Sacramento's Youth Lead Historic Wins to Reclaim Power, Place, and Possibility

On a grey, drizzly day in February at the Washington Neighborhood Center (WNC), a handful of Native elders offer guidance to teenagers who are rolling bits of rosemary, sage, and sweetgrass into medicine bags.

Sacramento Valley has been home to Maidu, Miwok, and Nisenan tribes for thousands of years. The fertile land has swelled and deflated to the river’s tune and is home to mature oak meadows, wild rice, and salmon as they rush upstream to spawn.

The WNC is a 70-year-old Chicano and Indigenous cultural center in the heart of Sacramento, which features, what some call, the oldest Chicano mural in the country, depicting the rise of Cesar Chavez and other Chicano justice movements. 

The WNC has a long history of activism, hosting programs and services dedicated to achieving land ownership, fighting for workers’ rights, and advancing educational and political equity. It is also where Tona Miranda spent countless hours playing as a kid, while her parents organized for Indigenous and Chicago rights. 

“It’s the energy [this place] holds,” begins Miranda, describing the feeling in the room as a tribal youth group gathers at the Center that evening to make medicine bags. There’s a picture of her as a child on the wall. “I remember running around there when I was little, you know, going to different ceremonies, gatherings, elders connecting…and now our youth get to [experience] that in the same exact way, but with an actual program.”

Miranda now serves on the board of the WNC and as the manager of Tribal Programs and Advocacy at Youth Forward, an organization that advocates for policies to support young people and develop their leadership to organize and advocate for systems change. Youth Forward serves as the coordinating entity for Sac Kids First, the largest grassroots coalition in the region. The coalition includes 35 youth-serving organizations and nearly 2,000 individual coalition members. 

Building a coalition focused on the promise and potential of young people

“I’m a big believer in prevention,” says Jim Keddy at his office at Youth Forward. He founded the nonprofit in 2017 after seeing a need for dedicated youth funding in local and state policy. The organization’s offices are located across from the Tower Theatre, with its neon sign shining like a beacon for the Sacramento area. 

Originally from Orange County, Calif., Keddy volunteered at the Peace Corps in Costa Rica after college before starting his organizing career in Oakland in 1987. He moved to Sacramento in 1996 with his wife and young family. When Keddy organized as an activist in the Bay Area, he was trained in, what he described as, “kind of old-school, high-touch, labor-intensive community organizing.”

So when Proposition 64 legalized cannabis statewide in 2016, Keddy was moved to get involved. He wanted to ensure the community could have a say in where that revenue went. 

A lifelong youth worker, a former foster parent, and a current mentor to a former foster youth, Keddy saw the effects of the foster system first-hand—its lack of financial and mental support to youth who were trying to make the best of the situation life had dealt them at a young age. He saw a connection between the fundamental failing of that system and the outcomes the community was seeing, specifically, substance misuse and mental health challenges. 

He also saw an opportunity with this new source of funds. “My goal was to steer those dollars toward communities of color that have been impacted by the war on drugs…and toward children and youth who had been impacted by foster care and by the criminal justice system,” he says.

“As a society, we spend enormous amounts of resources on human tragedy that could have been prevented,” he continued. “I strongly believe we would do better as a society if we spent money early and invested early.”

So Keddy and his team did just that. They built a network of a few hundred youth and racial justice organizations across California to influence how California would allocate the new revenue from legal cannabis. The coalition worked closely with the governor’s office and built up an infrastructure for organizing and activating people in the community—and especially young people.

At the local level, Youth Forward helped build a similar coalition, Sac Kids First. Sac Kids First was guided by the inspiration and learnings from the work of the East Bay Asian Youth Center (EBAYC), a youth development organization with chapters in Sacramento and Oakland, Calif., and a founding member of the Sac Kids First Coalition. In 1996, EBAYC was part of an Oakland-based coalition that successfully advocated for $14 million per year in funding for children and youth, establishing the Oakland Fund for Children and Youth. This process provided a clear guide for how Youth Forward and the rest of the Sac Kids First coalition could once again advocate in Sacramento.

The Sac Kids First Coalition began in 2016 with Measure Y, proposed legislation that would increase the local cannabis tax to 5% for a dedicated youth fund, separate from the city’s general fund. Measure Y lost the vote by just one percent. The opposition was immense, with the police and fire department unions arguing that it was an unnecessary proposal that would restrict the city from spending on essential services such as emergency response and public safety.

“The old guard doesn't want to give its power up, and we're seeing that reflected in so many different industries,” says Jay Franco, an organizer who worked on canvassing for the Measures for youth funding, “so one of the amazing things that we did with our coalition is change the conversation.” The definition of public safety in Sacramento now includes youth preventive programs and services. Because if young people have support, services, and pathways to get involved, it’s actually better for the whole community.

Transforming shortfalls into opportunities to build a stronger future

After the loss of Measure Y, the coalition regrouped and gathered signatures to place another youth measure on the ballot, Measure G, in 2020. This measure was strongly opposed by the mayor and it also did not pass. However, in 2022, this time with the mayor and firefighters as strong allies, Sac Kids First succeeded in passing Measure L. Measure L, the Children and Youth Health and Safety Act, was a city-wide ballot measure that proposed to take 40% of the money that the city generates from its cannabis tax (equal to about $10 million per year) for a city-formed Sacramento Children’s Fund. The reserved funds  are then used for agreed-upon services focused on youth mental health, youth substance abuse prevention, and youth homelessness for youth up to 24 years old.

With the failure of Measure G, “I understood my role going into Measure L was to support that narrative storytelling,” Franco recalls. “So, I did a short podcast series leading up to the campaign, with different member organizations, sitting down with young folks—showing the work that we do, and how that impacts the young folks doing the work on the front lines of it.” 

“They say the revolution is not going to be between 9 and 5,” Franco states, but “coalition building…it’s always been in me, in a sense.” As a child, Franco lived with his grandmother in Sacramento’s South Land Park neighborhood while his mother was incarcerated. An only child of a single parent, when his mother returned home, Franco took care of her as she struggled with cerebral palsy.  

Bouncing around for most of his youth and unhoused at times, he remembers sitting at a little table in a motel room to write a third-grade report. Despite the challenges, Franco found stability in playing baseball in South Land Park. He was also encouraged by the stories about his great-grandfather who helped build Franklin Boulevard and who was the first Mexican-American to chair the Small Business Association of Sacramento. “Great leaders help develop other leaders by giving them a piece of that leadership,” Franco believes.

In addition to now serving as a guiding voice on the board of Youth Forward, Franco fundraises for causes in Sacramento and across the state and hopes to someday create his own foundation. “I’m feeling that one of our biggest threats is actually burnout…we have to take care of ourselves so we don’t lose that spark, lose the fight, so we don’t fade into conformity…And so in building a coalition, more power in numbers, right? Power and proximity.” 

Since the passing of Measure L, the Sac Kids First coalition has continued to pursue agenda items that serve Sacramento youth. It has successfully worked with the city council in approving a guaranteed basic income program for foster youth who age out of the program. Too often, they enter the adult world without the kinds of support and guidance most young adults get from their families through these critical years. 

“We do work locally on children's issues with Sac Kids First. We do work in Native communities in Sacramento, but also with tribes… We're always doing state policy work. But it's all based around prevention, racial equity, health, and education,” explained Keddy. “They're all interconnected, and they're all mutually supportive of one another.”

The idea is that investing in young people is a public health intervention—stemming the tide of addiction, homelessness, and crime that grow from hopelessness and lack of opportunity. Investing in young people and their leadership creates a new kind of community where a different kind of future is possible. 

Some of these efforts are to ensure the tribal community is seen and supported, and that some of the past harms inflicted on the community over the course of generations are repaired—including harms from the commercial cannabis industry.

“When we talk about the growth of the [cannabis] industry, it's been on the backs of tribal lands and tribal people,” said Miranda. According to the traditions of one local tribe, “There was supposed to be 12 generations of water [preserved in case it] never rained again.” Noting that since outside cannabis growers have taken over the land, Miranda shares, “They [have] almost depleted that water,” and she adds, that all took place even before it was legalized.

Miranda has helped numerous tribes and tribal organizations access grant funding from state cannabis tax revenues for youth prevention programs and for environmental restoration of tribal lands damaged by cannabis growth. These funds are helping to foster, rather than break young people’s connections with their ancestral culture—nurturing both their connection with their past, as well as their opportunities for the future. 

Investing in young people to repair harms and lay the groundwork for a better future 

Tona Miranda was a child when the Sacramento Library launched a summer program for youth in the North area—she recalls the then Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna Jr. holding a reception and inviting children like her and others to present each of them with an award. Miranda’s eyes well with tears as she remembers piling into her aunt’s Volkswagen with her cousins in order to attend the program—it was the North area’s first time where kids could read books and get a healthy lunch, she recalls. A descendant of the Yaqui, Blackfoot, Otomi, and Chichimeca Tribal Nations living in North Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood, it was the first time Miranda felt like the city of Sacramento saw her, and recognized the Native community still present in the city. 

“We were kids that never had new books at school—we never had funding for that,” Miranda’s voice cracks, reflecting on what first brought her to this work. “It reminded me that the North area does matter.” Miranda wants to replicate that feeling she had as a kid herself, growing up in Del Paso Heights, the moment Serna Jr. acknowledged the beauty and promise of North Sacramento’s youth.

At the WNC, Miranda’s mother, Maria, dips her head and her face disappears beneath the large brim of her hat as she laces cords through animal hide to make medicine bags. Her words hum with the significance of continuing the practice across generations, her voice carrying over the hammering of holes in leather pouches. 

“Let’s give thanks for our sacred circle and the sacred time that we made today,” Maria says to the group gathered over pizza and wings, the bushels of herbs at rest in the center of the table. “And for these pouches—these are our companions now and we're going to fill them with all the love and the beauty and the herbs, whatever resonates with us.” “Rosemary is for memory," Maria continues. “It’s this ancestral memory that we all carry.”

Sixteen-year-old Lozen Miranda-Brightman is one of the teens making medicine bags at the Center. She closes her eyes and takes a deep inhale of the rosemary. She’s a tribal youth intern at Youth Forward and a sophomore at a local high school. “I love carrying around medicines,” Miranda-Brightman shares. “And I know my friends in elementary school thought that it was kind of strange to carry around rosemary, but it helps calm you.” 

Miranda-Brightman wears a black sweatshirt with an outline of North America and the words “Native Land” scribbled across it. She has a steadfastness rare in most 16-year-olds. But it soon becomes clear that her character is a legacy that runs through her. Miranda-Brightman is of Sioux-Yaqui and Otomi descent from a long line of freedom fighters. Her grandfather is Lehman Brightman, a prominent activist from the American Indian Movement of the 1960s. He established one of the first Native American Studies programs at UC Berkeley and is the founder of the organization, United Native Americans.

Her great-great-grandfather was on the grassy plains where the Battle of Little Bighorn took place, the most decisive Native American victory in the Long Plains War of 1876. Nearly 100 years later, her grandfather protested at Wounded Knee in 1973—a 71-day standoff between Native Americans and the U.S. government. It ended with 300 FBI agents and U.S. marshals opening fire on the protesters, resulting in unprecedented national attention for Indigenous rights and legislation that gave the tribes greater autonomy. 

For Miranda-Brightman, these sessions with her elders keep her connected to her ancestors, with an eye toward the change she can make for her own and future generations. She is from Del Paso Heights. She has seen a lot of unhoused youth, many of whom are contending with the trauma passed down through generations—the downstream consequences of parents and grandparents who were stolen from their families when they were young, forced into boarding schools, and relocated away from the connections that were meant to sustain them. 

When driving down the mainstay of Del Paso Boulevard in Del Paso Heights, its history is present among 1920s streetcar tracks, the shuttered mom-and-pop stores, and the great Iceland skating rink—an 80-year-old landmark, now overgrown by weeds—but now under construction with hopes to reopen in late 2025. 

The community had once been a thriving, lively place where there were jobs and opportunity, entertainment and connections, and affordable homes without the kinds of deed restrictions families of color faced in other neighborhoods. 

A series of interstates built in the 1960s diverted traffic out of Del Paso Heights, cutting off the recently incorporated town. McLellan Airforce base then closed, eliminating living-wage jobs for many, and with little creation of new jobs in the community, only 7.3 percent of the residents who live in the area are actually able to work there. 

“I was always taught to help the other kids because you know that you understand it,” Miranda-Brightman says. “They didn’t have the chance to go to college, to climb their way up in a world that wasn’t really built for us.”

Creating spaces where youth are seen and can build self-empowerment

Through coalition-building and grassroots activism, Measure L called on city officials to cede some ownership, voice, and decisionmaking power over city funds to the young people who make up approximately 32 percent of the city’s population. 

Sacramento has grown to more than 500,000 residents. As the population grew, so did housing prices. In 2022, there was a higher number of unhoused people in Sacramento than in San Francisco, with a 67% increase in Sacramento County over the course of the prior three years. One in 7 people experiencing homelessness in Sacramento County is under the age of 24. Young people transitioning out of foster care are at particularly high risk as they navigate this critical time in life, often without adequate support. In fact, in Sacramento, 1 in 4 people who are experiencing homelessness have been through the foster care system. 

By 2024, the homeless population had dropped by 29% to under 7,000 people due in large part to local efforts to address the housing issue. City officials credit investments in permanent housing, shelters, and homeless outreach for that improvement—but local nonprofits say they are still overwhelmed with the volume of need in the community.

As one of the key organizations focusing on youth homelessness prevention, Youth Forward is engaging youth who have been directly impacted by homelessness. 

Araiye “Ray” Thomas-Haysbert, 25, and Jen Phanh, 20, were both unhoused and displaced throughout their teen years at the time when they were both attending Hiram W. Johnson High School in South Sacramento, a school in which Youth Forward holds its Motivate Youth Program. Sitting together in their shared office at Youth Forward, they know personally the challenges today’s unhoused youth face, and they bring that expertise to their roles as youth organizers conducting outreach and afterschool programs. They also support other programs that counsel students on mental health and advocacy. “I didn’t really have a mentor in high school, but I really wish I had one,” Thomas-Haysbert shared. Phanh adds that when she joined as an organizer, “I wanted to be the adult that I didn’t have in school,” noting that the “students are going through real-life problems, and it’s hard to focus,” but oftentimes the schools and other agencies don’t fully grasp everything an unhoused student is juggling.

Having been a part of the Measure Y and Measure G campaigns during high school, Thomas-Haysbert said, “I’ve been doing youth organizing [and] engagement work since I was about 16 years old” and was added to the Youth Forward contact list early on in high school. Thomas-Haysbert and Phan also participated in a youth leadership program with The California Endowment’s Sisterhood Rising, which Thomas-Haysbert said was an inspiration for doing the sort of work they do now. “I just got to see wonderful women of color, [who] were also LGBT identifying, leading in their community. That’s the best… seeing the vision. I [was] like, oh, I could do that.” 

Having leaders that are dedicated to training the next generation of advocates is key. Phanh added, “I really didn’t know what organizing was when I first came to Youth Forward. But as I started learning about the skills and opportunities from Jim [Keddy, founder of Youth Forward], I started realizing I really liked this work and I really like what we do here.” 

For both Thomas-Haysbert and Phahn, being empowered by those around them has given them a vision of what is possible. “When I was younger,” Phahn shares, “I would never [have] thought I’d be this close to elected officials…but I think because our work is about advocacy and policy and we're in the capital, we have things at the local, county, and state levels—all our work is very interconnected.” “City Hall is right up the street.” Thomas-Haysbert adds, “I know legislators, I know people who are connected to the mayor—it gives me a certain agency, like my voice matters, like I can really create some change.” And part of that change is ensuring that the youth that come after them have the kind of support they wish they’d had growing up. 

“You know how they use the phrase, ‘it takes a village to raise a child?’” Thomas-Haysbert asked. “That's what healthy communities look like…putting all your resources together to uplift the younger generations. To get our youth to the place they want to be.”

As part of that village, Kamiya Turner supports teens in an afterschool program led by the Roberts Family Development Center (RFDC), a member organization of the Sac Kids First Coalition. At Allen Chapel across from Grant High School, Turner makes the rounds, checking on students and progress with their homework. Turner and her twin sister, Kameya, got their start working as mentors at RFDC when they were recent graduates from Sacramento State. 

“One huge issue that was coming up was drugs and alcohol abuse,” Turner says. “When we would talk to students, it was clear they’re trying to escape. But being here, you don’t have to escape through drugs—you can escape through a mentor.”

It’s effectively creating new pathways for these kids. “Because somebody listened.”

Having somebody who cares about them deeply, who checks in with their families and provides groceries to supplement the food deserts they live in—it’s made a difference, Turner continued. They can come here, do their homework, feel supported and seen, and learn about college. 

During Black History Month, Derrell Roberts, CEO and co-founder of RFDC, has arranged an event where three Black speakers discussed their careers with the youth. “It’s trite but it’s true: the sky’s the limit. The only limit is your thinking,” one of the speakers tells the group of teens sitting in front of him. 

Roberts started RFDC in 2001, with the intention of continuing his family’s legacy by deconstructing the “school-to-prison pipeline" and instead creating a “cradle-to-career” trajectory through academic support, parent education and engagement, and community involvement. 

Luz Romero and Christian Daniel are both 16-year-old juniors at Grant High School. They have attended Roberts’ Freedom School—a six-week summer literacy program—since they were freshmen. Both Romero and Daniel are now Thousand Strong Interns, a Sacramento City-supported paid internship program to have student leaders visit other schools and tutor students from 2nd to 7th grade.

Romero is grateful she was given the opportunity. The availability of internships, let alone paid internships, in the neighborhood is slim. When she visited other communities as part of the internship, she would see posters for afterschool programs, some even in her own neighborhood, that she hadn’t known about. Back home, she says, she really only sees “missing posters” on the streets. 

Collectively, coalition members and organizations are building a city in which the world of possibility becomes reality. Participating in the afterschool program and in the Thousand Strong internship have taught Daniel that he has something in him that he “didn’t know that I had.” The internship allowed Daniel to experience his first airplane flight to visit college campuses in Southern California. 

Daniel is adept at helping kids with shortcuts in math and getting them to understand problems that are challenging, “especially with little kids,” Daniel says. Romero never thought she was good with kids, but now she’s thinking about becoming a child psychologist one day. 

Building on a legacy of leadership and relationships to create a brighter future

Monica Ruelas Mares holds the whiteboard easel as she writes a list of newly elected council members. She’s leading an activity with the intergenerational members of the Sac Kids First coalition, to map out who holds power and where there might be points of influence. They’re gathered at Sol Collective, a community space founded in 2005 to mobilize art as a means of community-building and activism. Shades of blue graffiti cover the front of the building, topped with a sacred heart from the “milagros” folk art tradition from Mexico—a call for miracles and gratitude.  

“Is [Mayor McCarty] supportive of what we’re doing?” she asks the group. A member from the audience raises their hand and responds, “If one of the council members has been supportive in the past, does that mean they support us as a whole? How are we evaluating what support looks like?” they ask. 

After years of working to establish a relationship with the city government—and then-mayor Darrell Steinberg, who left office at the end of last year—the Sac Kids First members need to start again with the newly elected mayor, Kevin McCarty and his administration. This time, however, they have a public record of success and both Keddy and Ruelas Mares had already sat down with McCarty in February to introduce themselves. 

Ruelas Mares is a daughter of South Sacramento. Her parents both migrated from Mexico around 1989 and met at the apartment complex where they both lived in downtown Sacramento. Ruelas Mares grew up in a dual family household alongside her aunt and uncle and their children, her cousins. She was the youngest of 10 kids in the house.

After completing a degree at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Ruelas Mares wanted to come back home. She ran into Keddy canvassing in 2019 for the #Health4All campaign that would expand healthcare access to all, no matter their immigration status (now under threat in the latest state budget revision, mirroring cuts to Medicaid access nationwide). She was just 24 years old at the time. Keddy kept in touch with Ruelas Mares, introducing her to the Sac Kids First coalition and invited her to join Youth Forward in the middle of the pandemic in 2020 to lead work on Measure L.

“Ever since then, I have learned just so much about organizing, persistence, leadership development for myself, and trying to share that with young people that I'm working with,” said Ruelas Mares. This year, Ruelas Mares was reappointed the chair for the Children’s Fund Oversight Commission. 

At a recent meeting of the Commission, Ruelas Mares explained to her fellow commissioners, “Yes, folks are doing similar work, but not every organization will serve every young person…Some youth gravitate toward different institutions…It’s a testament that it is an ecosystem.”

Ruelas Mares, who says she “had a lot of rage” growing up, now shares “the thing that grounded me the most was hearing young people say that they cared about this too…and I think that's what really gave me hope for the future of Sac Kids First—for the youth organizing movement here in Sacramento.”

“We have [had] people who were our opponents become our allies, and you have to kind of look at it not as anything you're going to accomplish immediately,” says Keddy. “The Children's Fund is a good example of that, of the kind of persistence that's required to get the city of Sacramento to think differently about investing in kids.”

After her parents saw Ruelas Mares speak in front of 400 people at a town hall with the now former Sacramento mayor, Daryll Steinberg, her father told her about her grandfather, who was a representative in their rural community back in Mexico. Her grandmother on her mother’s side was a doula and medicine woman for her community. Ruelas Mares says that remembering those leaders who have come before her is what carries her through difficult council meetings or decisions. “It hits different when there have been generations of knowledge passed on that eventually got me to where I’m doing this work…they’re not here physically, but I feel that presence.” Fellow organizer and Advocacy Coordinator with Empowering Pacific Islander Communities, Ana Taukolo echoes, “I know that I’m carrying the weight of my ancestors. That's why I love this organizing work so much, because I know what it means…to those who have come before me.” 

In Sacramento, the movement to uplift youth and restore community power is more than a political victory—it’s a generational reclamation. From medicine bags woven with ancestral memory to policy campaigns rooted in prevention and equity, a chorus of voices—elders, organizers, and youth—are shaping a future grounded in healing, trust, and opportunity. Measure L, and the coalition behind it, proves what’s possible when young people are seen not just as recipients of services, but as leaders of change. Across neighborhoods like Del Paso Heights and South Sacramento, young leaders are growing into their power with the guidance of those who came before them and the tools to build something lasting. In the process, they’re rewriting the story of a city that once overlooked them by laying down new tracks of hope, resilience, and collective strength. Sacramento’s transformation shows that by investing in its youth, a community doesn’t just imagine a better future, it creates it. 

Written by Jess DiPierro Obert and Naomi Ranz-Schleifer. Photographs by Gabriela Hasbun, Jess DiPierro Obert, and Naomi Ranz-Schleifer