Youth-Led Social Justice Ambassadors Training

Last Wednesday we, Johanna Keller-Flores and Anna Miller, members of Eco Education’s Youth Advisory Board, held a Social Justice Ambassadors training at Great River School. This was the second step in a series of social justice trainings for students and teachers at our school. The idea for these activities sparked from a national conference on the topic of race and white privilege that we attended in Minneapolis last April. The plan was to introduce these topics to our high school as a half-day event. Forty six students were excused from their classes from 9am to 12:30 pm to participate in the discussions, lessons, and activities that we had prepared. We began with a brief introductory lesson covering the topic of white privilege and race in America. They continued on to activities that brought awareness to where we all stand with our identities and where others stand in racial and social hierarchies. The event ended in small caucus groups that were specific to each racial identity for discussion and reflection about what the activities meant to them, what it means and how it feels to belong to a certain racial identity, and different ways that we could make a positive impact in our school and communities.

For me, Johanna, this training has been a very personal event for me, and an opportunity for self-growth. I am someone who identifies as bi-racial, and having the ideas of white privilege and racial identity with me since the conference we attended, I can feel my outlook on the world and on myself change. You see the flaws in the systems around you, but because things become more clear, the solutions also seem to be in closer reach. I wanted to share these experiences with students at my school, especially because we have such a clear majority of white students.

I, Anna, was so shocked when I went to the white privilege conference in April because I couldn’t believe that I had never learned about this in school especially since it is very prominent in society today, which added to my suprise because up until that point I had thought racism was a thing of the past and isolated cases of prejudice were the only things that remained in its place. I had never thought before, that me just being white could be contributing to racism simply by not acting and it was at that point that I made the decision to take a step against racism in America. This summer, when I went to NYLC’s National Youth Leadership Training summer camp and I had the opportunity to learn about the achievement gap. I realized that white privilege was one of the main reasons that the achievement gap had developed over the years. So in addition to bringing awareness to my peers about the issues surrounding race in America, I wanted to empower them so that they felt smart and successful in school and in life, whatever their definition of success may be.

Currently we are holding weekly meetings with students who were impacted and empowered by the Social Justice Ambassador Training and who want to help us with our next step in strengthening our school community.  Our current idea is to hold a school-wide event that takes what we touched upon in the previous training to a deeper level. Additionally we want to continue working with the teachers at our school so that they feel confident in supporting our peers as they begin learning about things that may be hard to deal with on their own.

Anna Miller is an alumni of National Youth Leadership Council's 2011 National Youth Leadership Training