CAROLINE ROSS

Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Bachelor of Arts, May 2010

Concentration: Youth Organizing

Bio and Resume (.pdf)

Caroline Ross studies Youth Organizing at Gallatin, with emphasis on the experience of young people of color in school in urban centers. She believes that young people have a unique and powerful role in creating change in their schools and communities, and she is invested in methods that cultivate and maximize youth power. Integrating American Politics, Schools and Education, the Urban Economy, and Community Organizing into her individualized curriculum, Caroline works to establish young people as a political identity and a viable constituency and age group for achieving social change.

Before attending college, Caroline served a one-year term as an AmeriCorps volunteer with City Year Washington, DC, a full-time National Service program for 17 to 24 year-olds. During her corps year, Caroline developed and taught an innovative theater-based substance abuse education program for over 4,000 middle school students. As a teenager working daily in public schools and community centers throughout DC, Caroline became passionate about progressive teaching and learning in urban schools, and involving youth in efforts to strengthen communities.

Caroline continued her work with young people and arts-in-education with Boston Youth and Police in Partnership. As a program coordinator, she trained other young people to educate Boston Police recruits on youth culture, ageism, and racial bias in order to better serve and protect youth. Police officers and young people from the neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester built one-on-one relationships and used theater as a way to educate each other and break down barriers. This spurred her interest in dismantling the prison industrial complex, specifically the school-to-prison pipeline, and reducing the disproportionately high number of adjudicated young people of color. She advocates for the demilitarization of inner-city schools and envisions a shift from reactive policing to community policing.

Upon arriving in New York, Caroline continued her work with young people and law enforcement with the Blackout Arts Collective and NYU's Lyrics on Lockdown program. Alongside her classmates in Lyrics on Lockdown, she created and participated in arts workshops with high school students incarcerated at Riker's Island. As an intern with the Youth ECHO program at the Red Hook Community Justice Center, she worked with the nation's first community court to build a program that would address Red Hook youths' perception of crime.

Previously, Caroline organized Holyoke Youth Pride Empowerment (HYPE) in Holyoke, MA. The city's only community-based support and advocacy group for young LGBTQQIA people and their allies, HYPE organizes and educates young queer people in Holyoke to make strides for equality in a historically homophobic city and school district. Caroline and other young people with HYPE served as founding members of the Holyoke Pride Alliance and coordinated the first Western Mass Youth Pride Prom.

Caroline is currently the co-founder and volunteer coordinator for The Malcolm X Prison Debate Project, a debate program for high school students incarcerated at Riker's Island. She plans to pursue a degree in law. As a Reynolds Scholar, Caroline continues to find innovative ways to shift the conception of young people from consumers to creators of policies, to support youth leadership, and to facilitate strong partnerships between young people and adults.