Call to support the Budding Roses youth summer camp program in the Portland area. See donation page here.
Help Budding Roses host a fun, free social justice camp for Portland-area youth!
Budding Roses launched in 2017 as a free, radical social justice summer camp in East Portland for youth in 3rd-9th grade. For four summers, we have provided two-week summer camps including workshops on social justice issues, art projects, outdoor recreation, and free meals and school supplies. For the past two years, we created COVID-safe “Camp Kits” and delivered them to 70 families so our campers could continue learning and creating together even while socially-distanced. Now we need your help to host our first in-person camp in two years!
Your support helps us buy high quality supplies for our camp activities, purchase school supplies to give out free to all campers, and pay our organizers, counselors, and community partners with stipends!
Our camp activities talk about racism, gentrification, student activism, gender, climate change, and mental health – issues that Portland youth are already engaging with. We emphasize youth leadership and decision-making and take our campers seriously as members of our community.
About Us: Budding Roses is a volunteer collective of educators, activists, and students from the Portland community. We strive to provide a free, safe and encouraging space for East Portland youth to learn, express themselves, and engage critically with the issues of social justice that they encounter as members of our community. We seek to help youth cultivate the necessary tools to be active community members through experiences of collective decision-making and provide opportunities to lead and facilitate through direct involvement in democratic education.
Budding Roses was founded as a project of Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Foundation, inspired by global examples of mutual aid and popular education projects like the Paideia Free School in Spain and the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast Programs, and Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We believe in empowerment through education, while also understanding that mainstream education often reproduces structural oppression and disempowers youth, particularly low income and youth of color. Youth are members of our communities and are directly impacted by social justice issues, yet their perspectives are discounted and they are not taken seriously as actors of social change. We organize camp as a democratic educational space, where campers identify topics they are interested in learning about, set community ground rules, use restorative justice to resolve conflicts, and lead their own workshops to teach their peers.
We believe that empowering youth to become critically engaged with social justice issues lays the groundwork for transformational social change tomorrow and today. We see returning campers taking on leadership roles at camp, getting involved in their communities, holding banners at marches, and initiating discussion about social issues with their parents. This shows the effectiveness of Budding Roses at activating young leaders to see themselves as agents of change with the power to work together to change the world.
Explore our Curriculum: Activities from our 2020 social justice activity kits are available for free on our website at: www.buddingroses.org/curriculum
Connect with Us: If you are interested in participating, volunteering, partnering, or just following our work you can find us at:
Website – www.buddingroses.org
Facebook – www.facebook.com/BuddingRosesPDX
Instagram – www.instagram.com/budding_roses_pdx
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