Students Sound Off In Support Of Gay Marraige

Over the course of this year we've worked closely with Students at the Horizon School. They range from 8-12th grade. They were the first crop of high school students to go through out "Be The Change" curriculum. One of their assignments was to pick an issue they would like to build a campaign around and create a short Public Service Announcement and a brief statement to go along with it. Over the course of the next six weeks I'm excited to be able to publishing one youth created public service announcement video.

Here's the first one:
We as a group believe that homosexual marriage should be accept into American society. In America, we strongly promote freedom of speech and actions. American also claims that church and state are separated for your freedom of religion. With all of these exceptional ideas in place, homosexuality is still strongly opposed in government run operations. Why? Give us a good reason.

{Closets are for clothes}
A gay marriage is a happy marriage!

Atlanta Youth Grasp Organizing Tools

AFSC's pilot curriculum is in it's seventh week at Horizon's school and so far the experiment is going very well. This past week we meet with the whole student body and reviewed ways in which social justice organizations have used different art mediums have to create dialogue in the Atlanta community in the last month or so.

We also had Caitlin Barrow spend a few moments sharing her experience organizing against the Iraq war in Glynn County Georgia when she was in high school. Caitlin talked about what inspired her to get active,the challenges of organizing in rural Georgia, and the impact her high school activism has had on her life.

We spent the rest of the morning split up into working groups that the students helped to form around issues that they wanted to address in their communities. There were groups devoted to addressing education budget cuts, skateboarders rights, violence in the community, gay marriage, and the price of fossil fuels on our globe. Me, Caitlin, and Josie Figueroa went from group to group to help facilitate the process of campaign development.

Each group presented their ideas after we re-grouped and I have to say that I'm pretty excited what come of all this! Next week we'll be pairing each group with a young Atlanta organizer to help each group get a stronger focus, time-line, and a solid idea about need and resources available.


Tim Franzen
American Friends Service Committee