Week Five: Community Mapping - Examining the Issue

Though we only had one day to meet due to the upcoming winter break, we were busy becoming experts on our new topic: homelessness. As a group, we watched a video from Atlanta's Task Force for the homeless http://www.homelesstaskforce.org/ (under About Us: Our Mission & History). We took a Homelessness Quiz to test our knowledge and learn that there are many generalizations about homelessness that are simply myths. We expanded our knowledge so that we can come up with a service project that will best service the community.

Coming back from break we will dive into this topic more as well as prepare for our upcoming service summit on January 17 and our service project on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, January 19.

Have a wonderful holiday!

Everyday Leaders Mission Statement

Working together, we can dream, plan and achieve our goals while having fun. We will make the world a better place, because we are leaders of today and tomorrow. We are the Everyday Leaders!

- The student members of Everyday Leaders

Week Four: Community Asset and Needs Brainstorm

This week, the students started to think about their community and its resources. The students completed a group task called, Who Serves You? where the students researched contact information for their city council members, the mayor, state representatives, federal representatives, etc -- even the president elect! The students will need to refer to these resources throughout the year.

We also discussed our upcoming field trips surround MLK Day (it's a day on!).
On Saturday, January 17th, students will have the opportuniti to attend the 16th Annual Hands On Atlanta Martin Luther King, Jr. Service Summit. Students will particpant in activities and attending youth service seminars.
Monday, January 19th (MLK Day), the students will kick off their service. Students and family members are invited to serve at John Hope Elementary in the King District with environmental and beautification projects.
Permission forms were passed out for both.

Finally, the students completed a Community Assets & Needs assessment and decided that the issue they would like to address for Global Youth Service Day will be homelessness and homeless reflief. More to come as they learn more about the issue and start to develop their project for April!

The Courier Article

Today, the students wrote an article for the ACMS newsletter, The Courier:

Everyday Leaders is a program that empowers youth to improve their community and focuses on service learning for teens and young people. We will be going to different places to engage in seminars and service projects. Along with improvement of our community and service learning, we will be learning about our strengths and weaknesses and how to come together and take action. So far in our group, we have discussed a few projects we will be working on together in the future. We are working on how to get along with our fellow peers and get past racism, sexism, and other forms of hatred in our world. Everyday Leaders is a productive club that enriches our youth to come together and work together!
- The members of Everyday Leaders

Week Three: Team Building & Diversity

We had a lot of fun this week with new team building games like the Hula Hoop game, the Toilet Paper game, the Action Name game, and more! Tuesday we took a closer look at other youth-led service projects to see what other young minds are accomplishing all over the world. We also started to work on developing our own mission statement (we will post it when it is finalized next week!). Students were asked to work in groups to define TEAM. Here were their responses:

Group One:
T - Together
E - Everyone
A - Acceptance
M - Make a Difference

Group Two:
T - Togetherness
E - Excitement
A - Agility
M - Me and You

Thursday we got serious and had our Diversity discussion. To start it off, we watched the school version of The Teen Files: The Truth About Hate*, which challenged groups of teens around the US--even one from Georgia--to confront their prejudices around race, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality. Following the movie, we held an open discussion where students were able to talk about and define diversity, tolerance, and compassion. All students were very respectful of one another and many profound observations where made. Eighth grade students were even able to draw on previous class discussions in Mr. Fine's advisory about gender.

We tied this discussion into our Kick Off for Service which will be on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Dr. King's ideas surrounding the Beloved Community. The students even were even inspired with project ideas from the discussion. Next week we are getting into Community Asset Mapping and we will be gearing up for service projects to come in the new year!



*AIMS Multimedia: An Arnold Shapiro Production, 1999