ABOUT RR
Welcome - we are Radical Restart, a youth collective working to articulate our generations struggle, build powerful campaigns and learn alongside the emergent youth movements of the UK to create transformative change! We formed in April 2020 as a youth led response to the moment of collective crisis that the Covid-19 pandemic caused - and the wider crises of society from ecological to economic - we organised to ask a pair of simple yet powerful questions:
What would a Radical Restart look like?
&
What are we willing to do to make it happen?
Exploring these we dived into 4 key topics: Youth, Solidarity, Education and Movement Organising - running over 50 open workshops, a 2 week summer camp and getting a bunch of crews up and kicking - this was Phase 1, reaching out and building a foundation. Phase 2 started in the Autumn 2020 and was all about solidfying RR, building our collective commitment, radical imagination and developing our work.
Photos from the RR Camp back in August 2020 - you can check out the blogs here
RR GOING FORWARD
So, what does RR look like as a fully formed youth collective?
Well, the major change is that we've shifted from looking externally to looking internally - from running open sessions to building strong foundations. In essence, now we've got a crew - Phase 2 is all about really coming together, building our ideas and getting ready for action - check out the Our Work page for all the projects we've got on the go!
Towards all this we're using the dual concepts of Radical Imagination and Collective Commitment
- let us explain a little what they mean to us! -
Radical Imagination
At RR we talk a lot about the tranformative power of imagination. How it frees the mind, excites the body and leads us down paths unknown that feel scary and yet much like coming home. We believe this freedom to imagine is key to our humanity - probably the exact reason our world is determined to squash and destroy it at every turn. As such, our coupling of imagination with radical is two-fold:
1) that the simple act of daring to truly imagine is a radical act of defiance, an act we believe is central to the identity of youth.
2) using the meaning of radical as 'getting to the root' we challenge ourselves to dig deep, to lay bare the hard truthes of the world and from there to imagine in beautiful new directions!
Radical Imagination is our challenge to the world and ourselves - a rejection of the old stories of domination, violence and isolation and the welcoming of the task of imagining new powerful stories of change.
Collective Commitment
Making change is an inherently collective process - it comes when many many people step into their power and start walking a new path - no one person can change the world and never will. As such, and as the youth of an ever more individualised world,
we must re-learn art of collective commitment.
Commitment because this isn't easy - stepping off the path of least resistance and fighting for real change is hard and we need to own that. But commitment is more than just the drive to achieve - it is the bonds of friendship, learning and love you build along the way.
As such, this is what Collective Commitment
means to us:
"Collective Commitment is how we step away from individualism and derive a deeper inspiration, energy and power from those with who we struggle for change - from 'I Will Fight' to 'We Will Win'"
FOUNDATIONAL IDEAS
So what does it mean to be the youth of a broken system and burning world? What does it ever mean to be a youth fighting for change? These are the kinds of questions we are organsing around within the collective - all aimed at building our articulation of a Radical Youth Identity, a collective identity around which we as young people can organise, connect and build the kinds of powerful inter-community solidarity that we believe is essential for bringing about any true radical transformative change!
Key projects in this area at the moment are our Chaos Workshops and our soon to be released podcast: Only The Youth Can Save Us Now - check them out for more info!
RADICAL YOUTH IDENTITY
If we’re talking about youth and we’re talking about societal change then we need to talk about schooling. If we stop, and start questioning schooling as a system, then we begin to hit some big questions: Who is it really for? How does it affect our chances of making change? Why the fuck do we get no say in it? And then: How can we challenge it?
Trying to answer these questions got us busy - and ended up with us working to launch a campaign - asking young people to move out of this dissonance that the education system gets us into - and to start to DISOBEY. We refuse to be complicit as our generation gets assimilated into the same fuckery as the last- and as young people in the UK are here to reject our inheritance at the top of a colonial education hierarchy. F*ck Oxford. So watch this space - cos we’re getting ready to burn some exam desks…
CHALLENGING MIS-EDUCATION
We’ve also done a load of work on what kind of education we like to see - dialogue based, community focused and empowering. We’ve run workshops on youth identity, solidarity and chaos. And begun development of our very own movement school - The RYSE - read all about it on its page!
Pillars of The RYSE - a radical challenge to mis-education!