At Citywide Youth Coalition, A New Director Takes The Reins

CWYC's Alyssa-Marie Cajigas, Addys Castillo, and Ta’LannaMonique “TMo” Lawson-Dickerson. SUBLIME by CLo Photos.

Addys Castillo turned a quiet city nonprofit into a seat at the table for hundreds of New Haven youth. A decade later, she’s passing the torch to another longtime advocate for young people as working-class solidarity, lowering the voting age, and healthier public schools all take center stage.

That nonprofit is City Wide Youth Coalition (CWYC), which last month announced its first leadership transition in roughly a decade. This fall, Castillo is handing the reins to Ta’LannaMonique “TMo” Lawson-Dickerson, who for years has served as the group’s director of political education. Castillo will remain on in an advisory capacity for a year, to ensure a smooth transition.

Prior to leading CWYC, Lawson-Dickerson served as the youth services coordinator for the New Haven Pride Center. Alyssa-Marie Cajigas, co-founder of The Children of Marsha P. Johnson, will become CWYC’s director of programs.

“I think when we look at Citywide’s future, how do we build an agenda for the working class?” Lawson-Dickerson asked aloud during a recent interview with the Arts Paper. “We need a really strong working class agenda that centers youth. Youth voice, youth power, youth resilience.”

It marks a doubling down on youth advocacy for which the organization, first founded in 1976, is now known. When Citywide first came into being, Frank Logue was in his final years as mayor, working to counteract some of the devastating effects of Urban Renewal on the city. Around him, New Haven was a hub for activism and social justice, including the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program and the growth of groups like the Hill Parents Association, FLECHAS (Fiestas de Loiza en Connecticut en Honor al Apostol Santiago) and Casa Boricua at Yale.

And yet, the city was also economically depressed, and youth often bore the brunt of it through limited resources and struggling public schools. Citywide was born when a group of service providers—Barbara Tinney, Lydia Bornick, and Deb Stewart were all early originators—came together to advocate for young people. By 1986, the group was holding monthly meetings at City Hall, talking about youth programming. Six years later in 1992, CWYC was formally incorporated as a nonprofit organization.

“The organization has pretty much been the table to bring youth services together,” Castillo said. And yet for years, it didn’t center youth participation. Meetings were in the mornings and on weekdays, when students were already in school. The same group took a hiatus from June to August, meaning that NHPS summer break was their quiet period. “So you can imagine who wasn’t a part of this.”

That began to change slowly when Rachel Hereema, who now works for the Stratford Library Association and runs a coaching business, took over at the end of 2008. In 2013, Hereema approached the city during charter revisions, successfully advocating for two student positions on the New Haven Board of Education. Those became official the following year in 2014. But months later, before Citywide could also bring youth into its voting ranks, Hereema stepped down.     

When the CWYC board opened up applications for a director, Castillo saw a chance to enact change in the city that raised her (she was born in New York and raised partly in Puerto Rico, but grew up mostly in the Dwight/Kensington neighborhood). New Haven—and the country—was in the thick of the Black Lives Matter movement. Castillo, then working at the Children’s Aid Society in New York, understood intimately the power that youth voices could and did have.

“Ferguson was happening,” she said. “Baltimore was happening. And to me, it was like a missed opportunity. I got laid off, I had more time to dedicate, and I wanted to do policy level work.”

What followed was a years-long reshaping of the organization that centered, celebrated and nourished young voices—and offered them a seat at the table, and then the whole table itself. Initially, Castillo remembered, she would meet with other executive directors and social service providers, only to watch as they fell away when a call to organize went out. She spent months trying to bring in youth, struggling to figure out the right formula. 

Then in 2016, several teachers from Highville Charter School came to her in distress. One of their students, 17-year-old Aymir Holland, had been arrested for the alleged assault of an older Yale professor in the city’s East Rock neighborhood. They were certain he was innocent—and furious that no one would listen to him. They were also horrified that despite his age—Holland was 16 when the crime happened—he was being tried as an adult, rather than a juvenile.

Castillo, watching the case play out, launched a “Dinner and Dialogue” conversation series at the library meant to create space for conversation around social justice and youth involvement. She connected with Cajigas, then a wide-eyed student at High School in the Community ("We were already organizing, we just didn't have the language for it," Cajigas recalled). She pulled in city legislators and elected officials, including early champions Gary Winfield and Robyn Porter. 

“We started organizing, and the campaign formed itself,” she remembered. New Haven Public Schools students showed up on Holland’s behalf; they rallied outside the city’s courthouse on the first day of his trial. Yalies, there for orientation and move-in, listened to them, signed a petition for Holland, and joined the fight.

“We didn’t know Amiyr, so we didn’t know if he was guilty or innocent,” Castillo said. “But what we did know is that Amiyr was 16 at the time of this crime, and he should have been in juvenile court, not adult court. And they were trying to offer him over 60 years. So to us, it was like, we’re not doing this accordingly.”

Members of CWYC organized for a year, during which Holland pled nolo contendere and was ultimately released. That advocacy, which lifted up young voices, helped the organization grow its base. By 2019, students had become such a force that CWYC moved its headquarters down Chapel Street, from a closet-sized office at The Grove to their current home at 928 Chapel St. They hosted “Undoing Racism” trainings with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) and became an annual collaborator on Black & Brown Queer Camp. They focused on the power of voting, which is still central to the group’s structure.

And, they kept growing. In early 2019, members of Citywide joined Students for Educational Justice, Hearing Youth Voices, CT Students for a Dream and others to testify in favor of a Black and Latino Studies elective in all Connecticut public schools. In December of that year, their space was officially christened the Black and Brown Power Center, home to weekly meetings and political mentorship. Castillo, along with members, commissioned a mural by the artist Isaac Bloodworth and decorated the space with Black Lives Matter and Pride Flags, words written on the walls, and affirmations meant to keep organizers going even on their hard days. 

“This is what we dreamed about here,” Castillo said, motioning to a wall covered with the names of Connecticut legislators and how they were likely to vote. “That young people can feel that this is about them being centered.”

Even—and perhaps especially—when the twin pandemics of Covid-19 and structural racism hit New Haven in 2020, CWYC kept advocating, growing its footprint until it had gained both local and national recognition. In June 2020, following the state-sanctioned murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, Citywide helped organize marches and teach-ins that spanned the city from police headquarters on Union Avenue to East Rock Park.

Members—mostly public high school students—wrote and presented a list of demands, including fewer cops and more counselors in the New Haven Public School, to the city. They weighed in on reopening schools, supported new justice collaboratives and raised their voices around the importance of youth voting. They led walkouts for police-free schools and fought for better mental health services in their classrooms.

“We do this with trust and transformation,” Castillo said. “Trust because change happens at the speed of trust, and transformation because we recognize that we’re not happy with the systems that we have in place, and the only way we’re going to do this is we’re gonna all have to evolve together.”

“I Was Born An Activist, And I Grew To Be An Organizer”

Castillo’s deep belief in that evolution is also why it felt like the right time to pass the reins to Lawson-Dickerson, a longtime activist, Elm City COMPASS advisory board member and New Haven Public Schools parent who lives in the city’s Newhallville neighborhood. While she first joined Citywide in 2018, she’s been organizing since she was in diapers, encouraging people not to litter during her preschool’s recess periods.    

“That’s always been at the core of who I’ve been, from the time I was like, a baby baby all the way through now,” she said. “I always say, I was born an activist, and I grew to be an organizer.”

Leading Citywide was a logical next step, she added. As a kid growing up in the 1990s, Lawson-Dickerson joined her mom during union protests at Yale University, getting a crash course in worker solidarity and picket lines before she was 10. She learned about mental health from her mom, who worked for the Yale Child Study Center. Raised in North Haven, she also began to think about what it meant to be Black in the U.S., as one of few kids of color in her town and in her classes.

By the time she was a young adult, she was working with the organization Young Life and attending a series of reentry round tables that Mayor Toni Harp instituted at City Hall. Through her own small business, Tri-Cord LLC, she also worked closely with Youth Continuum, the City of New Haven and the state’s adult and juvenile justice systems. Her daughter, Khloé, and son, Camren, grew up alongside activists and movement builders, including at Citywide and the New Haven Pride Center. (“Your babies are Citywide babies,” Cajigas said.) So Citywide's sun-dappled offices and the streets it filled with joyful advocacy already felt like a second home.      

“I think that it reminds me that we can never start too early to do this work and to have these conversations and to hold these safe spaces, because our young people, starting from preschool on up, are dealing with the effects of living in society, which are touched by all of our systems," she said. 

Now, she sees the Citywide as a space for both organizing and healing, in part through political education. After years of working with youth across New Haven and the state, she’s excited to build CWYC’s commitment to working-class solidarity and increase civic literacy and participation—both in time for and well beyond the 2024 presidential election. That includes advocating for the two student members on the city’s Board of Education, who currently cannot vote in their roles.

“I don’t think you can really separate the anchor that Citywide is and the city of New Haven,” she said. “And the state. We’ve grown to the place where we set the tone.”

What that looks like in the next year, as Castillo remains onboard in an advisory capacity, is continuing the work of “We Vote Next” and growing a commitment to working-class solidarity across city-wide grassroots and advocacy groups. The first, which Citywide launched in 2019, is an ongoing campaign to lower the voting age in Connecticut, which would allow the members of the Board of Education to vote. The second includes building a working-class agenda that pushes for greater economic justice in the state and across the country.

In both, Lawson-Dickerson said, she hopes to build intergenerational connections, for which Castillo has already built the groundwork. By early 2025, she envisions an organizing roundtable that brings together activists and social service providers like U-ACT, Mothers and Others for Justice and the New Haven Pride Center among many others. For her, that’s part of the answer to the need for more resources for young people across the city.

“We are going to have some real conversations about what that even looks like for folks,” Lawson-Dickerson said, adding that she plans to hold an organizing meet-and-greet in December. “What that looks like for young folks, to really vote.”

“It would change what politicians care about,” she added. “Young people hold us accountable. If they’re not at the table, who is there to hold us accountable?”   

It also looks like slowing down and reassessing Citywide’s mission, vision, membership and work. “We’re not trying to build the ship while also trying to steer the ship,” Lawson-Dickerson said. “But we’re still here.” For the next six months, CWYC is taking a role focused on collaboration, from voter literacy efforts and the Justice for Jebrell movement to solidarity with those fighting for Palestinian rights. During that time, CWYC members also plan to move to monthly meetings, rather than weekly gatherings.     

Cajigas, who is now the organization’s director of programs, said she’s thrilled to see Lawson-Dickerson step into the role. When she joined Citywide as a student, she was just learning what organizing looked like and figuring out her role within it. Now, at 25, she’s taken on the role of a mentor and a fierce activist, teaching political history while also running her own organization dedicated to the lives of Black and Brown trans women. 

“When we talk about lowering the voting age in this city, it’s going to impact our economic strategy as a city, it will impact our education strategy as a city, I think it will finally bring the reckoning that this city needs,” she said.

Citywide Youth Coalition is located at 928 Chapel St. in downtown New Haven. Its next event is Freedom Week, which begins on the evening of Nov. 3. That Sunday, members will launch their podcast, “Blueprints for Freedom,” at 6 p.m. on Instagram Live. The next day, Citywide will hold a virtual conversation around the 2024 presidential election also on Instagram live. An election night watch party is scheduled for their headquarters from 8:30 to midnight.