“I often felt at times when I was a youth that I did not have the spaces or the people to be able to talk about the things I really want to talk about on a deep level,” said Tara Rose Brown, who recently became the Organizing Director of the Philadelphia Children’s Movement (PCM) — a collective that engages in thoughtful approaches to family life and learning in order to promote justice and liberation for all.
“I wanted to make sure that I was involved in the work to fill that gap,” Brown said about her career with youth and families, in which she aims to provide youth with the space and power to find their own voices.
PCM was able to hire Brown — the nonprofit’s first full-time employee — after receiving a $100,000 grant from the city’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual Disability Services to work in collaboration with various city-wide and national organizations aiming to address trauma.
Before taking the role, Brown — whose background is in counseling, social work, education and reproductive health — worked for the Health Resource Center program within the Philadelphia School District, where she coordinated and supervised seven drop-in resource spaces. Brown, who has always had a special interest in working with youth and families, said high schoolers could use those spaces to get connected with a variety of services, learn more about their health and find community.
Brown, who views the earth as a tool for healing, feels connected to the land and advocates for stronger stewardship of the earth. She’s served on the board of directors of the Urban Tree Connection. She’s also worked with the Attic Youth Center, the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, and other programs for young people.
She recognizes that youth are often seeking a safe adult to confide in and has appreciated opportunities to both become that safe person for others and empower youth to be leaders of their own spaces — through talking about their own experiences and sharing information with each other.
“As an activist and organizer at heart, I just really want to be a resource,” Brown said about her approach to working for and with the communities she serves. She hopes to be the same for PCM.
Philadelphia Children’s Movement launched in 2015 as Philadelphia Children’s March — with its first event held in support of the emerging Black Lives Matter movement.
“I love that the organization was formed out of a need that the community saw, then filled. These 10 parents came together and wanted a space where their kids can have their voice be heard around the issues that were directly affecting them,” Brown said about PCM’s history. “That’s an incredibly strong foundation for an organization.”
Today, the group is an active community and also works with schools, educators, and other organizations to support anti-racism efforts, activism and justice-seeking initiatives.
The organization, she explained, helps young people and their families and educators think more deeply about injustice and discrimination in all of its forms as well as the family structures, institutional systems, and life experiences that shape people’s encounters with those issues.
Educating and resourcing adults is a big part of PCM’s impact. Brown said the voices and perspectives of PCM’s youth have a strong influence on the work the organization does in schools.
The organization has helped educators examine curriculum and offered resources to families who want to be more intentional about their approach to parenting and intergenerational relationships.
They’ve also developed programs specifically designed to introduce young people of various ages and backgrounds to affirming books and experiences. Mentorships can also emerge from intergenerational connections. Organizers aim to help young people not only have all aspects of their identities recognized but celebrated.
Brown, who is 35, has embraced a role as a queer elder — recognizing that not all members of the LGBTQ+ community make it to her age. She aims to ensure young people have a queer role model in her leadership. She grew up with a strong sense of her queer identity as a kid and had support from her family.
“We spoke so joyfully about our queerness. We created that joy within ourselves and had it really radiating within us,” Brown said about being surrounded by queer affirmation and queer community throughout her life.
“My biracial identity as a Black and white person has shaped me as an individual in the ways that I navigate the world and how the world navigates me,” she added, noting that she doesn’t leave any aspect of herself outside the door when she shows up to work and is guided by Black radical feminism in her approach to personal and professional pursuits.
This has turned her into a dreamer — something she said keeps her more connected to youth than adults because of their own tendencies to approach life with the same passion for joy and wonder.
“We’re providing programming around Black joy,” she said about one of the org’s new initiatives for high school youth — which gives youth tools to explore music and other art, celebrate the joy in their current lives, and envision and plan for future joy. Participants can also learn to cook and bring ingredients home to cook with their families. They piloted the same program with middle school students throughout the school year.
Brown, who aims to empower them along their own paths toward self-discovery and navigating the world, said PCM has a similar mentality. Some of the young people who were raised within the community have now grown into new roles as they’ve grown up.
Brown has been with the nonprofit for just two months and is focused on listening to the leaders PCM has trusted over the past decade to learn about their vision for the future.
“We’re turning 10 years old in January, and I’m just really excited to see how the organization can grow next,” she said, underlining that the organization continually centers the idea of collective growth and collective work. “We don’t want it to look akin to the systems that we’re trying to fight against.”
Brown described her new role with PCM as a pipeline to and from the organization, calling her approach to leadership as a radical way of supporting people in community.
“Everybody is an expert in something, and I don’t ever really want to come to the table as a leader who “knows it all” because we don’t know it all. No one knows it all,” she said about her desire to lead through an intentional process of listening, reflecting and collaborating.
“We have such a creative, imaginative, innovative, radical team,” she underlined. “I just feel so honored to be able to help support them in continuing their process and guiding us all to help grow the organization.”