Engaging Students in Transforming Their Built Environment via Y-PLAN: Lessons from Richmond, California

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.