Monday, January 2, 2012

Broken Bondage - Retying the Knot

Sunday, January 1st, saw me implement a premature version of my youth advocacy pitch to a small group of young people. This early practice allowed me to see real-time reactions to my activity and dialogues intended to impress upon young people the need to advocate. I began by instructing the young people to gather into a circle and arrange themselves into a "knot" (Cross arms and take the hand of the people on either side of you). I told them their objective was to "untie the knot" without talking during the first round.

[What I didn't realize was I had incorrectly instructed them to form their knot. Instead of crossing their arms they should have reached across the circle to another young person and taken their hand. Both hands should have been extended across the circle.]

The young people accomplished the goal in less than five seconds for the most part because I constructed the knot wrong. Nevertheless, the activity gave the young people a chance to get more intimate with one another then they normally would have (holding hands) and gave me a metaphor to work with and connect in their minds. The team-building and relevance of the activity to the public health subject matter at hand were crucial to find some appeal/motivation for these young people to engage in the conversation.

After they untied themselves, I told them their community/neighborhood acts a lot like this either in a positive or negative fashion. The "knot" can either be protective or suffocating, and our job is to figure out whether their community is serving their needs or not. Then reporting the tendency of public health concerns for young people of their generation, they became more interested as the connections between those health risks (diabetes, heart disease, diet-related cancer) and their built environment were made. With such attention on the interconnection, we mapped the community's food sites, their proximity to the church we were sitting in, and finally graded each site (I prompted them with my core health questions: 1. More fresh food than junk food? AND 2. More healthy drinks than unhealthy drinks). The grades ranged from Cs to Fs and they gave fast food establishments no sympathy. I explained how appropriate their harsh analysis was because there are harsh realities and consequences for the communities eating and drinking these hazardous foods.

Where do I go from here? Next time I'll ask for those who would like to commit themselves to changing their area for the better.

What I am working to do is free their minds from the forced self-destructive resistance they will personally manifest in order to combat the hostile environment they are growing up in. If I can expose them to a positive form of resistance and channel the energy into team-building and constructive community organizing, then they will have a chance to feel the freedom of participatory democracy.

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