Charlene Carruthers has spent her adult life fighting for equality. As the national director for Black Youth Project 100 and a board member for black reproductive justice organization SisterSong , she helps lead a collective of black millennial activists who are dedicated to creating change in America.The BYP100 recently released its Agenda to Build Black Futures , a multilevel project addressing issues of economic justice and racial equality in a campaign for structural change to improve the lives of every black American. "It's the culmination of over a year of work from young black people, articulating what we think should be done," Carruthers said of the project. The Agenda covers issues as varied as reparations, access to health care for transgender youth, and finding solutions to the displacement of communities through gentrification. "If we're going to be serious about racial justice, we also have to know that economic justice is racial justice. You can't talk about one without talking about the other."Refinery29 spoke with Carruthers on her experiences leading youth activism and why it's so crucial to incorporate an intersectional approach to identity when discussing equality. "We do all of our work from what we call the black queer feminism lens," she described BYP100's approach to activism. "Which essentially means that we intentionally work to center the most marginalized people in our work.""In doing so, it's a more liberatory project and a much more radical project."This interview has been edited for length and clarity."When we talk about systems of oppression, young black people are disproportionately impacted. Be it by education, or the system of mass incarceration, healthcare disparities, all of those things disproportionately impact young black people. So in order to address these problems, people who are directly impacted have to be involved in the solution-making and reorganizing."There's so much power in young people creating something for themselves, but particularly young black people creating something for themselves to serve as a vehicle for the collective liberation of all black people. It allows us to run campaigns around issues of ending police violence, campaigns on economic justice, and what those two things look like in broader systems of state violence. That can be work from fully decriminalizing marijuana to calling for the firing of the police officer who killed Rekia Boyd to securing a living wage through the Fight for 15. That's what this platform allows us to do.""Intersectionality has its roots in the black feminist movement. In the historic Combahee River Collective statement, they looked at interlocking oppression and recognized that black women didn't exist in this world just as black, or just as women, or just as lesbians, or just as poor people, or as workers, but all of those things. All of our identities and experiences reflect the kind of systemic oppressions that impact our lives. And so it's important. Black people are whole people; we don't come to this work in pieces, and if we're going to have any type of solution that is actually meaningful, we have to include all of who we are."If we tell incomplete stories about what's at stake and what the problem is, we will have incomplete solutions. It's not about perfection. It's about commitment to seeing people as their full selves and the systems of oppression that impact them. If you are a black person living in this world, you are being impacted by multiple systems of oppression that intersect, and they impact your overall existence."