YOUTH PEACE CONFERENCES

ROCHESTER YOUTH CONFERENCE 2008
Breaking Generational Curses

Rochester's 5th annual Teen Empowerment Youth Conference drew hundreds of youth to Monroe High School on November 8 for a thought-provoking stage presentation featuring a youth-written play and speeches by young people. The day also included an information fair with many local agencies offering their resources to youth. Read about the conference in the Democrat and Chronicle.

BOSTON YOUTH PEACE CONFERENCE 2008
Step Up to Change: From the Strand to the State House

TE's 16th annual Boston Youth Peace Conference brought 700 youth and adults to the Strand Theater in Dorchester on May 10 for a powerful afternoon of theater, rap, and speeches by youth, as well as the TE-produced video Voices from Behind the Wall. See our News page for links to articles about the video and the conference. Click on the YouTube link at the top of this page for a portion of the video. In this clip, inmate Anthony Warren apologizes to the child, Kai Leigh Harriott, who was paralyzed by a shot he fired.  

SOMERVILLE YOUTH PEACE CONFERENCE 2008
Uniting the Ville: Real Stories, Real Change

More than 600 youth and adults came to the conference on Saturday, April 12, at Somerville High School. Read about it in The Somerville News, The Boston Globe, and the The Somerville Journal.

The conference was hosted by Teen Empowerment, the City of Somerville, and Mayor Joseph Curtatone, and sponsored by The Somerville News, Somerville Public Schools, and the Somerville Police Department. Full list of partners (1-page download)

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ROCHESTER YOUTH CONFERENCE AND SPEAKOUT 2007
Rated Real 2: The Resurrection of Hip Hop

The 4th annual Youth Conference and SpeakOut in Rochester brought hundreds of youth together at Monroe High School to explore the impact of Hip Hop on youth culture. Participants examined where hip hop came from with its roots as a community-based tool to unite, empower, and fight oppression versus where it is today as a largely commercially driven form of self-oppression. From these understandings, youth strategized how to concretely "take back hip hop" to heal violence and promote positive social change.

YOUTH PEACE CONFERENCE HISTORY

Boston neighborhoods in 1993 were engulfed by an epidemic of gang violence. Almost every day a young person was shot or killed by another youth. In response to these tragic and painful events, the youth of Teen Empowerment organized the first Youth Peace Conference. That conference, held May 5, 1993, attracted more than 250 teens from rival factions, produced a lasting peace treaty among five gangs, and set the stage for the dramatic decline in gang and youth violence that followed over the next several years.

Teen Empowerment has held the Youth Peace Conference annually since then in Boston, bringing together hundreds of teens to build relationships, explore important issues such as education, jobs, crime, and police-youth relations, and celebrate the power of youth to take action for positive change. TE's youth conference in Rochester has been organized annually since 2004, and our Somerville site held its first conference in 2007.

Segments of Boston Peace Conference shows are available on DVD.

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