- The more your concern is out there, the more support for it you'll garner.
1. If you work alone, think about how best to get your message heard... a poster at a large event, a poem written for a radio show, a film or zine.
2. Find interested others - local and afar (that's why the web is so good!) and organize.
3. Work with your peers - urban, suburban or rural - they're the ones who know best what your concerns may be and how they could be resolved
4. Work with organizations seeking the same things and are trying to get them changed in a way in which you want to work.
5. Work with those in other generations. Encourage them to see your point of view and exercise your power for their issues as you engage them in yours.
6. Work in the system through political parties, issue-oriented campaigns and established political, social, welfare and other activism organizations from the YMCA on.
Here's an e-mail from Alexandra Bradbury, then 16 and a junior at Seattle's Garfield High School, who participated in the November l999 WTO protests:
"Last summer, I joined the Student Outreach and Education Committee of People for Fair Trade/Network Opposed to the WTO. At first I kept pretty quiet at meetings and mostly took notes, since this was my first participation in activism outside of school and without my parents. The committee put on a youth teach-in about the WTO in October, then planned the youth march to converge with the big anti-WTO march on November 30.
During those months,I did a lot of reading on my own and attended talks and debates about the WTO. A couple weeks before the big march, I put together a flyer for other students at my high school, synthesizing some of the information I had gathered and listing relevant websites. I handed out copies and left stacks on lunch tables.
On November 30, the youth march swelled to about 2000 students, including around 100 from my school, as well as students from other area high schools, Seattle Central Community College, and the University of Washington. It was an enormous feeling to see a seemingly endless flood of students marching in front of me and all the way up and over the hill behind me, and then to look out from an overpass to see another vast contingent coming to join us.
I remember we were chanting and feeling exuberant and vast, as we neared the stadium where we would join the big march with the [other participants], a rainbow appeared over Queen Anne Hill. A good omen.
After the WTO Ministerial, a friend and I organized (with the help of Seattle Young People's Project) a committee of high school students to continue educating and organizing around the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and the global economy in general. Our most successful event, late in spring, was a panel discussion we held at our school. Four speakers of widely differing viewpoints spoke about the pros and cons of economic globalization to an audience of about two hundred students. Not only were our speakers pretty distinguished -- and capable -- for a high school audience, but the students were genuinely attentive and interested. We hope to keep up this kind of work next fall."
Check
out TPP and Resources for sites such as:
United States Student Association
(USSA)
International Student Activism
Alliance(USSA)
United Students Against Sweatshops
(USAS)
Libertarian Rock
React.com
