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On a recent Sunday morning at Judson Memorial Church in New York, seven-year-old Nova stood in the middle of the congregation and read from the children’s book We Are the Builders.

“Raise our voices, banners and beats. Meet and march out in the streets,” she told the dozens of congregants, many old enough to be her grandparents, as the summer sun poured through the stained-glass windows. “Who wants to join the disrupters?”

Once Nova listed the various roles people play in a community – builders, disrupters, caregivers, visionaries and more – congregants huddled in little groups based on their roles, discussing how they can help their neighbors: documenting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), delivering groceries to those in need and protesting against the climate crisis.

Judson, a multi-denominational church rooted in social justice and the arts, is trying something new: instead of separating children into a small Sunday school room, they are integrating kids into their service – and into their activism.

“Children are not merely recipients of justice,” Steff Reed, Judson’s Sunday school director, said during his sermon. “They are participants in the work of justice.”

Such children-centered activism is also happening in other progressive spaces and small neighborhood parenting groups around the city, as families figure out how to explain to their children why ICE agents are in their neighborhood, what the Iran war is about and how they can be most helpful in their communities.

“There’s no roadmap for how we parent through this,” said Elizabeth Hamby, Nova’s mother, who also formed a justice-oriented families group called Seeds in the Bronx. “There are no easy answers, and so having a space where we can talk about it, at least we can work on it together.”

Hamby, an artist and civil servant who has long woven activism into her work, started Seeds around the time Donald Trump retook office. About once a month, up to dozens of families get together and read children’s books about civil rights, sing resistance songs and talk about why people are protesting. Children, as they are wont to do, are also free to get up and play, while the adults commiserate about parenting through the world’s ills.

Eduardo Rega Calvo, a member of Seeds, said there hasn’t been a moment his six-year-old daughter, Naira, born in the pandemic, hasn’t been surrounded by protest. She heard the chants of Black Lives Matter protesters the summer she was born, the Washington Heights community organizing for Palestine and the rallying cries of thousands protesting against Trump’s policies on any given weekend.

For the last No Kings protest in March, Seeds marched down Broadway with 75 people. The children carried a parachute that read: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”

“We bought this little megaphone that they can hold, and watching them pass it between each other, and each leading songs and chants, it was awesome,” said Hamby. “It’s super energizing for us, and I think for others too.”

The Hands Off NYC coalition also helps families facilitate playdates in their communities, whether that’s setting up tables of coloring pages and chalk at local playgrounds or organizing small teach-ins with musicians and performers. The idea is not only to build community, but also to integrate organizing into regular life.

“When you have young kids, you don’t stop having them just because the government is doing bad things that you need to protest,” said Grace Lindsay, a Hands Off NYC organizer. “So there needs to be a way for those things to work together.”

Climate Families NYC, which has grown to 5,000 members since its founding in 2019, organizes similar park playdates and events, but with a climate bend: rallying against AI in classrooms and for local climate legislation, such as the recently passed Sunny Act, which allows renters to use plug-in “balcony solar panels”.

Liat Olenick, the Climate Families NYC program and communications director, recently took her four-year-old with her to the state capitol in support of the Sunny Act. At one point, she said, her child took off down the hallway outside the assembly chambers.

“He was wearing a sun costume, just bolting down the hall,” she said. “A four-year-old in Albany is hilarious by default, but he knows what the Sunny Act is, he knows who the governor of New York is.”

At Judson, the new adjustments to Sunday service nod to the longtime tradition of organizing within the church and folding children into that activism. Black churches were key organizing spaces during the civil rights movement. Sheyann Webb-Christburg, who marched with Dr Martin Luther King Jr at eight years old, recently told the Guardian that King made sure she and her friends were included in discussions about the fight for civil rights. “He took us by our hands and said: ‘Let them stand,’ and he brought us into that room, pulled up chairs and sat right in front of us, continuing to have conversations with us,” she said. “That was special.”

After the service at Judson, kids ate ice-cream sundaes in between painting butterfly wings to wear to the Queer Liberation parade. Ada, a nine-year-old who topped her sundae with whipped cream, said in a community of builders and caregivers, she sees herself as a visionary.

“I imagine a lot of good things, but I also imagine things that probably will never happen, like water parks with ice-cream and not water.”

After concluding that swimming in streams of ice-cream might be too sticky, she paused for a minute. “I would also like to see everyone helping each other,” she said, “and more people respecting others, even though we’re different.”