Virginia Student Power Network (VPSN) is the first-ever statewide student organizing network in Virginia. We were founded in 2013 to build the collective power of young people across the state and to develop their leadership and organizing skills. 

VSPN is a political home for young emerging organizers in Virginia.

Our members currently are concentrated in Richmond and Charlottesville, and we are deepening our base building work in Northern Virginia, Williamsburg, Harrisonburg, and Blacksburg, Fredericksburg, and the Piedmont Valley region.

OUR VISION

VSPN envisions a future of collective liberation, in which all communities break free from policing and the carceral state; in which everyone has the skills necessary to make sense of the world – and where everyone has access to a meaningful education. We strive to bring forward a future in which young people, students, and workers have decision-making power, self-determination and autonomy within their lives– including their educational and governmental institutions.

OUR WORK.

Our base, our member leaders, and our staff are predominantly Queer, Trans, Gender-Expansive, Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color who attend or have attended a public university in the state. The majority of our youth members are actively leading campus or community based youth organizations that focus on one or more of our priority issues.

We center our work on deep relationship building among our members and network organizations, in tandem with state transformative leadership development and state skill building tailored to youths’ needs. 

OUR ISSUE PRIORITIES

  • Education

    We strive to bring forth a future in which everyone has the skills necessary to make sense of the world — , where everyone has access to a meaningful education. From developing “Freedom Schools” and defending public education, to creating “third-spaces” and other places of enrichment for youth, – we position young people to be lifelong students — because we recognize that real learning happens in and out of classrooms.  Our mantra is ”to learn, is to grow, is to struggle


    We seek to uproot the hold that neoliberalism has on the critical education of our youth. We affirm that young people should have decision-making power within their own lives– including how, and what, they learn.

  • Criminal Legal System

    We envision a world beyond criminalization, policing, prisons, and war.  We fight diligently to ensure the right to futurity for QTBIPOC youth – meaning, our right to exist  in the future, without the threat of surveillance, incarceration, or murder. We assert that abolition – in our lifetime –  is the mandate.

  • Bodily Autonomy, Defense, and Liberation

    Our network is made up of incredible,  gender-expansive, queer, trans, and Two-Spirit folk who struggle to  interrupt gender-based violence and criminalization, while also alchemizing opportunities for  people of marginalized genders  to live freer and safer lives. 


    From legislative advocacy to mutual aid, we  fight for life-saving interventions such as, gender affirming care, reproductive autonomy, and gender self-determination. We believe that everyone has a right to receive the care they deserve.

  • International Solidarity

    We rise in the shadow of the freedom fighters who have catalyzed the liberation movements that have defined our lives. At home, and abroad, we move in solidarity with all people fighting back against fascism. As a freedom-sustaining machine, VSPN bridges people power, illuminating the dialectics – or the interconnectedness – of the struggles in the Commonwealth with those taking place in the Global South through political education and strategic communication. We remain firm in our commitment to the principled and protracted struggles of our lifetime, and support the effort of all youth working to transform complex systems of power.

  • Housing

    We affirm the right to dignified living, including the right to safe shelter.  As a southern movement-building org, following in Black and Indigenous freedom traditions, our network recognizes that our power and our survival derives from our relationship to the land, and our sacred responsibility to defend it. We  fight for housing interventions that disrupt gentrification, combat rent gouging, and keep our families in the communities they’ve lived in, and tended to, for generations  Where people are prioritized over profit.