The Òrìṣà Spiritual Assembly Youth Program — known internally as *Ọmọ Òrìṣà*, “the children of the Òrìṣà” — was founded in 2022 with about thirty teenagers across four cities and is, in 2026, running monthly meetings in eleven chapters in the United States, three in Canada, and (newly, since January) one in London. This article is a brief account of what the programme does, what it does not do, and why the teenagers who participate in it tend, over time, to stay.
The programme was set up after several years of conversation among Assembly chapter leaders about a recurring problem: the teenagers of practising families were participating in chapter activities only reluctantly, finding the adult-organised meetings boring or alienating, and increasingly drifting toward a peer-determined relationship to their cultural and religious identity in which the tradition appeared as something embarrassing rather than something interesting. The leaders who set the programme up — most of them parents of teenagers themselves — concluded that what was needed was not better adult programming but separate teenage programming, organised principally by and for the teenagers themselves.
This is the operating principle of *Ọmọ Òrìṣà*: the meetings are for the teenagers, run with adult guidance but not adult control, and structured around what teenagers actually find interesting rather than what their parents wish they found interesting.
## What a Meeting Looks Like
The monthly meeting runs about two and a half hours and has, by chapter consensus, three components.
The first is what the programme calls *Talk Time* — forty minutes at the start, very lightly structured, in which the teenagers catch up with each other, share what has been happening in their lives at school and at home, and (this is the crucial part) talk about what they are encountering in the broader culture that has anything to do with their identity as Olórìṣà. The discussions are sometimes light (a teen who has been getting questions from school friends about a recent music video that includes Òrìṣà imagery) and sometimes very serious (a teen who has been getting bullied for an aspect of her religious identity, a teen whose grandparent has died and who is processing what that means in the context of the tradition’s understanding of ancestry).
The second component is *Learning Time* — a sixty-minute session focused on a specific aspect of the tradition. The topic is chosen by the teenagers in rotation; the session is led sometimes by a senior member of the chapter who has been invited to teach, sometimes by a teen who has prepared on a topic of their own interest. Topics over the past year have included: the cosmological structure of the Yorùbá world; the history of the Atlantic crossing; the role of Yorùbá-derived religion in contemporary Black music (a perennial favourite); how to recognise misrepresentation of the tradition in popular media; the philosophical concept of *orí*.
The third component is *Doing Time* — fifty minutes that varies completely from meeting to meeting. Sometimes it is a practical workshop (basic beadwork, how to set up a personal shrine corner, how to make a simple consecrated water for personal use). Sometimes it is creative (writing pieces about identity for the youth section of the chapter newsletter, group projects on aspects of Yorùbá culture). Sometimes it is community service (preparing food contributions for the adult chapter’s monthly meal, helping with set-up for a chapter event). The principle is that every meeting includes some component of doing, not just talking.
The meeting closes with a brief group recitation of an Òrìṣà greeting that the chapter has chosen — usually a short greeting to *orí*, simple enough that even the newest teen in the room can join in within a few meetings.
## Identity Work, Honestly
The thing that emerged most strongly in the design of the programme — and the thing the teens themselves identify most often as the most valuable element — is that the meetings are a place where they can do identity work honestly without the surveillance of either the adult chapter or the school environment.
The adult chapter is full of senior practitioners who, for entirely understandable reasons, want to see the tradition transmitted with fidelity to the form they themselves received it in. The school environment is full of peers who, for entirely understandable reasons, are negotiating their own identities and are not always reliable interlocutors for someone whose identity does not match the dominant template.
The youth meetings are neither. They are a space in which a fifteen-year-old can ask, out loud, whether she wants to keep practising, whether she finds particular aspects of the tradition compelling or alienating, whether she wants to consider initiation in the future or whether she wants to remain a layperson, what she should do about the friend at school who keeps wanting to know if her grandmother is “into voodoo.” These are real questions, and they require a real space to be asked in.
The role of the adult facilitators (each chapter has two, both initiated members of the chapter, both with significant experience working with adolescents in some capacity) is to be present, to ensure safety and respect in the conversations, to bring teaching when it is needed and not bring it when it is not, and (this is the most important and most difficult skill) to allow the teenagers to disagree with and question the tradition without intervening to defend it. The teenagers’ relationship to the tradition has to be allowed to develop on the teenagers’ terms; defensive intervention by adults is the surest way to harden adolescent reservations into adult departures.
## The Outcomes, Such As We Can Measure Them
The programme is too young, and the cohorts too small, to support strong claims about long-term outcomes. What can be said is that the teenagers who participate in *Ọmọ Òrìṣà* are, in the short term, attending chapter activities at meaningfully higher rates than they were before the programme started; that the parents whose teenagers participate report substantially less conflict at home about religious-and-cultural-identity matters than they had before; and that the programme’s first cohort of teens — the ones who joined as fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in 2022 — have, in the four years since, included the first members of the programme to undertake formal initiations as priests of specific Òrìṣà in their late teens.
The programme is currently expanding in two directions. First, it is launching a parallel programme for the eight-to-twelve age group in chapters that have requested one — the principle being similar (peer-organised, age-appropriate, focused on doing as much as talking). Second, it is exploring how to support the post-eighteen group — the young adults who age out of the programme and who, in the early years, were sometimes losing the close peer connections that the youth programme had given them. A *Young Adult Network* is in pilot in Atlanta and Brooklyn and is expected to launch nationally in 2027.
If you are a teenager between thirteen and eighteen who would like to find your nearest *Ọmọ Òrìṣà* group, contact the Assembly’s national office. If you are a parent whose teenager might be interested, the recommended approach is to mention the programme once, share the contact information, and let the teenager decide whether to follow up. The programme’s experience has been that the teens who come because they wanted to come are the teens who stay; the teens who come because their parents pushed them are the teens who attend twice and then quietly stop.
The teenagers are finding their *orí*. The programme exists to give them company while they do it.