Be The Change 2011 is this upcoming weekend! July 29-31 at the Horizons School. Please join us in helping to empower the next generation of community youth activists and leaders!
How can you get involved? If you're 13-24 years old, register here and take part in the awesome skill-building and action packed weekend!
Any age and want to volunteer or contribute in any way? Check out our volunteer needs page and sign up! Then, join us this Wednesday @ 9pm for our final planning meeting!
Here's the second youth produced video that came out of our Be The Change Curriculum at the Horizons School. This crew of students call themselves the LFFR, of Lower Fossil Fuel Reliance.
We actually spent a few hours with then today to support their effort to make 1000 origami pinwheels to send to President Obama. In many Asian cultures(about half of the LFFR crew is first generation Asian immigrants) it is believed that if you make 1000 origami paper cranes then you will receive one wish.
When the LFFR crew completes their quest to create 1000 paper pinwheels(they got up to 405 today) they plan to hold a press conference at the Horizons school and send the pinwheels to the white house with one simple with; lower fossil fuel reliance.
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!
As the year approaches it's end and schools across the country are preparing for their winter breaks, Horizons high school students have been preparing for it's annual, "More Than Just a Word" performance. The students take time from their normal curriculum to put together multiple short skits and performances. Every student participated in skits about a gay high school couple, a twisted sleeping beauty story, and a transexual story. There was break dancing and hip hop singers.
Opening up "More Than Just a Word" was one of the groups from our "Be the Change" Curriculum. This group presented to the audience the 1000 pinwheels they planned to send to the President. The students are going to make a wish on their 1000 pinwheels for cleaner energy resources. We are glad that the kids were able to share their pinwheels with the audience and are so proud of of their hard work! A special thanks to Erin Glynn, from the Sierra Club, for providing the kids t-shirts and moral support.
As part of the ongoing "Be The Change Curriculum" Horizons students spent the day learning how art has been used in the past to promote human rights and build social justice movements. Students took the time to break up into small groups an discuss issues that are important to them.
After identifying changes that they would like to see in the community each group spend time strategizing ways to express the themes of their campaign ideas through art. Not only what type of art they could produce, but ways they could present their artistic expression to the community.
Students came up with some pretty awesome ideas that included flash mobbing, graffiti, wheatpasting, posters, and more...check out this compilation featuring some of the ideas students came up with.
As part of our ongoing "Be the Change" curriculum at the Horizon's school AFSC organized a field trip to the King Center where students where able to walk through the museum that lays down a basic time-line of Martin Luther King's life, legacy, and highlights other important factors of the civil rights movement. Students also learned about the role that young people played in the civil rights movement and we explored much or the unrealized work of Dr. King and his contemporaries around poverty and militarism, work that is still sadly relevant today.
After spending time in the museum we headed to the theater for a screening of "A New Time, A New Voice", which was a 30 minute retrospective on King's life. Many of the Horizons students expressed feeling deeply effected by the film, one 10th grader stated, "I've always known that Dr.King was part of something important, but I never had any idea of the sacrifices folks made in that(civil rights) struggle. I had no idea it was that hard."
After the film we spent some time around Coretta Scott King and Dr. King's tomb and we went inside the Freedom center where there are rooms devoted to Rosa Parks, M.K. Gandhi, Dr. King, and Coretta Scott King.
We're looking forward to processing the experience further with students as we begin to explore modern movements in the south.
Today was an exciting day as AFSC begins an experimental curriculum with local high school Horizons. Each Wednesday morning for the next 8-10 weeks, AFSC will be leading the entire Horizons student body (about 50 students) in a pilot program that will take the "Be the Change" concept used at the May youth convergence and put it in an interactive classroom format.
Just like the convergence, we will use Dr. King's April 4th, 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech as a grounding text to frame our discussion as we connect the dots between the "giant triplets" of racism, militarism, and poverty. And just like the convergence, we hope to spend part of the time educating students and doing skill building and the rest of the time allowing students to begin planning for themselves how to be the change in their communities.
UNLIKE the convergence, we aren't working with a group of youth (mostly college students) already engaged in their campuses and communities coming together on purpose for a weekend convergence. Instead, we are working with 8th-12th graders with varying levels of awareness about these issues. So, we began the first session with a discussion about where "Be the Change" comes from, and why the quote is relevant. Who was Gandhi? What did he have to do with Dr. King? Tim asked the students for examples of other leaders who chose to "be the change they wanted to see in the world." Answers ranged from Abraham Lincoln to Michael Jackson.
Next, Tim asked for volunteers who could read our grounding text, the April 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech, with a little bit of King's confidence. Our volunteers stepped up to the plate, and together we read the entire speech. Students did a great job engaging with the text as we discussed some of the background of the time period, including the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.
Finally, we moved to the gym for an exercise linking the issues we had just discussed. Tim laid out 20 bowls on the table, each labeled with a national department, and told the students that these labels represented different areas in which the national government spends its trillions each year. Since the way a group spends its money represents its priorities, we wanted to test Horizons students' priorities. Each student was given two paperclips, each clip representing one percent of the budget, to "spend" in their chosen areas. The following breakdown shows Horizons high school students' values and priorities:
Out of 51 students (102%): 1. The Arts: 20% 2. The Environmental Protection Agency: 15% 3. The Dept. of Peace: 13% 4. Education: 11% 5. Missing areas???: 9% (depts. not otherwise represented) 6. Health and Human Services: 6% 7. Military Spending: 6% 8. NASA: 4% 9. Energy: 4% 10. Agriculture: 4% 11. Dept. of Justice: 3% 12. Housing: 2% 13. Labor: 2% 14. Transportation: 1% 15. Homeland Security: 1% 16. Treasury: 1% 17. State and International: 0% 18. Other Agencies (CIA, etc): 0% 19. Dept. of the Interior: 0% 20. Commerce: 0%
After the exercise, students who put their paperclip money in the "Missing areas" bowl shared what they were thinking of, like water and technology. Then, Tim confessed that two of the areas were made up: The Arts (which is really a small fraction of the "Other Agencies" category) and the Dept. of Peace (which doesn't exist). Next we passed out AFSC's "One Minute for Peace" pamphlets revealing the national government's ACTUAL budget, which was met with cries of disbelief and a few expletives as the students realized their dinky 6 paperclip percentage points of military spending did not come close to the 57% of the actual budget. We hope this eye-opening exercise will lead to a lot of discussion as students continue working with Dr. King's speech for their homework assignment.
Next week we'll keep digging into Dr. King's real issue-linking legacy with a field trip to the King Center! Stay tuned!
