Seeds of Fire

Program Overview

For 18 years, Highlander’s Seeds of Fire (SOF) program has brought together thousands of young people (ages 13 – 17) and their allies (ages 18 and up). Seeds of Fire creates space for emerging and experienced grassroots organizers and community leaders to build collective power and influence critical shifts in policy. We host, support and network intergenerational organizers from across the South to share their social justice work and to learn about Highlander’s methodologies.  Discuss the different issues in your community, find strategies to address these challenges, and build your relationships in the region.

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Program Components

Popular/Political Education 
and Analysis

We believe that political education and analysis, through the lens of popular education, creates lifelong leaders who are able to critically examine issues while making connections between our work at every level.

Intergenerational Organizing and Mentorship

This program brings together youth and allies of different ages for intergenerational programming. The allyship will involve adults supporting and challenging each other, while exploring how to best foster youth leadership. 

Skills, Tools and Strategy Building

Through popular education, participants will experience 3-way learning practices where they will become both educators and learners of collective knowledge. Using research, theater, games, art, music, history and collective wisdom, participants will get to generate new visions for the world they are trying to build.

Transnational Struggles

In order to struggle and effectively envision a future for liberation, we will explore movements and organizing efforts happening across the world, and interpret them through the context of ancestral wisdom. 

Our Impact

  • Develop leaders and organizers with social and political analysis that are dismantling and uprooting state-sanctioned violence, challenging economic and governance systems and working for alternatives
  • Build resources for youth work in the region
  • Develop a participatory budgeting process for the Seeds of Fire fund
  • Prepare young people to be part of organizations and assume leadership positions across the South
  • Achieve the clear policy changes in schools, local communities and at all levels of government that are needed to shift harmful public school practices and end the criminalization of young people of color and immigrants

Join Us

The Seeds of Fire program has included the SOF camp, mini-camps, the Living Legacy Tour, SOF Advisory Committee, Greensboro Justice Fellows, Stay Together Appalachian Youth (STAY), and Supporting Emerging Appalachian Leaders (SEAL), 
as well as local internships. Now we host fellowships, cohorts, networks, as well as working individually with youth and their organizations!