GROW Windham took part in two important workshops recently. On February 24th, the Windham Youth CORE joined us for another workshop at Wesleyan University about Growing Power. On Tuesday, February 27th, The Windham Youth Advocacy Collective came together for a workshop about Community Mapping.
A couple of different workshop sessions being held at Wesleyan revolved around how to build a proper movement, and the Community Mapping workshop was about mapping out how many organizations are available in Windham to help youth. There were a lot of different barriers that were discussed when talking about how to create positive change.
At one workshop, the host said, “If you’re gonna change the system, you cannot maintain the status quo.” This is a statement that a lot of activists agree with because the status quo is why our system seems to be in such disarray in the first place, so it makes sense to want to change it.
At the other workshop, one problem that we discussed was that a lot of youth in our community don’t have access to adequate transportation in order to get to events around town. There were a lot of different ideas being discussed on how to change this, but the overall theme remained the same: That we have to change the status quo if we want to truly make things better.
This was particularly attention-grabbing because these were two completely different workshops, and these were points brought up by completely different people, and yet because our values align with each other, we essentially ended up talking about the same thing. How do you think we could best change the status quo in order to bring about positive change to our system?
