On a recent Sunday morning at Judson Memorial Church, seven-year-old Nova stood before the congregation and read from the children’s book We Are the Builders, listing the roles people play in a community — builders, disrupters, caregivers, visionaries — before congregants huddled in groups based on those roles to discuss how they could help their neighbors, including documenting ICE, delivering groceries, and protesting the climate crisis.
The scene is part of a broader rise in children-centered organizing across New York City’s progressive spaces, as families confront how to explain to their children why ICE agents are in their neighborhood, what the Iran war is about, and how they can be useful in their communities, The Guardian reported. Judson has shifted away from separating children into a small Sunday school room, instead keeping them in the service and integrating them into acts of social justice.
“There’s no roadmap for how we parent through this,” Elizabeth Hamby, Nova’s mother, told The Guardian. Hamby, an artist and civil servant who wove activism into her work before the Trump administration, founded the group Seeds in the Bronx around the time Trump retook office. Once a month, up to dozens of families gather to read children’s civil rights books, sing songs about protest and civil rights, and discuss protests; children are free to play while adults talk about parenting through global crises.
Eduardo Rega Calvo, a Seeds member, said his six-year-old daughter Naira, born during the pandemic, has been surrounded by protest her entire life — the chants of Black Lives Matter demonstrators the summer she was born, Washington Heights community organizing for Palestine, and the rallies against Trump’s policies that have filled weekends ever since. For the No Kings protest in March, Seeds marched down Broadway with 75 people, the children carrying a parachute that read “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
“We bought this little megaphone that they can hold, and watching them pass it between each other, and each leading songs and chants, it was awesome,” Hamby told The Guardian.
The Hands Off NYC coalition facilitates playdates with coloring pages and chalk at playgrounds, and organizes small teach-ins with musicians and performers. “When you have young kids, you don’t stop having them just because the government is doing bad things that you need to protest,” Grace Lindsay, a Hands Off NYC organizer, told The Guardian. “So there needs to be a way for those things to work together.”
Climate Families NYC, which has grown to 5,000 members since its founding in 2019, organizes park playdates and events with a climate focus — rallying against AI in classrooms and for local climate legislation such as the recently passed Sunny Act, which allows renters to use plug-in balcony solar panels. Liat Olenick, the group’s program and communications director, told The Guardian she recently took her four-year-old son to the state capitol in support of the Sunny Act; he wore a sun costume and ran down the hallways. “A four-year-old in Albany is hilarious by default, but he knows what the Sunny Act is, he knows who the governor of New York is,” Olenick said.
At Judson, the integration of children into activism draws on the church’s long tradition of organizing. Black churches were key organizing spaces during the civil rights movement, and Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at age eight, told The Guardian that King made sure children were included in discussions. “He took us by our hands and said: ‘Let them stand,’ and he brought us into that room, pulled up chairs and sat right in front of us, continuing to have conversations with us,” she said.
After the service at Judson, children ate ice cream sundaes and painted butterfly wings to wear to the Queer Liberation parade. Ada, a nine-year-old who described herself as a visionary, told The Guardian she wants “to see everyone helping each other, and more people respecting others, even though we’re different.”