Teens Take Charge

When Whitney Stephenson co-founded Teens Take Charge in 2017, she didn’t imagine she was laying the groundwork to launch a nonprofit—she just thought she was putting on a spoken word poetry show.

The idea for Teens Take Charge was born out of a question. During her sophomore year at a Bronx high school, a visiting podcaster and journalist asked Stephenson whether she had white friends; Stephenson didn’t. What she did have were white, Black, and brown teachers, who primarily played disciplinary roles.

In that moment, something clicked. She had never been asked to reflect on the racial and economic disparities embedded in her daily schooling experience. “I didn’t recognize the inequality,” she said. “I was just in it. I thought, this is just how school is.” That observation opened the door to deeper questions about race, access, and who gets to thrive in New York City’s schools.

After that moment of awakening, Stephenson and a fellow student organizer began hosting open conversations at the local library for their classmates to discuss the issues they were facing at school. The problems their peers raised—lack of textbooks, missing calculators, art programs ending mid-year—were symptoms of a deeper problem. “Someone should be concerned,” Stephenson remembers thinking. “Why aren’t they?”

They realized that if the system wouldn’t respond they had to find a way to make it listen, and they called their first public event To Whom It Should Concern. Held at the Bronx Library Center, the evening featured student testimonials, spoken word poetry, music, and community dialogue.

It was a call to action, and also the beginning of something much bigger: Teens Take Charge

Today, Teens Take Charge runs as an afterschool program and youth-led campaign incubator for high school students. Each year, a cohort of students from all five boroughs comes together to choose and run campaigns based on their own lived experiences. This year’s student cohort focused on expanding access to internship opportunities for students in under-resourced schools, and on disrupting the patterns of gentrification affecting their communities.

The work is collaborative and evolving. Students begin by sharing stories and identifying common themes, then break into groups to pitch campaign ideas. At a citywide gathering of high school students, their peers vote on which campaigns to pursue.

Last year, the internship campaign led to new partnerships with local nonprofits, including a collaboration with fellow Brooklyn Org grantee YVote. The gentrification campaign focused on gathering community interviews and building momentum for future programming around tenant rights.

“There’s so much vision, but the school year is short,” said Stephenson, now the full-time Organizing Lead. “We’ve built in a pass-the-baton structure so each cohort’s work feeds into the next.”

Support from Brooklyn Org has helped make that structure possible. “Our youth organizers receive stipends for their work, and Brooklyn Org helps make that possible,” said Stephenson. “The funding also covers things like food, transportation, and supplies: everything it takes to make these programs happen.”

In recent years, Teens Take Charge has also invested in student wellness. “Organizing can lead to burnout,” Stephenson explained. “With Brooklyn Org’s support, we’ve incorporated cultural outings and wellness events that let our student organizers recharge while staying connected with each other and with the work.”

That care has a ripple effect. Many Teens Take Charge alumni go on to lead change in college and beyond. One alum, Nina W., now studies education policy in college and recently won an award for her research on school segregation. “She told me that without Teens Take Charge, she wouldn’t have gone down this path at all,” Stephenson shared.

As for what’s next, Stephenson’s vision is expansive. “Our goal is to reach more students, especially those who think change isn’t possible. We want to show them that it is, and that they can be the ones to lead it.” That means growing the program’s reach across more schools, deepening student mentorship, and continuing to support alumni beyond graduation. “A lot of our students are first-generation,” Stephenson said. “They enter systems that weren’t built for them, and we want to help mend the gap those systems create.”

The hope is that Teens Take Charge can continue serving as a launching pad for young people to carry this work forward—wherever they go next. With support from Brooklyn Org, that future feels within reach. “We’ve come a long way from where we started,” said Stephenson. “And we’re not done.”