Planting Seeds of Sovereignty: How Crayons & Culture Is Shaping A New Generation of Black Leaders (Written By: Josiah Jacobs)

As we progress through 2025, Donald Trump’s return to the White House has sent shockwaves throughout the nation. Not in recent memory has the outcome of a presidential election affected the lives of such a huge amount of people within the first six months of the presidency. I would say that plenty of people have lost hope for what the future holds because of these recent developments. However, I believe that it is of the utmost importance that we remember that we still do have the power to create a brighter tomorrow. The most surefire way to create a better future is to make empowering children a priority, and to create opportunities for the next generation to lead. Grassroots organizations across the nation have remained committed to this mission, and in this piece I would like to highlight the work of an organization that I’ve been blessed to teach with this summer, Crayons & Culture.

Crayons & Culture is a grassroots education solution that works to instill a sense of Black Consciousness and pride within the Black youth of Baltimore City. Despite Baltimore City being majority Black, this has not erased the fact that educational institutions oftentimes tend not to be able to support the needs of culturally affirming Black youth and excellence. Crayons & Culture offers a solution to this lack of culturally affirming education through tactics and a pedagogy rooted in immersive learning that recreates what the classroom has the potential to look like when you awaken the natural genius that lies within Black children. While children may appear to be passively experiencing the world, my time at Crayons & Culture this summer revealed just how much they are paying attention to their surroundings and internalizing what they observe.

For children, what they pay attention to is of critical importance. In a society that has been built on the notion of Black inferiority, these messages have the ability to permeate loudly through their young minds. This reality, combined with the resurgence of the more overt-form of white supremacy embodied through this current presidential administration, makes the mission of Crayons & Culture, along with similarly aligned Black institutions, even more paramount. In this era we find ourselves in, it is crucial that the values of Black pride and the ethos of self-determination lie not only at the center of how we think through this era, but also in how we create solutions and problem-solve for what lies ahead. When creating strategies for a liberated future, we must remember that our fight has been born out of a love for our communities, and by having a sense of pride about who we are. Every great Black organization engaged in their respective struggles because they believed wholeheartedly that we were worth fighting for. 

At Crayons & Culture, we have worked hard to instill a sense of internal value and self-worth within the youth. In the class that I had the opportunity to teach here, I had the youth repeat positive affirmations about themselves in front of the class. I stressed to the children that they must say their affirmation proudly, like they truly believe what they are saying. Having students declare positive affirmations may seem simple, yet it directly counters the ‘myth of inferiority’ that Dr. King warned against—a myth that too easily takes root in the absence of an affirming narrative about self. The idea of them being innately less intelligent compared to other groups, like we are often fed in the media, can spread like cancer if left undiagnosed.

When engaging the youth, having an inherent sense of value is critical, because this is what will carry these same people into adulthood. One morning here at Crayons & Culture, I had remarked to the camp that the knowledge that they are receiving will save their lives. It would be easy to believe that I was being hyperbolic when I said this, but I wholeheartedly maintain what I had stated. True empowerment, I believe, is impossible without knowing the revolutionary legacy of our ancestors—those who, as John Henrik Clarke said, are “revolutionary people” simply by surviving and striving in America. Not to mention, we must communicate the idea that our history didn’t start in 1619, but that we ruled nations, innovated new forms of travel and agriculture, and created complex systems of knowledge in Africa that we still can’t fully understand today. These ancestors live within us everyday, whether we are willing to acknowledge this truth or not. When we understand these core principles of where we come from as Black people, it plants the seed within the mind that we do have the ability to create change, and that we can do it on our terms. These ideas create the foundation for a child to use their imagination to become a problem-solver, and to solve these problems not purely out of anger, but out of love for their people. Crayons & Culture provides this opportunity to plant seeds of sovereignty within Baltimore youth to become self-determining changemakers within their communities. 

Too often, when creating programs and solutions for our communities, we tend to focus solely on addressing the problems and overlook the beauty, love, and deep-rooted strengths that already exist. It’s not enough to fix what’s broken; we also must celebrate and protect what we value. When we center that love—love for our people, our children, and our cultures—we create the space for imagination to flourish. By partnering with organizations such as Our Time Kitchen for cooking, FullBlast Steam for engineering, and Whitelock Farms for agriculture, we empower children to become solution-makers. Each of these organizations provides children with essential knowledge and skills that are crucial to building functional, thriving communities. Motivated not by anger or hardship, but by kinship, pride, and a strong sense of responsibility, these children are equipped to shape a better future. Crayons & Culture places the seed within young people to not only see themselves as capable of solving problems but also as individuals who have a place of improving the well-being of their communities. Our vision is to create a cohort of leaders who are both aware of the problems affecting their community and equipped to spearhead the movement toward Black liberation, which I define as our community attaining autonomy over its economic, political, and cultural life. 

Crayons & Culture is rooted in a long legacy of Black institutions that have worked to uphold and maintain a Black identity that is rooted in pride and devotion to the Black community. Being reared within a Black institution provides not only the ability to see yourself in a positive way, but it also allows you to see Black leadership demonstrated  in practice. While this philosophy holds true for children, it also applies to young adults as well. Through the internship and fellowship program here at Crayons & Culture, we have also created the ability for young professionals to enter into leadership roles, thus giving them first-hand experience at what it is like working in an institution that is devoted to the empowerment and success of Black people. 

By having the ability to work with the youth daily, these young professionals are seeing the power that comes with working for an organization that is grounded in a moral ethos that sees its work as bigger than just education, but providing these Black children with a sense of self that will fundamentally change how they live their lives. Many of the interns and fellows here at Crayons & Culture have never had the opportunity to work at a Black owned and run institution, thus lighting the spark in their older age about the possibilities that lie before them when the doctrine of self-determination permeates throughout an organization.

The cultivation of a young cohort of leaders is nothing new at the Black institution, and Crayons & Culture is committed to following in this legacy. Providing employment that serves your community is one that can empower an individual with a deep sense of purpose and can oftentimes provide young college students with a sense of direction at such a pivotal point of their lives. Moreover, providing Black youth with employment allows them to have a personal stake in the community that they wish to see thrive . In order to prepare a young cohort for leadership, they must be ready when the baton is handed down to them. Handling the responsibilities of leadership, like the interns and fellows have done so far, prepares them for what this society will inevitably throw at them. 

By providing this socialization for these young professionals, Crayons & Culture provides a glimpse of what a functional community can look like, and how feeling a sense of accountability towards the people who you serve will allow you to make culturally-informed decisions about specific ways your community can be made better . At Crayons & Culture, we pride ourselves on not just our work with the students, but also with the ways in which we try to keep the guardians of the children involved with the activities. In order to reap the full benefits of a culturally-conscious education, the elders must be involved. This provides for a deeper sense of accountability that we aspire to embody as a part of our organization. In order to have the seeds of sovereignty bloom into what we have imagined, we must be completely bought in as a community, elder and youth alike. 

Crayons & Culture, like the Black institutions that paved the way for its existence, has produced an environment that cultivates a new generation of Black leaders who are not only devoted to the Black community, but also embody this devotion in their actions—all as an expression of the will of the people.