Now that Amnesty has had its last meeting of the year, I thought it would be nice to also wrap up Amnesty with some highlights. First, our Fill-a-Purse drive went awesome! Our members Brooklyn and Ashlynne dropped those off at a domestic abuse shelter and we're happy to help out those women. Also, our Hall of Herstory was amazing and is still up in our school. It really educated students, as one girls said to me "I didn't know Mulan was a real person!". Also, Documentary Day was off the hook! With about 90 students watching, many people learned about the horrors of animal poaching. For me, I was glad to teach my fellow Amnesty members alittle about LGBT+ and help them become aware about the issues LGBT+ face through my Tuesday lesson. I think Amnesty was a great experience for many people and although our numbers dwindled in the end, we had a good hardworking group and we met our goals. Thank you Ms. Mendoza for giving me the chance to work with these people and fight for what we care about!
This Tuesday's meeting of Amnesty I will be leading the group in some LGBT+ learning activities. I tried to focus on activities that connect to students lives, so they can socially change and become aware instead of just spouting out facts. Also, with my research I had been using I finally got to reading the Amnesty International Ally Toolkit for LGBT+. In it was some great materials, including facts, ideas for activities and dome background information I definitely needed. I put a link to the toolkit above, and I am going to keep working on my activities. I am so excited to share my findings with my peers and to see what they think!
Holy crap!! Our environmental and animal committee has been planning a documentary day in which students would stay afterschool to watch the documentary titled "Racing Extinction" which focuses on human effects on the environment and how to help stop the extinction of many species. They had been working so hard on it and I was so proud of them. As a last resort to get kids interested, we talked to two biology teachers Ms. Sessions and Mrs. Sherman and convinced them to give extra credit to any student who came. We advertised so much and today was the day! I walked over from my last hour to Mr. Delmont's room to find a riot of people outside of it! They were all there for Documentary Day!! Amnesty kids began rushing around signing in people, collecting money, handing out snack bags, popping popcorn, and handing out waterbottles! Once everyone was settled (and there were kids everywhere, all over the floor, in other people's laps) we began the documentary. That documentary definitely made an impact on all the kids, including me. I looked around and saw kids genuinely interested in it. It was definitely a great feeling. Once we tallied everything up, we found that we had about 80-90 attend!!!! It was awesome! Definitely one for the books!
At this past meeting the entire club was running around getting ready for Documentary Night. Our documentary night is next Tuesday and we are so excited!
We will be showing "Racing Extinction", a documentary focusing on dying environments and the effects of human civilization. We will be selling food related items and be charging 1$ at the door. This meeting we created a banner advertising for the event and got the final details in place. Also, we have the PHHS biology teacher Ms. Sessions sponsoring our event and is giving out extra credit to any student that attends the event. We are hoping for a good turnout! During this weeks Amnesty meet, I decided who I would be writing my letter to. I decided I would be writing to Jim Kolbe, a former US representative from Arizona who was the second openly gay Republican to serve in Congress. I decided he would be an awesome man to write to because of his many years of experience in Congress and his outside views on what is happening in today's government. I also began to draft some questions I had for him. Here are some of my questions.
This week in Amnesty we finally got around to Write for Rights. The next three meetings will be wholly devoted to work in on our letters and sending them off. Also, some of the members did interviews with each other for our videos regarding what Amnesty has been doing, what we plan to do, and what we think about each individual topic. We got some great footage and are excited to see our Write for Rights campaign take off!
At this last meeting of Amnesty, we completed our Herstory project and hung up the posters! They look amazing and I saw several students stopping to look at all if the posters.But also, this was a learning experience for me regarding my issue. Amnesty' teacher helper, Mr. Delmont, took me aside after all of the posters were created. He wanted to warn me that because we have several trans women in our lineup the school might stir up a bit and we could possibly be held responsible for it. It wasn't his fault, but it is crazy that people have to worry about even putting posters up about trans individuals. As a club we still decided to put them up because they are women and if we allow ourselves to be silenced, then everyone will be silenced.
Today we continued to work on our two campaigns, Herstory and Documentary Night.
For Herstory, we began to create the posters that will create the Hall of Herstory. This will continue into next week as well. Documentary Night had alot to do. We chose a night (the first Tuesday of May) and filled out all of the paperwork to have an after-school fundraiser. The documentary we will be watching is "Racing Extinction" and focuses on human's impact on the world. We began to think about concessions, money and admissions. We will be selling animal-realted foods, such as goldfish and animal cookies. Also, admission will be 2$ and the money we make will be going towards a waterbottle drive we will be doing. I was not at the Amnesty meeting this week, but I organized the meet for everyone. We have so much going on!
To celebrate March as Women's History Month (yay!!!) we are beginning our "Herstory" campaign. We are going to transform one of the halls in our school into a timeline for influential women in history and decided to choose obscure women. We decided to choose Mulan, Olympus de Gouges, Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, Mother Teresa, Wangan Maathai, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Alice Walker, Sylvia Rivera, Oprah, Laverne Cox and Malala. Each woman will be displayed on a poster in the hall with their picture and some important facts on them. Also, we are organizing a documentary night as a fundraiser for our club. We will be having a fee to get into the class to watch the documentary and it will illustrate one of our chosen causes. |