1. Drug Abuse: What can you do about drug abuse in your community?
Here are a few suggestions.
Organize and conduct a youth-run forum in your school, or community center, with the purpose of bringing people together to discuss issues of drug use, abuse, and distribution in your community. Invite policy makers (school board, city council, Representatives, school administrators) and any and all active members of your community, youth included, to discuss issues of immediate concern surrounding drugs. Use the forum to raise awareness of the concerns of youth and brainstorm ideas for what can be done in your community to make youth safer and more drug-free. Collect and present statistical information you collect about drug use in your schools and community as well as information on organizations already working to combat these problems. Gather resources to distribute as well as generate lists of people who are willing to volunteer to help make change. If possible, elect a group to hold forums consistently, providing an opportunity for people from diverse perspectives in your community can come together to discuss common problems and common solutions.
At a community or school event, set up educational booths representing both national and local resource centers for drug information. Provide information on prevention and treatment centers, recent and pending legislation focusing on the issue of drugs, as well as prevention programs and opportunities for volunteer work. Contact local and national organizations and have them provide you with free resources to hand out as well as any other information they can provide. In addition to information booths, set up lobbying booths with petitions to your U.S. Senators and Representative about the pending legislation that you have studied in this lesson. If there is a bill that you feel should pass or should be rejected, collect signatures from your community and send these to the Representatives in your state. Have information about these bills to distribute to people who want to know more about them. This is an effective means of political participation and informs your community what is going on in the legislature.
In your community, create a mural focused on topics discussed in this lesson. Somewhere on your school campus, or in your community, find space to create a visual project that serves to educate people about drug use and the options available to decrease the problem with drugs in your community. This project can be done with your class only, or can become a community effort with input from lots of different groups. On the day in which you create the mural, distribute information on drug resource centers in your city.
2.Gangs: What can you do about gangs in your community? Here are a few suggestions.
Think up a group that will provide a sense of belonging, means of identification, or a group with shared values. Provide alternative activities that will fill this need. Start an after-school program in your school to try to discourage gang behavior.
Propose to your school a gang awareness week. Arrange for ex-gang members to speak to the student body about their experience, discuss reasons why people join, and hold brainstorming sessions on ways to provide alternatives to gang life.
Start a Gang Prevention Troupe. Run workshops on gang prevention in your high school and local middle school. Contact local non-profit organizations for gang prevention curriculum or create your own lessons, and visit different classrooms to educate your peers. Publicize your efforts and make this troupe a permanent club in your high school. Recruit younger students so that after you graduate the troupe will continue.
3. Intolerance: What can you do about Intolerance? Here are a few suggestions.
Conduct a survey in your school to see why students stay in their own cliques. Ask students to tell you on the survey which group they belong to, and see if people can classify themselves as easily as they do other people. Ask if people seem to act mean towards people of other groups for specific reasons, because they are bored, or have a specific grudge against them. After the survey is complete, and you have tabulated the results, publicize them all over the school: in the newspaper, at an assembly, go around to different homerooms to spur discussion on the results. What can your school learn from this and how can people of different groups begin to talk to one another?
Conduct your own Commission on Race in your school community. Decide what you believe was effective or ineffective in President Clinton's Commission and design your project from there. If there are examples of successful interaction and communication between people of different backgrounds at your school, highlight them and let those students lead an assembly on a designated topic. If your school is made up of mainly one race and problems of intolerance are due to lack of communication between people that look different, organize a school exchange with a school that has more diversity. Conduct an exchange program to get to know other students and overcome boundaries that are created by neighborhood divisions.
An idea that a group at the Student Advisory Committee came up with was to conduct a freshman class on issues of intolerance. This would be a mandatory class for every student in high school, that addresses the needs of students of all backgrounds to make everyone feel welcome when joining the student body. This would allow students to talk about issues of intolerance right when they enter high school, hopefully to address the problem before it starts. An extension of this project could be to have a buddy system designed to assign freshman with a senior of a different race, class, ethnicity, or clique. (Pair students with immigrant/refugee students to ease their transition into this new community.) The Seeking Solutions Community Guide and Segment 15 offer good models for this kind of class.
Please forward all inquiries regarding the website to webmaster@crfc.org, or use the contact form. This website is provided courtesy of the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago. Copyright 1998-2002.