Providence Youth Student Movement

Vision: PrYSM envisions empowered, healthy, and joyful communities of color free from the violence of the School to Prison to Deportation pipeline. We seek to create a platform to educate and amplify youth of color, Southeast Asian, and state violence survivors’ voices in building a world without policing, prisons, and borders. Mission: PrYSM mobilizes our community to build grassroots power and organize collectively for abolition and liberation for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. PrYSM has historically organized at the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation by centering youth, women, queer, and Southeast Asian leadership in our campaigns, our organization, and our communities. Values: Abolition - We must confront and end cycles of violence in our communities. PrYSM must work towards transforming our communities by building safer spaces that foster accountability, healing, and dialogue. Love - The path to abolition and liberation must be rooted in compassion and solidarity. Love for ourselves, our families, and our communities must guide PrYSM’s work, actions, and collective vision. Resistance - We must unite to shift power into the hands of the people through direct action, base building, community coalitions, and youth organizing. PrYSM builds power by centering the experiences of oppressed communities and developing their local grassroots leadership.

In the summer of 2001, a series of gang fights left a 31-year-old Southeast Asian refugee dead and a 17-year-old youth of color incarcerated for life. As a result, Black, Latinx, & Southeast Asian youth were met with increased police surveillance, and harsher punishments for those convicted of gang-related crimes. This would become the drive for Southeast Asian youth to come together to build PrYSM as an organizing home to dream of alternatives to police and prisons. Shortly after PrYSM’s founding, the United States signed a repatriation agreement with the government of Cambodia, allowing for the forced deportation of Cambodian refugees. Within less than a month from when the agreement was signed, dozens of young Cambodian men trickled into PrYSM meetings. These young men were the first Cambodians to live in the US and face the piercing sting of anti-Asian prejudice. They would band together to form protective cliques which evolved into gangs, and as a result have been convicted of crimes. Some of the young men were concerned about being deported and their survival in Cambodia, noting that they spoke only limited Khmer and had no remaining family left in Cambodia. Others expressed a deep fear and disbelief that the United States was sending them back to a country which they had fled because of genocide. And so, PrYSM began to organize Southeast Asian youth and refugees in undoing the school to prison to deportation pipeline.