Below is an auto-ethnographic biography (Chapter 1 & 3) and findings from a narrative inquiry case study (Chapter 5 - Chapter 9) of a six-year multi-site peer mentoring and youth activist program in Clarke County, Georgia. What began as a summer reading program for incoming freshmen led by peer mentors in 2016 evolved into a mentor-activist course fashioned to reach credit-deficit and high-risk students in Clarke County School District (CCSD) in Athens, Georgia. After six years of the program, which sought to carve out a space of belonging for marginalized students and taught a critical analysis (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008) of Athens’s racial history, a narrative inquiry case study was conducted with twelve of the 240 youth mentors-turned-activist graduates in 2023. These students reflected on their connection to the program and the factors that contributed to its generation of hope, as well as the impact and sustainability of the program, whose goal was to “seek to combat the school to prison pipeline by establishing a family of support around struggling students.” (Kim, Losen & Hewitt, 2010). This research draws on the work of scholars who saw teaching as a transformative political act, in the terrain of Liberation Psychology of Paulo Freire, Ella Baker (Ransby, 2003) and Myles Horton (1990). Additionally, the research is rooted in humanizing and critical theory (hooks, 1994; Pirrto 2002; Knight, 2007; Paris, 2011, Irizarry & Brown, 2014; Kinloch & San Pedro, 2017; Fine 2018; Duncan Morrel, 2009), which I used to complicate and highlight the experiences of hundreds of marginalized youth rebels in Athens, Georgia, who dared to hope for and enact a better educational reality than the one they inherited. I was grounded by Black Liberation Theology (Cone 1991), as well as Radical Kinship outlined by Gregory Boyle (2010), and examples of underground Black educators in the post-Reconstruction South (Thurman 2017; Givens 2021; Cobb, Stembridge, Samstein & Day 1964). The questions I sought to answer through this narrative inquiry of twelve Cedar Shoals graduates are: What made the peer leadership youth program uniquely restorative and sustainable in Clarke County schools, and what impact did the peer leadership program have on its alumni?
