Dream Defenders

It is the mission of Dream Defenders to inspire an uprising of communities in conflict, causing in a shift in culture through transformational organizing. We seek to influence culture in six spheres: social organization, customs and traditions, language, arts and literature, government and policy and economic systems. We are an organization grounded in and fueled by movement building and our issues and priorities are defined by the individuals in communities which we work alongside to broker change. We work actively to organize an evolving movement positioned to lay the foundation for real victories for social justice and equality, shaping policies that are inclusive of young, Black and Brown voices; those of Florida’s emerging majority.

Our long-term vision for Dream Defenders is an organization that creates a pipeline of trained, indigenous leadership in the communities that we serve through engaging in community organizing and civic engagement; elevating the importance of issue & value based electoral engagement; and presenting movement consciousness and community power as a popular cultural imperative. We organize to strike at the heart of the “New Jim Crow,” a system entrapping young people of color in a cycle of substandard educational access, mass incarceration, and poverty. We seek to perfect a new model for engaging young people, specifically youth of color, with an eye toward carrying out a new “Southern Strategy”: developing leadership from the emerging new demographic majorities across the South, and eventually the rest of the country.