SOCIAL JUSTICE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY 2015

Ages 11-18 | Monday - Friday 10am - 3pm | July 7 - August 7 2015

Kite’s Nest and the Staley B. Keith Social Justice Center partnered for the second year to run the Social Justice Leadership Academy, a leadership training for eighteen teenagers growing up in Hudson.

Over the course of five weeks, youth ages 11-18 came together to step up as young leaders, developing their own voices and visions for change. This summer, we grounded our program in an understanding of the struggle for racial justice as a defining struggle for our generation. As a group, we examined the history, systemic oppression, and movements for liberation that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter Movement. From there, we explored how other facets of our identity shape our lived experiences, and shared our own stories, making connections between our lives and larger structural relations of power. Together we developed skills for organizing and practiced tactics to build people power, including: producing radio, making music, writing poetry, presenting speeches, feeding our community, and building our network of change-makers. Stay tuned, this is just the beginning! You can learn more about the people and organizations that make the Social Justice Leadership Academy possible here.

SONGS PRODUCED BY SJLA 2015:

final PROJECTS: PHOTOGRAPHY, RADIO & FOOD

RADIO: YOUTH TAKE OVER THE BARBERSHOP TALKS ON WGXC: 90.7-FM!

PHOTOS FROM OUR SUMMER:

WEEK 1: WHO ARE WE? WHAT IS SOCIAL JUSTICE?

We began our summer with a week of activities, conversations, games and skits to build our community and culture, to begin making connections between political education and youth organizing, and to come to a shared understanding of social justice and leadership. We introduced concepts key to doing anti-oppression work through hands-on workshops exploring identity, intersectionality, and the historical threads of oppression and resistance, and we took a trip to the Watershed Center:

WEEK 2: VOICE: IDENTITY, EXPERIENCE and EXPRESSION

In our second week together, we dug deeper into the ways our experiences are shaped by who we are and our interlocking identities with two mini-workshops, called Gender and LGBTQ 101. Visited by photographer Bryan MacCormack and a team of music producers from Found Sound Nation, we spent our afternoons developing our voices through music and photography, breaking into groups to write and produce songs. At the end of the week, we headed to the Free School in Albany for a youth media share: teens from Youth FX screened an award-winning film they made about two young women who fall in love; the Truthworker Theater Company performed excerpts from a play about the experience of solitary confinement in prison, and we shared our music!

WEEKS 3 & 4: GROWING OUR NETWORK, PROJECT LAB

WEEK 5: COMMUNITY EVENT & ACTION

WHO WE ARE

SJLA PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS:

Kite's Nest, the Staley B. Keith Social Justice Center, and The Watershed Center.

SJLA 2015 EDUCATORS:

Cedrick Fulton, LJ Amsterdam, Jalal Sabur, Nicole LoBue, Kaya Weidman, Sara Kendall, and Paige Gbasie.

SJLA 2015 YOUTH:

Adonis Ragland
Aidan Collins
Arden Martin
Betye Arrastia-Nowak
Cierra “Cinnamon” Gray
Courtney Murphy
Kimedrick “Hamma” Murphy
Jahmir Barnett-William
Jacob O’Leary
Jasmine Wise
Jaquan Morgan
Juan Simon Sanchez
Mia Justiniano
Mike Alert
Mykal Walters
Romellio Ragsdale
Irlande Louis
Tee-quan Davis

SPECIAL THANK YOU TO:

Operation Unite • The Dyson Foundation • Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation • The Watershed Center • Soul Fire Farm • Bryan MacCormack, Left In Focus • Molinski Photography • Found Sound Nation • Sol Flower Farm • Whistledown Farm • NY State Summer Employment Program • Barbershop Talks • WGXC: Hands-on Radio • Tanya Linn Albrigtsen-Frable • Tres Myers • Silent Barn • El Puente • Bertha Summer School of Resistance • Albany Free School • Truthworker Theater Company • Youth FX • PROMISE Corps • Common Hands • Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood • Carl Skoggard and Joe Holtzman