Impressive Social Action As A Result of a Junior Youth Group
Here is a wonderful story from New Braunsfels describing their involvement in the community resulting in a social action activity fruit from their junior youth group.
“We started our junior youth group about three years ago and used a room at the local community center for our gatherings. Our Bahá’í community is quite small with no youth but we decided to go ahead and start a group with the hope of raising capacity with the junior youth to become future animators. Friends from the Learning Site came to help us with outreach and we were able to get a Junior Youth group started within three visits to the focused neighborhood. During these three years we developed a good relationship with the Education Director at the community center. She was slowly allowing us to do more activities.
Some of our JY group service activities involved partnering with the Martin Luther King Association. We made posters for MLK day and displayed them at the community center and the main library. Junior youth and kids from our children’s class participated in the local MLK March.
Due to a racial incident that occurred within the city, the mayor decided to bring the community together to consult about ways to make sure similar incidents did not occur again. The mayor reached out to local organizations to participate in a community forum that would help promote unity in diversity. Because of our connections with MLK, three Bahá’í were invited to join this forum. This group of about 60 community members came up with the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Awareness forum, (IDEA forum). Since we were involved in the formation of this group, we were able to contribute in the design of the organizational structure. We decided that it would have a horizontal structure within circles, instead of the traditional top down leadership. We came up with a steering committee and four subcommittees that each had a liaison that would join the steering committee to make sure all the subcommittees were equally represented. Our Bahá’í team members joined the awareness subcommittee and recruited the Education Director at the local community center to join in. The awareness committee is about education and appreciation of our diversity.
We partnered with the ED and the IDEA Forum to host a mini camp for kids. The camp was on fostering friendships with the theme of unity. It included arts, crafts, and games. The focus was on developing their strengths in showing cooperation and teamwork, making friends, appreciating diversity, making sure everyone is included, listening and trying to understand, and working to make things better for all. The participants learned the quotation “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole world.”
We involved our junior youth in planning the activities and they helped facilitate it. We had 10 lovely children of diverse backgrounds participate. We did an art project that showed them the qualities of being a true friend. We discussed the power of unity and did a skit at the end of the camp for the parents that was about unity and disunity. By the end of the camp bonds of friendship had started and they learned about how essential it is for cooperation and reciprocity in order for us to achieve growth and to realize we all benefit and are stronger when we work together.
The Education Director asked us to offer this mini camp again as he had a waiting list so we will repeat the lessons again in August.
Here is the structure from the committee:
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