This field report describes how high school students from Richmond, California used
an innovative educational strategy called Y-PLAN (Youth – Plan, Learn, Act, Now) to
actively participate in the planning and transformation of their school,
neighborhoods and city. Our description follows students through the five-step YPLAN
process, highlighting how they effectively challenged the ways in which
unhealthy environments and adult-oriented urban planning and policy making
structure disadvantage and undermine trajectories of opportunity. In doing so, the
report illustrates how Y-PLAN can equip young people from low-income
communities with the tools they need to become agents of positive change, and
informs a discussion for planners and educators of the essential conditions that
structure that agency.