Intro Text

In the MCA Learning team, we believe that young people are today’s most vital creative leaders. Supporting the visions of people in their teens and early twenties is essential to the cultural and civic health of our society today—not just to the sustainability and patronage of the arts in the future. The museum can offer young people the tools necessary to build community and platforms to lead public conversations about contemporary life, but we can’t do it alone. MCA Learning participates in a vibrant community of dedicated youth and allies all across Chicago who are working together to amplify young voices.

What ties these organizations and collectives together is a shared commitment to authentic youth agency. Agency is the power to act. Agency is the combination of confidence, self-awareness, and empathy, as well as the ability to engage those skills to make change. To support the agency of another human being means to affirm their unique and valuable expertise (everyone can be both teacher and learner) and to invest real resources and trust in what they want to accomplish.

The groups we work with support the agency of young people in many different ways. Some are programs organized by adults in which youth get to decide what projects to work on and how they want to accomplish those projects, others employ youth as staff or engage them as leaders in specific initiatives. Some are projects designed and executed entirely by young people. In all cases, youth are included in essential decision-making (following the principle “nothing about us without us,” popularized by the Disability Rights movement), compensated fairly for their work, and entrusted with authentic decision-making power over valuable resources. They are not instrumentalized, tokenized, or asked to carry out the creative vision of adults.

Youth agency is an ideal that can be hard to achieve in a society rife with adultism—the belief that adults, just because they are older, should have power over the lives and bodies of young people. Cultural institutions like the MCA have a lot to learn about how to make our spaces truly accessible, let alone empowering, for people in their teens and early twenties. By building relationships and collaborating on projects with groups across the city that share our values around youth agency, we are learning to be stronger allies for Chicago youth.

Here are just a few of the incredible groups of young people who will be leading projects at the MCA this spring: