.
Preliminary research shows that South Asian youth are frequent targets of bullying given post 9/11 xenophobia (SAALT, 2013), and points to high rates of mental health issues and acculturative stress (Lee, 2009). We can help normalize and help make meaning of these experiences at an earlier age by opening spaces to share them.
The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (2010) finds that one-third of all Asian-American youth feels civically alienated. The voices of youth, particularly youth of color and young women, are often missing from public policy debates and social change efforts. Youth have been absent from other Asian and Pacific Islander youth work done in Chicago.
Definition of Desi:
Desi – n., adj.: refers to people with origins in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan, and the Maldives, but the diaspora spreads from Fiji to Trinidad, from Kenya to the Persian Gulf, from South Africa to Guyana and Suriname, from Southall in Britain to Washington, DC and many places in between.
Apna Ghar Sponsorship
Chicago Desi Youth Rising is fiscally sponsored by Apna Ghar, whose mission is to provide critical, comprehensive, culturally competent services, and conduct outreach and advocacy across communities to end gender violence.