oh my, it's the end of week 7!

I've been meaning to write this post for the last 4 weeks, but the weeks have been passing too fast. Maybe you noticed that too.

Since the last post, pretty much everything has happened.
After going on a staff retreat in the catskills to plan out the structure of the entire summer, the young people came. At least 50 on the first day. We've been doing a lot of workshops, discussions, and we're starting some projects. But to give you a better idea, the following is a list of everything that has happened at Reach:


Boat exercise
Secrets exercise
Race/Ethnicity/Nationality/Culture discussion
Identity & social control discussion
Self-governance discussion
History of racism in America from an Asian American perspective
Individual race caucuses
Barbeque @ Prospect Park
Homophobia workshop
LGBTQ panel
Transgender panel
Journalmaking
Sewing
Drama
Our own Jerry Springer show, caught on camera
Driving up to Cornell and back down in one afternoon with Don to get 6 computers that CIT no longer uses. Thanks Kelly and Al!
4 fights broke out in one afternoon.
several young women and young men revealed that they had been sexually assauted.

We are going into week 4 of summer youth employment. Next week we will start the project areas in writing, filmmaking, web design, guerilla theater and guerilla art, all with a political focus of course. These were supposed to be the heart of the summer, but lately we've been having trouble with some of the young people, who are taking advantage of our intentional lax attitude (we don't have rules at project reach because 1. we expect that young people are mature and rational, and 2. the young people need to come up with their method of self-governance).
Some of them are very disrespectful of other participants' and staffs' voices, are disruptive, and tend to break down serious analytical discussion into jokes and disruptions. I want people to have a fun time too, but you know, there's a time and a place.

BUT, before I start going down that path too far, I really want to say how incredible it has been to work with all the young people. They all have incredible stories to tell about their lives. When we did the secrets exercise, an exercise where people anonymously posts a secret about themselve which nobody knows, they not only posted, but even had the courage to come out and talk about rape, anorexia, suicide, and being beaten. In workshops a lot of them were very engaged and analytical; they are very mindful of others, are strong and determined despite everything (and I mean Everything) they've faced, are incredibly creative, generous, and are just such great people to be with. It really warms my heart to think about them, and I think I'll have a really hard time leaving.

That has been the most incredible part of the summer. Having never worked with 14-20 year olds in such a setting, I really didn't know what to expect. For a while before the summer I was jaded with the way that our society was educating and producing its new generations of young people. This is based on my experience working with middle schoolers, and my personal experience in the public school system (refer back 2 posts). Mainstream media like MTV, Fox, movies like Bratz, conservative teachers and textbook publishing companies (like McGraw-Hill) and the highly controlled prison-like public schools young people go to are misinforming young people politically and personally. They teach us to accept the status quo (sickest part of all, to internalize and even rationalize the status quo), and to expect that we are entitled to everything - an expectation that crosses class lines. This is why I am even more impressed by the young people at Reach. I don't mean to idealize them because they aren't ideal, and at times I do wish that they were even more analytical and would find the voice and words to express exactly what it is that they're trying to say. But I think our role is also to facilitate that process for them, so that they find that voice through theater, writing, web publishing, or art.

I have so much more to write about and I've got pictures to post so check back soon!

-dk

Some pictures

Emma Osore:


Julie Mac and an excessively large building in Brooklyn:


Hannah Sadtler:


Garden in Brooklyn projects:


When the bird had its creamy ways with me:


Tina, Shaq, and Ding, on the way to Reach retreat:


Snake I found up in the Catskills on the retreat:


Untitled:



-Ding

A brief summary of what I've been doing (for those future cuspers)

So far most of the summer has been dedicated to planning for the summer youth program.
We get our young people from job fairs, and they are paid by the city through the Youth Summer Employment Program (YSEP).

The summer program will be 4 days a week for 7 weeks, with each day split between workshops, counseling, and projects. The workshop are mostly about racism, sexism, homophobia, identity, body image, relationships, personal histories, organizing, and activism. Our project areas are designed to let the young people express their own histories and what they learn at Reach, both to themselves and to the community:

The four project areas:
*Website design (Toussaint): learning the ins and outs of website design, and using them to create an online anti-discrimination resource, post videos from the video project, and from the men's caucus.

*Just Videos (Veronica and Tina): shooting and editing videos about social justice issues in the community.

*Guerilla Theater (ShaQona): improv & street theater, as a way of liberating the inner voices and communicating anti-discrimination messages

*Guerilla Art (me): reclaiming art from the galleries and into the streets, to spread the messages we learn at Reach and place them in strategic places, with wheatpasted flyers, zines, stencils, stickers, messages in bottles, and subverted advertisements.

We'll also be doing writing and journaling so we can reflect on the whole process.

I'm very excited for what we have (and haven't) planned. In addition to all this we'll also be taking trips to museums, beaches, and parks. I'm a little intimidated about leading a guerilla art group because I haven't done so much guerilla art myself, I've just seen some really cool ones. Also, I'm a little intimidated by the prospect of counseling 5-6 young people. I'm good at listening and asking questions, but not good at challenging mentees with tougher questions that might make a huge difference. It's always easier when counseling to agree with the person and sympathize with their problems, and while I can see the pain or anger they are in, sometimes it's more of a problem with them instead of their friends/parents/environment. How do you tell an emotionally distressed person that they are the ones who are hurting themselves? Well I guess just like that.

Of course that's not the only type of difficult case, but I would still like to make counseling one of my higher priorities this summer, in addition to creating a really dynamic guerilla arts project with the young people.

wow I really got off track...here's what else I have done so far:

At the job fairs for YSEP I handed out quartercards (image to be upload soon) and talked about Project Reach to >1,500 youths looking for employment. According to Don, years back there were so many jobs that they didn't have enough people to take them. Now the city has less money and has a surplus of youth instead of a surplus of jobs. This was quite evident at the job fairs. Our first site was at a mostly Chinese high school, near Chinatown. There were nearly 1000 people lined up looking for jobs in a really small, cramped auditorium. Our second site was at another public school, with young people cramped into an audiorium where the AC had malfunctioned (conveniently on a hot muggy day). They were led in groups of 30, lined up, lectured, and then dispersed in a room full of employers. By the time the 6th group came, most of the employers had already filled up their slots and left, so that the only people left were us and a few other places, so that there were 30 people coming into an auditorium with three choices. We felt really bad for them so we couldn't leave, but we had to because there was still another day of recruitment.

Here are some reactions from the young people when I told them about Project Reach

Me: "hey, have you all heard of project reach?"

them: "no"/[shake head]/[looks away]

me: "well we're one of the orgs you can sign up with inside, and we are working to stop racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination in the community" [give them quartercard]

them: [shake head]/[look at quartercard]

me:"have you thought about what kind of job you wanted to have this summer?"

them:"no"/"yea I wanna do daycare" (8 times out of 10)/"construction and labor" (which they wouldn't have found at this job fair)/"yea something with sports"

---------
well, what I can conclude is that most of them have some vague idea of what they want to find at the job fair, and it's usually always daycare or sports, or working with kids. Then they come and find something at the YMCA or some other summer camp, and no matter how much we tried to sell Project Reach (we were the only ones quartercarding in addition to tabling), there were very few youth actually interested in doing anti-discrimination work. Most of the youth (>90%) were people of color, so it seemed strange that they didn't want to work on issues that have doubtlessly affected their lives.

Looking back, if someone approached me with such a proposal when I was in High School, I probably would have just thrown the quartercard on the ground, knowing the janitor will pick it up. Needless to say I have changed a lot since then.

Let it be known, I held fairly conservative views on race. What a surprise it is then, to remember that I mostly watched Fox, and learned from conservative teachers (Mr. Miale, my 8th grade confederate flag-loving patriot history teacher, Mr. Horowitz, whose American History class defended Vietnam and neglected all the student movements of the 60s, and Miss. Viscome, my dear German teacher who I really liked but would show us Fox news during class, loved Bush, and fear-mongered terrorism post 9/11). Most of my friends had been white and we'd make racist(not just mildly racist, but really horrible) jokes during lunch and purposefully leave our trash next to (not inside) the trash can. It really sickens and pains me to remember that I took an active part in this.

These were the sources and influences on a high-school aged Asian. Despite the fact that I was a minority who hadn't been in this country for too long, despite the fact that I had experienced discrimination, I was still decidedly apolitical, disempowered, and discriminatory. So I guess I shouldn't have expected too much from the young people of color who didn't care about discrimination.
After all, they probably are taught to think that racial categories and stereotypes are unchangable and biologically rooted, that gay people are purse carrying queens, that girls are chicks, and that it's okay to make janitors pick up after you. Maybe this was just an education and social environment that was unique to me and my high school, but I highly doubt that I was the only one to learn from conservative white America.

In any case, we eventually got over 40 young people (out of over 1500) who wanted to work with us. The group is predominantly female, Black, Asian, Latin@, Hapa/mix, South Asian, and White (from biggest to smallest group). Summer program starts Tuesday, and I am really excited.