After-school Activism

Volunteering at College Gardens has been so enlightening for the duration of the semester. It was a big learning experience for me because it was unlike anything I had done before. Throughout the semester I created bonds with these kids that took some time. At first, the kids were hesitant because they did not know anything about me, nor I about them. Towards the end they became more respectful and more willing to listen. There were still challenges because around homework time the kids never seemed to have homework. On the slim chance they did have homework, they never wanted to do it and became off task very easily. Once they got off-task it was a long process trying to get them back on track. They loved to play games and be interactive when we went outside to play.

The site leaders were extremely helpful and willing to talk to the kids if there were any issues. If issues did arise they were quick to step in and diffuse the situation. The behavioral issues were a major problem that is bigger than what College Gardens can solve. A site leader has said that while the kids show respect at the site, at school it is a different story. They can be extremely disrespectful at school, at the site however, disrespect is not tolerated. To gain respect from the kids, you need to respect them too. The site is different in the regard that the problems faced in the real world don’t seem to exist. The kids get to be kids and have fun. The kids are bright already, they just need the encouragement from others.The site really needs more funding, but that is difficult to get when the kids don’t come regularly and they don’t promote the free program in schools. The schools offer after school programs too but they are not free, so they don’t allow programs that are free to be promoted.

Sustainability Matters

Preface

Activism is hard. That is the main thing I’ve learned from this process. Anything and everything can go wrong at anytime and you can be right back to square one. When this project was assigned, I initially intended to create a documentary style short about the lack of pay for college basketball players in Power 5 conferences. I planned to interview players and administrative staff from UMBC Basketball but quickly, this became impossible with the rapid success of the men’s basketball team through March Madness. Upon learning that developing a project around pay in college basketball was no longer possible, I looked to make on  sustainability at UMBC. The plan was to design new signage for trash cans and recycle bins that clearly explain what is supposed to be disposed where but, as soon as the designing began, I noticed that Sustainability Matters, the campuses sustainability initiative, was already ahead of me. Back to square one, I looked to combine my previous concepts together by creating a video that advocates on behalf of Sustainability Matters, informs the campus of the sustainability initiatives that are in place, and offer some suggested improvements to the campus’ sustainability plan through recycling.

Sexual assault on college campuses

For my activism project, I made a website (Link below) to educate and share stories of sexual assault victims to create an environment for people to share their experiences through the comment section. My first blog post was a story from a fellow UMBC student who shared her story. This blog is very important to me because it is about a topic that I care deeply about. I think it is so important to have more conversations about sexual assault in college campuses because as the banner says above, 1 in 4 women will experience date rape or attempted one during their time in college which should not be acceptable.

Throughout this project, my relationship to activism changed a lot. I always thought activism was about marching, protesting and something grand and big. I never thought I had enough stance or voice to participate in my own activism. However, as Dr. Kate said, activism can be through everyday action. Although making this blog was something pretty small, it really made me feel like I was participating to make a world a better place, and I’ve learned that I can do activism that way and that it doesn’t need to be this huge fancy event.

https://mybodymyconsent660782643.wordpress.com/

 

 

 

 

 

Talk About Teen Dating Violence!

We chose to focus our activism project on spreading awareness of teen dating violence among high school students through a series of posters. Teens tend to start dating at the beginning of high school, but with dating- there also comes dating violence. The point of this project is to spread awareness of dating violence and persuade teens to start talking about the signs and symptoms associated with abuse in a relationship so they can identify and prevent it.

Human Trafficking in Baltimore

Example of false advertisements that are known to lead to unsolicited work

 

Example of false advertisements that are known to lead to unsolicited work

Our activism project was the consolidation and narrowing down of a much broader set of ideas. We realized that we all shared a passion for wanting to support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault but didn’t know where to start. We struggled with trying to find groups to partner with around campus and Baltimore, but after several dead-ends and unreplied-to emails, a phone call to TurnAround solidified an opportunity to start a non-perishable food drive. TurnAround is a private, nonprofit agency that provides counseling and supports services to victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and human trafficking. They have their central office in Towson, MD and a second branch in Baltimore City. The food that we collected through this drive will be used for survivors who are put into emergency shelters and housing.

We brainstormed many ideas on what we wanted to do as our activism project, going from buttons to interactive flyers to giving talks to elementary/middle school kids about internet safety, another issue that leads to human trafficking. We finally came to the consensus of doing a non-perishable food drive, but aspects of it had a few flaws. One of our main issues was finding spots that would bring in the most donations. Although, once we actually started the canned food drive, we ran into other unexpected problems.

After the first week of the drive, we were not getting the results we anticipated so we decided to think of alternative ways to spread word. We decided to reach out to student organizations and send them an electronic version of the flyer and a brief description about who the drive will be helping. We asked them to forward it to their listservs and instructed them to put the items in the residential halls or to contact one of us if they wanted to meet up instead. The list of student organizations we were contacted were: HLSU, CSA, Sign of Life, VSA, PhiDE, SGA, Unicef, WILL, We Believe You, Women’s Center, and Community Directors of Residential Halls on campus. Most of the organizations were more than happy to assist us, while some did not respond. While emailing these organizations did help, one-on-one conversations with officers yielded the most action. That kind of personable communication helped spread the word and expose our drive to people who don’t just live on campus.

Putting boxes in residential halls worked because college students who live on campus usually have a great amount of non-perishable items that they eat themselves. With our time constraint as the main limitation, this was the most convenient way to collect the items. However, we could have been more successful if we included more public locations, such as grocery stores, libraries, gyms, and different areas around campus, such as the Commons, Women’s Center, and other departments. Having a longer time span for the drive itself may have also allowed for more food to be donated due to the longer duration it would be exposed. We could have also had advertisements posted around the school and surrounding neighborhoods to increase donations. We could have included hygiene products, like feminine products or toiletries, or clothing in our drive. This would not only increase the amount of donations received but also help TurnAround gather more supplies beyond canned foods and non-perishables.

Before the project, many of us had an performative relationship with activism, understanding the need for activism and the need for civic engagement, but not engaging. We could easily share and retweet articles and posts about causes that need supporting or injustices that need reporting, anonymously behind our monitors. However, once galvanized by this opportunity to make actionable change, we learned how it was too easy to leap and tackle a project larger than we were prepared to alter our prior passivity to accomplish. As an activist, we learned how easy it was for us to take on a more ambitious project than we had the capacity to complete. We learned the importance of having series’ of smaller, actionable goals to get towards our ultimate vision. We learned about how much of activism is done behind the scenes. There’s only so much that is going at and actively doing things, making change. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Activism is also supporting those actions the hidden bulk of work including networking with multiple moving parts, waiting for responses, preparing material, and maintaining personal needs around the project. We’ve learned the importance of those hidden responsibilities in activism and how much activism is done beyond what can be seen or heard.

We have also learned that activism can be very challenging at times and the unforeseen obstacles that you face, can be very discouraging but you must never give up and find a way to get around those obstacles. Being an activist is not easy, you must prepared to change your approach and how plan to execute your plan. There will be some setbacks but you have to keep pushing. They ladies at TurnAround told us, that no amount is too little and as long as you are doing your very best to help others, you will make a difference.

Food collected at Potomac Hall

Food collected at Patapsco Hall

 

A Heroic Change

 

A Powerful POSEition

 

The Scene is Set

Our group chose the issue of the lack of representation of minority groups in comic books and how that can affect the readers. This includes people of color, women, individuals of all shapes and sizes, and the LGBTQ+ community. To complete this project, our group held a table at the Commons Mainstreet where students could come over and hear what we had to say. To attract more people, we had a large cardboard cut out of Groot (as seen in attached photos), a large collection of comic books provided by Mehr, and free merchandise from a local Baltimore comic book store called Cosmic Comix.

Our group invited people to the table and attempted to create a discussion and raise awareness and like any activist, we collided with negative comments, arguments from people we thought would be on our side, and differing opinions.

BREAK THE STIGMA!

YOUR Mental Health Matters

This is the focus of our activism project, and throughout the semester our goal manifested itself in different ways. In the brainstorming process, we all recognized our passion for bringing awareness to the mental health resources on and off UMBC. Our project was partly inspired by our complaints towards the counseling center on campus, but also our recognition of its importance as a resource for improving students’ mental health. To start this project, we initially planned on consulting the counseling center and see what we, as students and activists, could do to improve the atmosphere of the center.  Along with consulting the counseling center, we wanted to bring awareness to mental health online as well as in person. With that in mind, we created an Instagram account and planned on making flyers and stickers.

 

The Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/mental_healthactivism/?hl=en) @Mental_HealthActivism was created so that we could reach people who were not yet ready to talk about mental health out loud. Activist projects start off with stepping stones, each new stone is a new level reached. We did not want to push people and make them uncomfortable, creating a bad perception of mental health outreach. We wanted to give people a chance to talk about mental health or become aware of its importance through social media. The instagram page starts off with information about mental health and also some events that took place on the UMBC campus about mental health. The posts then go to videos about people talking about what mental health means to them, the stigma they feel surrounding mental health, and anything else that relates to mental health. This goal was to get people comfortable with talking about mental health and in hopes that seeing and hearing people talk about mental health would then get people more comfortable with the idea of mental health and hopefully take the stigma away. We worked on attempting to get the Instagram page publicity, but we learned that it was very difficult. Obtaining followers and getting likes on your posts is strenuous and does not always happen. However, we have learned through this that you do not need a thousand likes on a picture of 100 followers, you just need to make a difference in someone’s life. That was our goal with the Instagram page, to hopefully get someone more comfortable about mental health even a little more than they were before. The social media posts and flyers were meant to touch on the importance of mental health and reducing the stigma of reaching out for help regarding mental health. We found that making posters was an easy and accessible way to get information flowing about the mental health resources on campus.

 

We hoped that students would walk in the commons and see our flyer and take note of the capability they had to receive help and wellness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After some advice from Dr. Kate, we realized that we could achieve our goal of bringing awareness to mental health without talking to the counseling center. Realistically speaking, we had one semester to complete our project, and trying to change the counseling center’s system might have been difficult for our group to achieve. We easily accepted this change, especially since we wanted to focus more on bringing awareness on campus.  For the rest of the project, we focused solely on strengthening our awareness campaign.

One thing that we would do differently was to engage with other people and their opinions more. We found it difficult to find time to interview different people about their perspectives of mental health on college campus. If we had taken more time to interview people, we may have been able to gather different data to be able to better approach our issue with a diverse mindset. In addition, it would’ve been in our best interest to start some of our projects earlier than we did.

Our relationship with activism changed tremendously throughout this experience. First, we developed a greater appreciation for activists who dedicate their lives to their cause. It was hard enough as full time students attempting to get together and plan activities or poster designs in the semester. The amount of effort one needs to contribute to an issue they are passionate about should never be underestimated. Secondly, we learned that being activists doesn’t always mean touching one hundred people’s lives. Sometimes, activism is making small changes that will set of a chain reaction into something bigger, and this is perfectly fine. Finally, we learned that activism is more than just action. It is a change of mindset that one must have in order to reach people. Our view of outreach definitely grew throughout the semester. We also learned that ‘success’ can hold different meanings for different people and for us, success in this activism project was about spreading the word and getting people to talk about mental health, therefore I am grateful that we learned that activism is far beyond being successful or not since it is about the effort, intention and work that goes behind it.

 

We learned that one of the best ways to reach people is simply face to face. That one connection can change a person’s entire outlook, and possibly catalyze to many more!

Tackling the Diversity Dilemma at UMBC

Throughout the world there is a lack of inclusion within different social and racial classes. On UMBC’s campus we see a lot of diversity but these groups tend to keep to themselves. UMBC is extremely diverse. Below I have included the demographics of the 2017 freshmen class (my class):

• White: 40%
• Asian: 26%
• Black: 17%
• Hispanic: 7%
• International: 4%

–https://undergraduate.umbc.edu/quicklinks/fast-facts.php

People look at these statistics and assume that there isn’t anything that needs to be worked on in regards to diversity on campus, but these people are wrong. Before the March Madness game UMBC vs UVA, our school lacked a sense of unity. It still doesn’t foster a feeling of cultural and racial unity and inclusion. That being said, my project helped address the problem of cultural and racial diversity and unity not being present on campus. These groups of student and facility need to be represented and need to feel included and welcomed on campus. Everyone deserves to be embraced and not excluded.

We definitely are not the worst in terms of diversity and inclusion for a college campus, but we aren’t perfect. Our University has a website dedicated to diversity and inclusion https://diversity.umbc.edu/ . The vision statement on the website includes:

 

This statement illustrates that the UMBC understands the importance of diversity and inclusion, but is having difficulty implementing it.

Thus, I created a new dinner series called: Diversity Dinner. As the former Project Manager for Diversity and Multicultural Affairs in the Student Government Association I utilized my resources to fulfill this activism project. I used funding from SGA to book the Skylight Room and have the event catered.

The specific goal of my project was to address the lack of diversity and inclusion amongst student organizations and work in collaboration with the student body to identify and address these issues. I sat down with leaders and members in a multitude or organizations and ask them thought provoking questions related to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender diversity and inclusion in their organizations. We sat in focus groups with peer facilitators (myself and Meghan Lynch, Vice President for Student Organizations in SGA) while eating dinner and asked these questions.  We had a raw discussion to fully understand what issues there are within student organizations in regards to  race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender diversity and inclusion. I started the conversation by asking them questions that I created with Lisa Gray (Associate Director of Diversity and Inclusion). We had a raw discussion because the participants were asking questions and brought up points that neither Lisa nor I addressed in our list of questions. They asked questions such as, is there a reason why the most diverse professors teach social sciences, arts, and humanities.

To me a successful project means that at least one participant was positively impacted. That they felt heard, that someone cares and is willing to put in the work to seek positive change in diversity and inclusion within the student body and faculty/staff. I feel that my two diversity dinners were successful because they were impactful. One participant tweeted:

Overall, reaching out to cultural organization e-board members was effective. Next time I will find a way to reach out to a bigger population of students so that I can get a more accurate representation. What didn’t work as well was getting the faculty excited about UMBC’s diversity dilemma. Maybe holding a position with more responsibilities in SGA could help.

Throughout the course of this project, I realized that some faculty members did not take me seriously. Maybe because I am a first-year student or because I held an appointed position in Student Government and not an elected one. But as an activist, this made me more motivated to make a difference because I wanted to prove that I am capable of tacking such a layered problem.

  Now, as a Senator of the Student Government Association, I will take the feedback from the two diversity dinners and share them with the Faculty senate. This is an incredible institution and with effective communication between the student body and the administration we can truly flourish. We can and we should work together to make the House of Grit and Greatness a house that cultivates inclusion in diversity.

 

 

#BeClear

I chose to do my activism project on consent as I have read articles and listened to conversations about how people were sexually assaulted or inappropriately touched. A few of the conversations that I overheard involved persons that I knew personally and professionally.

Only One of the Many

Riverview Elementary School is a Title I school, in which most students come from low-income families and receive federal funding. More than 95% of students receive federal funding at Riverview. Though Riverview receives federal funding, the school’s academic performance is inadequate like most other public schools that are Title I. To show Riverview’s poor academic performance, I have researched their third-grade class Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) Language Arts test scores:

• 6% of students did not expectations on PARCC
• 2% of students partially met expectations on PARCC
• 5% of students approached expectations on PARCC
• 6% of students met expectation on PARCC
• Less than 5% of students exceeded expectation on PARCC

So, only about 24.6% of students performed well on the test while 78.3% of students did not.

Now, I am not saying we need to teach students to perform well on tests, but why are students at low-income community schools doing worse than other students at high-income community schools?

At Severna Park Elementary School, a high-income community public school in Anne Arundel County, the PARCC test scores are:

• Less than 5% not meeting expectations
• Less than 5% of students partially meeting expectations
• 4% of students approaching expectations
• 3% of students meeting expectations
• 1% of students exceeding expectations

The majority of students at Severna Park Elementary School are white and the majority of students are African-American at Riverview Elementary Schools with a large Spanish community.

These statistics are important to look at because they show us that we have an unequal public-school system here in the United States of America. An unequal education is established by a student’s family socio-economic background, race and ethnicity, academic performance, and by the resources provided to the students.

In late August of 2017, I decided I wanted to do service-learning at the Shriver-Center at UMBC. In October, I became a teacher’s assistant at Riverview Elementary School for a third-grade class where I helped my students build strong literacy skills, while building positive relationships with them.

In the third-grade class that I helped assist, there were six students below reading grade-level. One of my students approached me and said that she didn’t like reading her books, because they were too easy for her. I then read ono-on-one with her to see where she was at with her reading ability and I found that she stumbles on some words, but overall, she reads efficiently. I then had her choose a chapter book for us to read together while I helped her sound out the words she didn’t know and asked her questions about the book to make sure she understood what she was reading. In addition, I took notes on the story, so when I would read with her the next time, she would not forget what happened and would understand the story better.

I also found that my other students below reading grade-level were reading books that were unchallenging and I also sat down with them individually to read with them one-on-one. Unfortunately, I could not do this every time I volunteered at Riverview because of their schedule and the major projects they had to do. I think having more time at my service-site would have benefited my students more and would have helped me improve their academic abilities. However, I did find that having my students read out loud and tracking what they are readings is a lot better than them reading on i-ready, a website that assists students in learning how to spell and sound out words.

In addition to working with my students become better readers, I also worked with them to become better writers. Some of my students struggled with structuring their sentences and paragraphs, or even writing down their ideas in a coherent way. I found only helping them structure their paragraphs with transition words and correcting misspelled words, assured me that they were thinking on their own.

I wanted to volunteer at Riverview Elementary School to gain teaching skills, because I planned on doing Teach for Americaafter graduation. However, my students showed me that I want to make a career out of bringing an equal education to all children in the United States. Volunteering at Riverview, helped me notice the discrimination in low-income community schools more clearly. It helped me see the ignorance to the issue and that some people don’t know what a Title I school is.

If I were to volunteer again to help students thrive in their academics, I would definitely go to my service-site more than two days a week. I also would communicate more with the teacher to see what I can do to have a greater effect on the student’s academic performance. I would want to work more ono-one-one with my students below reading grade-level to see through chapter books with them.

Through doing this activism project, I learned that I will continue this work throughout the course of my life. I learned that feminist activism does not only have to be about fighting for women’s rights but fighting for equality for all those who are marginalized. An unequal education prevents, both girls and boys, from achieving gender equality. In addition to, it cripples their right as a human being to have a quality education, one that is not affected by their socio-economic background. In order for women and men to be equal, they all need to be equal through the social, economic, and political domains.

I also learned that in order to make real change in the world, we cannot think practical. For instance, charter schools and financial assistance are only going to prolong the problem, they are not the solution to solving the issue. We need to establish an equal education for students altogether in the United Sates without the need of financial assistance and the need to open up charter schools in low-income areas. We need more teachers, we need after-school programs, we need to give all academic subjects equal value, and we need to give students the opportunity to be taught humanity.

https://datausa.io/

http://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2017-05-08/how-charter-schools-improve-traditional-district-education

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/bs-md-ci-poverty-undercount-20180202-story.html

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/readersrespond/bs-ed-rr-school-counselors-letter-20180305-story.html