MVC Quarterly Magazine, Vol. II

MEDIA VOICES FOR CHILDREN PRESENTS A QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER

Volume two 2020/21

COVER IMAGE:

Luz Belen smiles happily on her first day of school in Nyarit, Mexico. Photographer: Robin Romano

LUZ BELEN STRINGING TOBACCO

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS Brianna Chance Morgan Keyt Melissa Knowles Reid Maki Petra Lent McCarron Len Morris Valeria Popolizio Sally Reis ART DIRECTOR AND EDITOR Morgan Keyt 2 / ďťżM E DIA VO IC E S

At twelve years old, Luz Belen worked from sunrise to sunset, stringing tobacco with her older sister Joceli until a special program moved her to a school built on the tobacco plantation.

Tobacco is a primary crop on the west coast of Mexico and is picked by indigenous Huichol families that migrate from the mountains for the summer months.

They live in fields saturated by poisonous pesticides, without sanitation, cooking and

sleeping in the open and bathing with polluted rainwater.

Handling and picking tobacco has been proven to cause neurological illness in children and pesticide exposure can lead to cancer and death. For Luz Belen, school has rescued her, she’ll have warm food, a place to shower, medical care and education. Joceli, however, has been left behind. The family is unable to afford sending both to school.

MVC MEDIA VOICES QUARTERLY UPDATES 6. FROM THE COLLECTION 8. THE FIGHT CONTINUES

EXPERIENCES 12. THE RAW MATERIALS TRAP 14. THE RIGHT TO ART

THE POWER OF YOUTH 18. SUPPORTING THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS 21. THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUTH VOICE 22. FOSTERING AWARENESS

MEDIA VOICES FOR CHILDREN DEPENDS ON OUR SUPPORTERS. SCAN TO MAKE A ONE TIME DONATION OR BECOME A MONTHLY SPONSOR.

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YOUTH VOICE

THESE ARE AN ASSORTMENT OF PHOTOS FROM OUR MOST RECENT EXHIBITS. VISIT WWW.MEDIAVOICESFORCHILDREN.ORG FOR MORE INFORMATION AND PHOTO DESCRIPTIONS

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MVC

HUMAN Resilience IT DIDN’T FEEL RIGHT to release this version of the magazine without recognizing the uncertainty of this time. 2020 has brought new trials and tribulations unlike our society has ever seen before. I do not need to reinforce how terrible COVID-19 is and how hard this year has been for so many individuals all over the world. It is easy to lose hope when every time we turn on the television the news seems to get worse, when every time we open our phones the statistics are more disheartening. We are in fear for our loved ones, for ourselves, and for our communities. Amidst the craziness, it would be easy to succumb to the fear surrounding us and allow it to overwhelm us.

However, that is not what we are seeing. For every terrible statistic, there is another heartfelt thank you to healthcare workers. For every bad sign of what’s next, there are handmade signs in windows saying: “Thank you,” “We love you,” “We are in this together.” All over the world, balcony dance parties are taking place, workout classes are being taught across yards, teachers are delivering food to students in need and loved ones are conducting an obscene amount of Zoom calls. Despite all of the horrific news around us, people are coming together in a way we have never experienced. Healthcare workers are traveling from all over the world to the areas in the most need, thousands of essential workers are keeping us fed and warm, and friends are organizing drive-by’s for each other’s birthdays.

The resilience of the human spirit never fails to amaze me. Instead of breaking us down, this terrible time has resulted in the biggest act of love our society has ever seen. We are staying home to protect one another.

When it comes to being resilient, we all need to look towards children as our guides. During my time at Media Voices, that has been one lesson that has stuck out. No matter their story or what they have been through, when given the opportunity, kids are able to laugh and love and exhibit an insurmountable amount of strength and resilience. These kids have become my heroes.

At MVC, we do child rights. It may feel like the world has been put on pause, but we will continue fighting for our heroes across the globe. Advocacy has not been put on pause. Kindness has not been put on pause. Love has not been put on pause.

Be kind to yourself and to others in this time, we will get through this together.

-MORGAN KEYT Morgan is the Art Director and Editor for Media Voices Quarterly and has worked as an intern with MVC for almost two years

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MVC UPDATE FROM THE COLLECTION: PHOTO EXHIBITS ILLUMINATE CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

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IN 25 YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHY, Media Voices has amassed hundreds of thousands of images of child labor and the joys of childhood in every corner of the world. In 2014, our collection found a home at the Dodd Center for Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. There, it is actively used by teachers, activists, government bodies and the member organizations of The Child Labor Coalition.

Media Voices Board member and photographer, Melissa Knowles, spent a year culling images and creating two photo exhibits to be used for educational outreach to schools and display in public spaces. 2019 was a busy year for these exhibits as they were road-tested as part of a larger Media Voices project to create a nationwide child labor curriculum for middle and high school students.

BENEATH THE BARCODE is our flagship exhibit and is currently on display at the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington. Geared to grades 9-12 and the general public, twenty plus images represent child labor behind the items we buy, eat, wear, use and the electronics we dispose of. The exhibit has an accompanying action kit that enables individuals to learn more about how to make ethical choices through their spending. Apps, videos, best practice programs, reports and stories from the field give visitors the tools they need to learn more and engage further.

So far, schools in Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, Florida, Arkansas, and Wisconsin have used Beneath the Barcode and helped us develop these classroom materials.

Our newest exhibit, OUR CHILDREN is a gorgeous salute to the beauty and resilience of children worldwide. Portraits of kids from Nepal, Pakistan, the United States, Afghanistan, Kenya, India, and Romania capture the spirit of each child an giving us a brief yet powerful snapshot into their lives and dreams.

MVC photo exhibits have already hung in libraries and public galleries in Florida and Massachusetts. Connecticut showings are in the planning stages, timed to the rollout of our new child labor and curriculum by fall of 2020.

With support from the NEAG Foundation, The Human Rights Institute at UConn, The Dodd Center, The International Labor Affairs Bureau of the Department of Labor, and The Child Labor Coalition, work is now underway to create a virtual classroom on child rights, trafficking and children’s human rights for use in Connecticut schools this fall with a national roll-out planned for 2021.

-LEN MORRIS Len is the co-founder and Editorial Director of Media Voices for Children, a documentary filmmaker, lecturer and PHOTOGRAPHER: ROBIN ROMANO advocate for children’s human rights.

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The Fight Continues Ending Exploitative Child Labor in the U.S.

BY REID MAKI

MOST AMERICANS are surprised to learn that child labor is alive and well in the United States.

In the early 1900’s, large numbers of girls and boys worked in factories, coal mines, farms and in other assorted occupations that often caused significant damage to their health and development. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal put an end to most child labor in the U.S. when the Fair Labor Standards Act passed in the late 1930s, but the law allowed a giant exemption for child labor in U.S. agriculture.

The Child Labor Coalition (CLC) has worked for three

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decades to close that exemption. The CLC’s 38 members include Media Voices for Children, several of the largest unions in the U.S. including the two mammoth teacher unions, and a host of child rights and worker rights organizations. The groups come together to perform advocacy and education- all with the intent to reduce child labor internationally and in the U.S.

Safety or C.A.R.E. has been introduced in numerous sessions of Congress by Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, a Democrat from Southern California.

We’re very fortunate and excited to be able to support domestic legislation that would close discriminatory agricultural child labor loopholes. The Children’s Act for Responsible Employment and Farm

In the summer, there are kids working 80- or 90-hour weeks often in oppressive heat and unsafe conditions.

Some farmworker children work during the school year before school, after school, and on weekends. Children

CARE makes it illegal for 12and 13-year-olds to work on farms unless their parents own the farm. Current law allows these children to work unlimited hours when school is not in session.

COURTESY OF HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, PHOTOGRAPHER: BENEDICT EVANS

who migrate and work experience many educational disruptions that cause them to drop out at alarming rates.

Agriculture is one of the most dangerous work sectors in the U.S., with alarmingly high injury and fatality rates- yet we allow children to work on farms.

Child farmworkers regularly work near heavy equipment and with razor-sharp tools.

They are exposed to snakes, toxic pesticides, and excessive temperatures- many health experts believe children are more vulnerable to heat and dangerous pesticides than adults. In addition, child labor is often driven by a “piecerate” payment system (the

more you pick, the more you are paid) which forces people to endure the terrible conditions in order to help support their family.

CARE would also raise the age at which child workers in agriculture can perform hazardous labor from 16 to 18 like all other U.S. occupational areas. If a child isn’t allowed to drive a forklift at a Walmart because it is too dangerous, why should they be allowed to drive one at an agricultural processing facility? According to CARE, child farmworkers who are 14 and 15 would be allowed to do some farm jobs if the Department of Labor identified them as safe. CARE would also increase fines for

child labor violations and call for badly-needed child farmworker injury reporting systems.

We at the CLC believe these rules are based on common sense and that most Americans would support them.

We also think the current exemptions discriminate against Latino children of farmworker families who disproportionately harvest fruits and vegetables in the U.S. The CLC is also fighting to advance legislation to ban child labor in U.S. tobaccowork that makes children sick from nicotine poisoning.

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PHOTOGRAPHER: ROBIN ROMANO

The flu-like symptoms caused by nicotine exposure have been described by child tobacco workers as “feeling like I was going to die.”

Can you think of another job in America that children are allowed to do that makes them regularly ill? We can’t. While picking, kids wear black plastic garbage bags to protect themselves from exposure to toxic nicotine. You have to be 21 to buy cigarettes in the U.S. but we allow 12- and 13-year-olds to work unlimited hours in toxic tobacco fields- as long as school is out. Crazy, right?

The CLC and its members are involved in a wide range of related issues. We fought with partners to successfully keep the Trump Administration from overturning an Obama Administration ban on children applying pesticides on farms. We’re also urgently opposing an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to dramatically shrink “agricultural exclusion zones” -protective areas around workers in the field, including children.

Farmers are not allowed to apply pesticides in these zones and shrinking them will gravely endanger farmworker health as well as the health of surrounding communities.

In the last two decades, global child labor has been reduced from nearly 250 million children to 152 million- a reduction of nearly 100 million children, and we believe that child labor in agriculture will be eliminated as part of that historical trend.

The CLC joined about 80 groups in trying to pass a chlorpyrifos ban in New York State. This hazardous pesticide has been linked to increased autism rates and lowered IQs in children. In a victory for the coalition and after six months of intense pressure, New

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York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered a state agency to begin removing chlorpyrifos from most uses. Recently, Corteva, (formerly Dow Inc.) the leading global manufacturer of chlorpyrifos agreed to suspend the manufacture of the dangerous pesticide.

The CLC is also working with Public Citizen and a coalition of groups to pass legislation that would protect adult and child workers from occupational heat stress—a grave danger for farmworkers. We’ve also joined great groups like Justice for Migrant Women to support efforts to reduce sexual harassment of women and girls in the fields.

Our goal in protecting child farmworkers is not to prevent children from working on farms but to ensure that the work is ageappropriate and not hazardous and that the hours are not excessive and damaging to the health or education of children.

John Kennedy once said, “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.” We believe that children must be nourished and protected, and -like Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Kailash Satyarthiwe aspire to eliminate all exploitative child labor in our lifetime.

-REID MAKI Reid is the Coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition and Director of Child Labor Advocacy of the National Consumers League.

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MVC

THE RAW MATERIALS TRAP

BY PETRA LENT MCCARRON

TWENTY YEARS AGO, in an interview we shot with Wangari Maathai for Stolen Childhoods, Maathai identified the undervaluation of Africa’s raw materials as the primary cause of the immiseration racking the African continent.

I flashed back to that interview listening to a Child Labor Coalition call-in meeting in which we discussed ways to ensure that cocoa farmers in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire could be paid a living wage. There are a lot of promising approaches, from policing supply chains to community action plans to prevent child labor and support the education of cocoa growers’ children. There is a general agreement that the farm gate price of cocoa beans needs to be higher. And yet it seemed to me that the global community is attempting to fix something incrementally, when perhaps what is needed is a complete redesign. Fixing injustice after the fact is always more difficult than preventing it to begin with.

Take a bar of chocolate, for example. The value in that chocolate bar is added in the processing, the manufacture,

the design of the packaging, the branding, the marketing, the shipping... What if that value could be added in the country in which the cocoa beans are grown?

A German coffee company, Solino, provides a model for what that could look like. In 2008, Felix Ahlers, the CEO of his family business FRoSTA AG, a large European frozen food company, took a trip to Ethiopia and realized a few things. Ethiopia exports about 190,000 tons of raw coffee beans annually, earning about 560 million Euro (about 615 million dollars).

However, if the entire crop of raw coffee beans were exported as roast coffee, Ethiopia would earn an additional 340 million Euro (about 373 million dollars) a year, (Sterken, 2018).

Ahlers decided to start a coffee company that produces roast coffee entirely in Ethiopia with the quality and packaging that would enable it to be marketed to consumers in Germany. This required some training and s u per v i s i o n fo r t h e manufacturing – printing the packaging, for example, had to reproduce the barcode crisply

CHILDREN ARE INVOLVED IN EVERY STAGE OF COCOA PRODUCTION With the meager profits cocoa farmers are making, they are forced into hiring the cheapest possible laborers: children. Child labor and forced labor is behind the production of the cocoa that major chocolate companies are making huge profits off of.

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enough for German supermarket scanners to read them. But once the Ethiopian workforce was trained – a small one-time intervention – the company was on its way. Local pickers, roasters, designers and shippers, all of themearning a decent wage.

Workers at Solino earn an average annual income of 1200 Euros ($1,325.51).

The cost for European consumers for Solino coffee is comparable to local brands, and the money stays in Ethiopia.

If the entire coffee harvest in Ethiopia were processed locally, it would produce 280,000 jobs paying about three times the average wage. That’s a helluva lot more effective than traditional development aid.

If this model were to spread to the cocoa-growing areas in Côte D’Ivoire and Ghana, cocoa farmers mired in generational cycles of poverty would have a chance to build an industry. It would be a game-changer.

The success of Solino coffee was possible because the EU did away with import duties for processed coffee a few years ago. If we’re truly serious about eliminating extreme poverty and child labor in cocoa, the United States and other wealthy countries will have to refrain from the quiet under-the-hood mechanisms wealthy countries use to protect their economic dominance.

The outdated expectation that African raw materials can be obtained at fire-sale prices needs to go. Opening markets to African products – making trade truly fair – is so much more dignified a solution than grudgingly offering handouts, too little too late and consistently ineffective.

-PETRA LENT MCCARRON Petra is the associate editorial director of MVC and has co-produced, edited or associate produced all of Galen Film’s productions.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SOLINO- VISIT THEIR WEBSITE AND LEARN MORE VOLU ME 2  / 1 3

THE RIGHT TO ART

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BY MELISSA KNOWLES

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION IS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN EXPERIENCE THAT EVERY CHILD HAS A RIGHT TO. Yet, in Tanzania, most students in the school system continue to be excluded from receiving art education. Lack of sufficient funding, teachers, materials, and equipment, as well as limited inclusion in the school curriculum, prevents generations from being active in a creative way.

Volunteers are relied upon and needed to assist in the creation of a curriculum or to visit local schools to teach art classes. It is for this reason, alongside photographing children, I volunteered with Precious Project, consulting with the staff at the Precious Primary School that they support.

This rural school provides education to orphaned and abandoned children in the poor town of Nshupu, Tanzania.

Art is central to Tanzania’s cultural preservation and expression; the country contains some of the oldest traditions of art in the world. In local communities, ancient rock paintings are still actively used for rituals, ceremonies, and healing. The strong intangible relationships between these paintings and living practices reinforce cultural, social, and spiritual identity.

The country, however, faces immense challenges in protecting and developing Tanzanian art. Low local access to or interest in cultural sites, economic pressures to

commercialize and adapt to the needs of the international tourist market, and underpreservation of artifacts undermine the prosperity of traditional and contemporary art practices. It is a tragedy that a country, or a child, not feel who they are creatively.

The Precious Primary School has neither the resources nor the teaching experience to offer quality art instruction… yet. The enthusiasm for the classes I taught is, I hope, a driving force towards a more permanent solution.

In January 2020, I taught lower grade classes, working with children ages three through nine, and orphans living at the children’s home. I worked across a range of media and made use of whatever resources were available, in addition to those I packed with me. This approach allowed everyone to feel that creativity need not be confined to those who can afford expensive equipment.

Activities were designed to meet the diverse needs of all participants so that all could enjoy and engage with sophisticated art forms, no matter their previous experience or skill.

My aim is always to inspire a confidence in each individual’s creativity while at the same time helping them use their creativity to help another’s art-making. In this way, the student artist also becomes a facilitator of another’s creativity, promoting an ongoing cycle of shared art-making that is not reliant on a teacher’s presence.

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Teachers also have little familiarity using materials, so lessons guided them as much as students. When a teacher feels they are creative, most often that they can draw, this immediately impacts the children they work with. Children, as we know, are sensitive to what adults are thinking and feeling. It is therefore important that teachers are encouraged to explore their creativity for everyone’s mutual benefit.

What it means to be artistic often needs to be redefined to encourage the idea that everyone, given the opportunity, is creative.

Often, we hold preconceived ideas that prevent us discovering latent abilities.

Early mark-making through spontaneous drawing and painting was encouraged in the youngest grades and recognized for its potential in developing fine motor and pre-writing skills. The school struggles to help students overcome bad handwriting, which examiners will refuse to read in national exams. Illegibility results in immediate failure, which if in grade 7, bars entrance into secondary school. Legible handwriting is essential to ensuring a 12-year-old’s further education.

The enthusiasm displayed for art by the two hundred students I worked with was like watching a mesmerized infant, fascinated by his first marks on paper. Smudging with soft pastels, or pencil shavings, mixing watercolors, collaging with colorful paper, drip painting with acrylics, detailed pencil drawings, and spontaneous exploration across all media generated wonder and delight.

“I dance my paintbrush!” said one girl, open and unguarded in her affection for those she shares her painting experience with. And indeed she does, with the understated grace of a child’s flourishing creativity, a birthright that connects her to her country’s ancient traditions, and those around her today.

-MELISSA KNOWLES

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Melissa is a photographer, curator and arts educator, who has worked with MVC for the past three years.

EVERY CHILD HAS A RIGHT TO ARTISTIC EXPRESSION

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MVC A How-to guide on supporting gifted and talented girls, worldwide.

BY SALLY REIS

WHEN I AM ASKED about my research and explain that I study underachievement in girls and women, I am often greeted with a quizzical look. Why would you be concerned about smart girls and women in our country?

Aren’t women doing better than men in just about all areas? Hasn’t their progress been incredible in the last few decades?

And while progress has been steady, as always, the facts don’t tell the whole story as a huge gender gap favoring men continues in the top levels of accomplishment in every field and every country in the world. Everyone who cares about the future of our planet should be concerned about the future of all girls and women, and especially, the population that I study, academically advanced, talented girls and women across the world. We need to understand the various barriers that exist to their high achievement, and be ready to implement strategies to support this group to enable them to realize their dreams.

Some of the strategies my research has demonstrated as helpful in enabling high potential young girls to realize their talents, include the following: PHOTOGRAPHER: MELISSA KNOWLES

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1. Identify girls’ and young women’s specific strengths, abilities, and interests so that they understand they truly do have talents and can identify potential future areas in which they can excel for future college, graduate school, and careers.

2. Ensure that girls learn to feel comfortable about accepting praise when they achieve at high levels, as too many girls deflect both compliments and praise for achievements.

3. Encourage girls and young women to become involved in many different types of extracurricular activities and provide exposure to travel opportunities, clubs, and sports that challenge them and move them out of their current comfort zones.

Encourage and support participation in diverse extracurricular (leadership, athletic) activities as well as enriching experiences such as field trips, and other intellectual pursuits.

4. Encourage girls to take as many STEM courses as possible and praise and reinforce their successes in these and other areas to help to expand their options for their futures.

5. Help girls create a written plan for their future that includes their specific goals, identified interests, appropriate risks (such as going away to a competitive summer program or college), dreams and hopes, criteria for supportive friends and romantic relationships, and their specific higher educational goals and career goals.

6. Help girls understand, ameliorate, and challenge both the external and internal barriers that may impede their success, and suggest strategies they can use to identify and combat those barriers in their environments.

be very important to young women.

7. to Encourage relationships with other high achieving girls, and whenever possible, ask educators to group high achieving girls together in classes, in science and math clubs, in interest groups (robotics, journalism, creative writing), or other groups where these students can support each other.

8. Expose girls to the lives and successes of other talented girls and women through direct and curricular experiences; including online video opportunities, TED talks, lectures, field trips, seminars, role models, books, websites, videotapes, articles, and movies. (Personal Ted Talk favoritesformer U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, says women’s issues deserve a place at the center of foreign policy, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg discusses whey we have too few female leaders, citing various reasons why women are missing from the top roles of all professions around the world).

9. Suggest and introduce diverse and interesting career options, especially by introducing women who are successful in those careers.

10. Stress self-reliance, independence, decision-making, humor, safe risk-taking, and an inclination for creative action; Expose smart girls to competition whenever possible so that they are better prepared for competitive situations in academics and in work.

11. Express a positive attitude about talents in girls in all areas and provide an unequivocal source of support, avoiding criticism as much as possible.

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Too often, young girls and women continue to face gender inequality both at home and in school. When parents have lower aspirations for their daughters than for their sons, internal barriers develop, and girls and women may lower their own aspirations.

Providing more advanced educational opportunities for girls and women will absolutely result in additional choices for future careers. Additional education for all girls, particularly experiences that enable them to learn to be leaders, will result in better opportunities for employment, additional choices in life, and more of a chance to make a difference, something that I have been found PHOTOGRAPHER: MELISSA KNOWLES

Challenges persist in opportunities for and accomplishments of talented girls and women.

Progress has been made, but men still write more books, win more awards, and are elected to office more frequently. Men govern more countries and states, and hold more of the financial and entrepreneurial power in this and other countries. We have never had a female president in our country, we continue to have fewer women in leadership positions in the world, and women, while they have made progress, continue to lag behind in many indicators, especially in leadership positions.

Programs and services to help talented girls to develop their talents must be enhanced and parents and teachers have to work to create more opportunities and understanding of what smart girls will encounter as they mature and pursue their careers, lives, and dreams.

Recent research suggests many women leaders begin their path to leadership early, engaging in various educational and leadership-based activities as adolescents. In several cases of leadership in other countries, such as India and Africa, case studies demonstrate that having women leaders in communities can make a positive difference, driving policies and programs that improve family and community well-being.

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-SALLY REIS Sally is a professor of educational psychology at the UConn and a world renowned researcher on gifted education and women and girls.

PHOTOGRAPHER: ROBIN ROMANO

THE IMPORTANCE OF YOUTH VOICE YOUTH VOICE THE YOUTH COMMISSION IN MANCHESTER, CONNECTICUT was created in 2008, prompted by the town’s 2007 Youth and Family Master Plan.

I joined the Manchester Youth Commision in 2014. As a commissioner, I served as a youth representative for the Manchester Board of Directors, created, facilitated and attended community events, and helped fund community initiatives through our grant program. My work in the commission helped me realize that my passion was learning more about people and finding the resources to help them in whatever they may need. Whether it was funding a new ukulele program for a local elementary school to strengthen their music program or helping facilitate empowerment workshops for middle-school-aged girls, the commission helped me foster a lifelong love for community building.

Our advisor, Heather Wlochowsky, would often remind us of the importance of the work the commission produced. Despite all the effort she put in, she made us aware that we were the ones making the decisions.

As youth, we are often told what to do and how to do it. Heather valued our voices and empowered us to use them to strengthen our community.

These lessons and values followed me throughout my undergraduate experience as a student at the University of Connecticut.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF VALERIA POPOLIZIO

In 2017, I became a coordinator for Mentoring Educating and Transforming to Achieve Success, a peer mentoring program within the Puerto Rican/Latin American Cultural Center. Yet again, I was in a space where my voice was validated and empowered by others, especially our professional staff. By working directly with my community, I understand the needs of other students and of the cultural center. Since being in this position, I have focused my energy on empowering others and advocating for better resources. Whether it be creating educational events for our students, sharing our experiences to emphasize our need for better resources, or sending letters to administrators, I have always valued my community as a priority in my work and overall life. At its core, the work I did in high school as a commissioner never ended; it was the foundation for my path as a campus leader and activist.

The overall lessons and values of the Manchester Youth Commission - community building, diversity, empowering youth voice are the basis of creating lasting and systematic change. In the fight against child labor and gender equality, programs that involve children and minoritized groups in community decisions have proved to be effective in increasing the distribution of resources towards vulnerable groups. By empowering these groups during their youth, it will hopefully have an everlasting impact on individuals, the way I know that it has impacted my life.

-VALERIA POPOLIZIO

Valeria Popolizio is an intern at MVC and will be attending Georgetown University for graduate school.

VOLUME VOLU ME 2 2 ďťż// 21 21

MVC XL Fostering Awarenes

ENVISION A TYPICAL FIRST SEMESTER FRESHMAN on college move-in day. It is a tradition for families to say farewell by helping to move their child into their dormitory. As they flee the nest that has protected and supported them since birth, this moment serves as a milestone for many.

For some students, this milestone is absent from their reality.

It is easy to assume that every college student in the United States has experienced the typical home life in which their parent presses them to succeed. We are wired to believe that since a student has arrived at a higher institution, they must have been brought up in a supportive environment.

Research indicates that students are much more likely to graduate from high school if their parents are supportive of their studies and career choices. Yet, this is not the case for a host of students attending the University of Connecticut.

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This, in addition to my own experience, caused me to spring into action.

As a first-generation, independent and homeless student, the issues that I encounter are not typical for the average collegegoer. At an institution with over 32,000 students, I knew I couldn’t be the only one. I knew that if I wanted support, I had to share my story.

Familial violence dominated my life from the time I was seven years old up until college. It became my reality.

My mother taught me to never speak a word of what happened at home as it could attract interference from the Department of Children and Families (DCF).

Occasionally, when information slipped out, social workers from DCF were turned down by my indignant parental figure, which resulted in heightened, perpetual violence. At the age of sixteen, I fled the home and took to friends’ couches.

Transitioning to college was no easy feat. Without family, I struggled when filling my FAFSA, I lacked transportation during move-in, and I couldn’t relish in the same milestones in which my peers did. When my first college break approached, I watched my new friends shuffle into minivans for the holidays while I sought solace in my dorm room.

Instead of letting those roadblocks define me, I allowed them to spark inspiration within me: I was determined to find a support group.

Upon searching, I stumbled across Creating Caring Communities (CCC), a student organization built for students like me. CCC aims to build a community for students who have a background in the foster care system, identify as independent, experience familial estrangement, or face homelessness. The young organization was exactly one semester old when I discovered it. Compared to

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differences, which is why CCC has become our latest project.

In the near future, CCC hopes to attract a larger audience.

We need issues such as independent status, foster care, and homelessness to be recognized on campus.

MARIA KELLEY SPEAKING AT UCONN

other larger and more established organizations on campus, CCC was under supported and insignificant.

It had a clear goal yet deteriorated quicker than it began.

I decided to revitalize the organization with the help of a friend, Maria Kelley. A freshman and strong advocate for foster care, Maria was the final piece to the revitalization process.

She was raised in foster care and also has a story to share and was seeking the same system of support that I was.

Everything has fallen into place since we began collaborating. Although we have different experiences and backgrounds, we are both painfully aware of the challenges students like us face. Essentially, we share more similarities than

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BRIANNA CHANCE

The ever-changing face of the college student has metamorphosed as more diverse students invest in and work towards higher education. Retention efforts include providing the quality support and advocacy that our students need. Based on a review of multi-year studies, it has been noted that only 20% of foster youth attend college, with only 2-9% obtaining a bachelor’s degree (Wolanin, 2005). Additionally, homelessness affects 18% of students attending two-year colleges and 14% of those attending four-year institutions (Jones, 2018). Our goal is to support these minorities.

CCC is a new and blossoming resource for students in terms of academic support, social development, emotional guidance, and peer advocacy.

Most students do not know of our existence and some fail to recognize that these issues are even prevalent at the university level.

Thus far, CCC has taken initiatives to support its students in need. Recently, we have become invested in the topic of food insecurity

THE CCC SUPPLY CLOSET

as a result of homelessness. In less than one month, we have collected over 50lbs of food to distribute to students in need.

Donations are housed in an office where students can take what they need, we refer to this initiative as the “CCC Supply Closet.”

In addition to imperishable donations, our supply closet houses a variety of hygiene products for students who demonstrate financial need.

We hope this initiative grows in the following years.

Social action is sought in the presence of tribulation. We would not fight if we felt that our voices were already heard.

Fostering awareness begins with fostering connections, which is what Creating Caring Communities has begun to do at the University of Connecticut and will continue to do moving forward.

Brianna Chance is a sophomore at UConn piloting multiple initiatives on campus VOLU ME 2  / 2 3

MEDIA VOICES FOR CHILDREN 110 DAGGETT AVE VINEYARD HAVEN, MASS. 02569 MEDIAVOICESFORCHILDREN@GMAIL.COM 508 693 0752