Activities
This nonpartisan clearinghouse offers free information, resource-sharing and networking for young people who seek to pursue community change, for example, changing a school board or city council policy. Trainings and consulting with adult organizations that seek to partner as equals with young people is another area of activity. Various publications include "Youth! The 26% Solution" and "Maximum Youth Involvement."
The Youth Activism Project also operates an international initiative called School Girls Unite. This youth-driven initiative based in the Washington, D.C. area collaborates with another group of high school and university students in Mali called Les Filles Unies pour l'Education. Together these African and American activists advocate for gender equity and universal education. They raise donations and currently are sending 70 girls in Mali to school. UNICEF identifies this West African country as one of the 25 nations in the world where "emergency action" is needed because the majority of girls do not complete even elementary school. Les Filles Unies makes regular trips to the schools to hold meetings with the village elders, teachers, parents and the younger students. This firsthand knowledge and youth-led evaluation increases their credibility when these young people--who are not yet old enough to vote--meet with government officials such as the Ministry of Education in Mali and Members of Congress. Ongoing participation with the Global Campaign for Education has seen an increase in the U.S. government's assistance for basic education for children in developing countries from $400 million in 2005 to $740 million in 2008. For the sake of comparison, Great Britain gives double that amount: $1.5 billion/per year.
Read more about this topic: Youth Activism Project
Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life for woman has gone. She has as many resources as men, as many activities beckon her on. As large possibilities swell and inspire her heart.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion.”
—Marta Zahaykevich, Ucranian born-U.S. psychitrist. “Critical Perspectives on Adult Women’s Development,” (1980)