This past Saturday, the senior scholars as well as the advocates and one other mentor and I had the opportunity to participate in a series of workshops headed by NYCore (Collective of Radical Educators).
The seniors chose the workshop that peeked their interests. I, along with many of our female seniors joined the Sadie Nash Leadership Project in their workshop: We Are the Experts of our Lives Creative Activism.
The workshop started off with the “Nashers” giving us a presentation about who they are as a program. They are a leadership program for girls and they are based in both New Jersey and New York City. They teach girls the leadership skills they need to become activists and to attain general success in all areas of their lives. The projects that they showed us that they are currently working on is a blog that they have started that speaks about the different issues that each of the Nashers want to address. They also showed us a film that they created that addressed the Stop-and-Frisk practices in NYC. It was very eye-opening and one of the other attendees made a good point in her commentary when she said that it’s not widely known how this policy affects woman as well as men. We were able to ask questions about their processes and the steps that it took to create their blog and come up with their video piece.
Later on in the workshop, we participated in an activity where we were handed cards with different steps involved with activism written on them and we had the task of working together to place them in the correct order. When we were finished, we went through each step and reviewed why we chose to place certain steps where we did.
Basically, the workshop taught us, and I quote Sadie Nash’s tagline, “what leadership looks like” and what it takes to create a program that teaches activism. There were a number of teachers and facilitators in the group and they were able to learn about how the program was run for reference on how to create and run their own programs while the youth attendees were able to learn about Sadie Nash and their activities.
In the end, all the seniors came together to discuss how their workshops went and for the most part, the seniors has a very enjoyable experience.
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