We must put young people into a
position to learn the many varied skills of advocacy in theory,
action, and as a group. Teaching advocacy with the three pillars of
Theory, Action, and Community, any group of committed young people
will attain the confidence and intelligence to advocate on behalf of
themselves and their loved ones.
The story of the birth of this program
is more about me than about any one group of students. It's a story
about seeing the full picture rather than a small fragment.
Driving to Munoz-Marin, my
North Philadelphia school site, I felt excited like I often do when
preparing to teach a cooking club lesson. I had already completed two
cooking club series and felt comfortable teaching, cooking, and
supervising simultaneously. Due to the hectic schedule of the
co-sponsoring teacher, often times I had to do all three with minimal
assistance from him. Fortunately for me and the cooking club
participants on this day, Mr. Henderson had enough free time to
commit to assisting our cooking endeavors. Now, what you have to
understand is that Mr. Henderson is a former chef, so his experience
puts my very limited work in the kitchen to shame. What you also must
know is that earlier in the day I had asked and received the
permission of the kitchen manager to use the full-service kitchen as
a classroom for the cooking club. So, you have to imagine me with all
my cooking equipment, the chef turned teacher, a full-service
kitchen, and 12 students excitedly preparing to begin our session.
When Mr. Henderson asks, “Why don't we just use their stove to cook
rather than your electric skillet?” Now, ordinarily I am incredibly
cautious when it comes to young people around large cooking
equipment, but he was a trained chef and these young people were
seventh graders so I knew the benefits outweighed the risks. Well,
Mr. Henderson begins working the tabletop grill and the smells of the
onions and peppers and mushrooms start swirling through the kitchen,
and within minutes the kitchen is alive with movement. Young people
preparing more mushrooms, chopping additional onions, and opening
more bags of low-fat cheese. Soon enough, many of the young people
are handling cookware and moving food up and down the grill.
The students were thrilled
to have the chance to cook in such a professional looking
environment, Mr. Henderson was excited to have the chance to work
with his students casually, and I was overjoyed that the cooking club
had taken on such a practical and dynamic form. These young people
were working with fresh food, making a vegetarian dish, and relating
stories of past cooking experiences, smiling the whole way through.
It was then that Mr. Henderson changed that positive attitude for the
rest of the session with one statement. It was like we had all been
living in this fantastic kitchen with it's pristine equipment and had
forgotten about the world outside the kitchen. He told us all then
that the reason the equipment was pristine was indicative of the
larger problem. It seemed to Mr. Henderson that the equipment we had
been using and much of the other equipment throughout the kitchen was
telling him a different story. “This equipment has never been
used”. The students and I looked bewildered. Then he said, “If
you look at the grill and how clean it is, any commercially operated
grill would have marks of all kinds lining the surface, and this has
none. I mean it's spotless.”
I was speechless. The
students were not. They began firing off questions after question and
demand after demand trying to understand why they couldn't enjoy the
caliber of food we had just produced in less than half an hour. Turns
out, the full-service kitchen had been reduced to a satellite kitchen
not long after being installed. The fridge was packed to the brim
with frozen entrees and the ovens were colored dark from use.
The dots had been connected
for me. I saw then not just the value of the cooking club, but the
value of something else: the value of exposing the policies
structuring the lives of these young people through hands-on
investigation and action. If we can couple this kind of learning
environment with an advocacy curriculum, those very same young people
could have done the appropriate research and strategic planning
necessary to change those structures to allow for the healthier
tomorrow they all deserve.
Young people must be given
the information necessary for them to see the larger picture. It's
not enough to be able to cook well on a tabletop grill, you must be
sure that every child will be eating nutritious food from those same
grills tomorrow and beyond. Such a vision requires a new kind of
demand; a new kind of advocacy.
“When the teacher is ready, the
students will appear”.
You ask any class of students “who
wants to be a leader?” And you will see 99 percent of the class
with their hands up. They will be stretching and straining their arms
to get the attention of the teacher. I see this kind of hunger for
power everyday. The students are ready for the challenge of
leadership. The question now is, are we ready to teach? This program
will see students taught persuasion, political education (very
basic), strategic planning, coalition building, community research,
and teamwork. This recipe for advocacy will lead to youth advocates
capable of designing and implementing an advocacy event in their
locality mobilizing their community around health. They will see
first-hand the potential impact their ideas and their actions can
have to effectively shape their world for a healthier tomorrow. I can
attest to the power of this kind of empowerment to convince young
people to continue to stay informed, and courageously stand up for
what they believe is right for their generation and the generation of
tomorrow.
The skills we will impart to these
young people through this program will make them capable of
envisioning a world we cannot even dream of. And these dreams will
not be deferred. I will aid them in connecting the dots between
policy, community, and nutrition. For each of them their connections
will be different. Their unique visions will give them the strength, the resolve, to sustain.
A Healthier Future will give young
people the opportunity to read deeply into their advocacy talents and
see for themselves their evolution as an advocate: a thinker and actor.
