Rap Resilience Advocacy Project

Resilience Advocacy Project (RAP) is a platform for New York City’s most underestimated youth to develop the skills, confidence and peer support they need to build authentic community power and take their rightful place at the center of transforming the policies and systems that stifle their potential. RAP trains teens to become social justice leaders in their communities. Through partnerships with schools and community-based organizations, youth learn to design and launch solutions to real-world problems in their communities. We work with under-served groups of youth and focus on a range of social justice issues including: relationship violence, school discipline, sexual and mental health, access to higher education, bullying, and stop and frisk. RAP works to drive positive changes in youth and anti-poverty laws and policies. We produce cutting-edge policy briefs and reports, provide public testimony, work with legislators, and directly involve youth in research and advocacy initiatives around issues impacting their lives. As a youth-led, adult-supported organization, RAP trusts and believes in low-income youth of color as both the experts in their own experiences and the people best positioned to drive solutions to the problems facing their communities. We live this value within our organization by initiating and adapting our programs based on the feedback of our youth leaders, and creating cultural norms and policies to ensure our organization is responsive to and supportive of youth at all levels.