It Works Like Teen Spirit

Janice Lee MPP 2000

Janice Lee MPP 2000 didn’t come to the Kennedy School intending to work with teenagers. She wanted to focus on electoral politics. However, as part of her PAE research, she met a former Crips gang member from Boston who was still getting into fights at school but had natural leadership potential. From that point on, Lee was hooked.

“At first I just needed a PAE topic,” Lee says, explaining why Common Cause, the citizen’s lobbying organization, asked her to come up with a plan to reinvigorate democracy in Massachusetts. After working on it for five months, she realized it was too huge a topic, so she narrowed it down to getting more kids involved in democracy (the average Common Cause member, at the time, was 71 years old).

“My research showed there’s not a lot out there to get kids involved, despite the fact that they’re the least connected and civically engaged generation,” Lee says. “I took Marshall Ganz’s organizing class and realized that if you let kids organize themselves, they’ll get hooked.”

That, she says, was when she stopped focusing on the theoretical and started focusing on concrete ways to engage students. She began by meeting on a regular basis with students from high schools in Cambridge and Boston. Instead of lecturing about abstract words like politics or coalition building, however, she decided to get personal.

“If you say to a kid, ‘Our democracy needs to be fixed,’ it won’t work. But if you ask them, ‘What’s wrong in your life that you want fixed?’ they start talking about wanting extended library hours or better school bathrooms,” Lee says. “Lectures don’t work. Discussions don’t even work.”

Exercises do work.

“We had one group decide what they would do with their free time. We gave them chips and only let kids with certain chips make the decisions. This made the others angry, and it helped them all understand how in the beginning, only white male landowners had the vote and the power,” Lee says. “I don’t think any lecture could talk about voting, decision making, and injustice as well.”

Working with teens, she also learned early on the importance of opening up about herself.

“You have to tell your own story, or they won’t trust you at all,” she says, describing her initial meetings. “I told them that I remember feeling dismissed when I was their age because of my family. I came to the states from Korea when I was four and couldn’t speak English.”

Lee’s family eventually settled in New Jersey, where her parents saved enough money to move to a wealthy community and to buy a toy store in a poor neighborhood of color, where Lee worked after school. Witnessing two very different worlds became a lightening rod for her activism.

“I went back and forth between places where kids were driving BMWs to poorer areas. It made me really angry to see how different it could be,” she says. “I’m amazed at how young I was when I realized injustice. I ended up channeling a lot of that energy and anger into volunteerism.”

With her PAE project long completed, Lee is now channeling her energy into the Boston-Area Youth Organizing Project, a faith- and school-based organization designed to develop leadership skills in teens. Successful projects include working with students to get the hours for free student subway passes extended and improving bathrooms in Boston public schools.

“The bathrooms emphasized that they weren’t important in society, so we worked on who they needed to influence and how to get access to people in power,” Lee says. “It culminated in a meeting with the principal. They were scared to death, but when they got in the meeting, they were confident. That’s what I’m proud of most. They learned to use their voice.”

—Lory Hough