We adapted.
2020 Online + Virtual Organizing
Weekly Check-Ins
Our Advocacy Support Team cares about bold youth leadership. Check-ins are focused on strategizing campaigns, event planning, peer to peer coaching, and mentoring from field professionals.
These check-ins are most importantly about relationship building. Each week we gather to hone our participant’s organizing skills, grow their confidence as leaders, and clarify their vision for justice.
Virtual EJ Tours
Seeing is believing. This initiative is a way to uplift the people and places behind the issue. In partnership with Hawaiʻi Women in Filmmaking, participants get training in filmmaking and environmental justice advocacy.
This initiative is an adaption from environmental justice tours that have historically been done in and with community. But we are living in a digital world and adapting more and more each day.
Inclusive Justice
In response to the inspiring work of the Black Lives Matter movement’s growing activism, especially among youth, we created a space to bring Oʻahu youth and community leaders to discuss the histories and experiences of systemic racism, white supremacy, and colonialism in Hawaiʻi.
We know this is just a starting point, but it is an important pathway to better understand the full scope of equity issues for community-resilience advocacy.
Change in action…
Community Change Forums
Conversations are a catalyst for change. Community Change Forums is a space for youth to listen and learn from one another on issues they care about. At the beginning of every session we discuss the meanings of justice, equity, and liberation.
The goal is to build a baseline of understanding of what it means to be an organizer in your community-- taking action with friends and family to change your school, campus, or city. and leads to an opportunity to co-create solutions, whether it be through institutional change and/or policy advocacy.
EJ Reels Camp for Girls 2020
The Reel Camps for Girls from Hawaiʻi Women in Filmmaking “is a creative space where girls unleash their creativity, build confidence, and initiate a long-term individual transformational journey from passive recipients, to active makers of their own stories.”
We participated in a weeklong camp to discuss local and global environmental injustices, decolonization frameworks, systemic change, and circular economies. Everyday the girls were exposed to different issues to inspire their content and bring their passions alive through filmmaking mentorship. One thing was clear in this camp, youth care deeply about their future and solutions to protect our collective wellbeing.
Watch these amazing and soulful videos from the participants! Read a day by day account!
