The Purple Room: A YPAR-Designed Healing Space Grounded in Community-Engaged School Leadership

Abstract

This article explores how a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) team and adult co-conspirators in varied school leadership positions became partners, an unusual pairing as urban schools do not often prioritize young people as leaders. The school leveraged the district's community-engaged mission and their collective power to increase youth organizing and mental health in an urban-based community school. Drawing from community engagement and social justice, the authors use the concepts of sharing power and engaging healing to better understand the development of this YPAR project, a youth-designed healing space called "The Purple Room." Findings show that multiple levels of school leadership can set the conditions with youth researchers to build trust and to support the justice-oriented work that students know is needed.