Identity performance and collectivist leadership in the Philadelphia Student Union

Abstract

Youth organizing work benefits young people in myriad ways, equipping them with the skills and dispositions to organize around the systemic inequities and policy decisions that threaten their communities. The findings from this life histories study in the Philadelphia Student Union (PSU) reveal that the organization’s collectivist leadership model engaged young people in developing leadership capacity among the PSU membership, participating in consensus-based decision-making and embodying positive representations of PSU in their daily lives. Together, these activities allowed them to define and redefine the group’s internal and externalized organizational identity. In this cyclical process, young people came together to support a context that sustained individuals’ identity work through an inclusive and mutually empowering model of leadership development.

Notes

1. There were 6 school chapters at the time of my study, though the number of chapters fluctuates from year to year depending on the students’ interest and administrators’ cooperation in each school.

2. An action is a pre-planned public event used to garner the support of outsiders and/or put pressure on powerful individuals and institutions to meet the group’s demands.

3. All participants’ names have been changed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sonia M. Rosen

Sonia M. Rosen, PhD, is a visiting assistant professor at Arcadia University, Taylor 302, 450 South Easton Road, Glenside, PA 19038, USA. Email: [email protected]. Her research spans the fields of youth organizing, youth leadership, identity development, educational policy and organizational theory. She has published articles in Education 3–13 and PennGSE Perspectives on Urban Education.