- By Rifat, MAP Youth & Communication Specialist
Last Friday MAP teens were invited to create a workshop for Today’s Leaders: A Virtual Civic Engagement Conference, hosted by Erie County 4-H. The goal of the workshop was, ‘Ensuring the Visibility of Youth for a Better Tomorrow’. There were many workshops, provided by youth from all over Western New York, including, ‘Building Diverse Friendships’, ‘Applying Leadership Mindset to our Community 2020’, ‘How COVID Affects Parent and Youth Relationships’, and many more.
Neena, MAP’s Youth Education Director, and MAP Youth May, Sara, Alize and I decided to take the opportunity to deliver a workshop to help make our community stronger. This was difficult at first, as this was our first time creating a workshop, but Neena guided us very well through our fears and we decided the topic of the workshop would be “How to advocate for yourself”. Coincidently, I wrote an article a few weeks ago on self advocacy (if you missed it feel free to check it out here).
We came up with an idea to play Kahoot, a game-based learning platform that makes it easy to create, share and play learning games or trivia quizzes in minutes. We came up with scenarios and asked the audience what they would do, for example, if your teacher said your name wrong what would you do? Would you politely correct her, pronounce her name wrong, or do something else?
It was interesting to see how people had different opinions, the fun part is when we were steering the audience through self advocacy and realized what it means to have control of your audience. As the game went smoothly we gave out 5 steps to being an advocate by asking questions about the issue you stand up for. These included; Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing? Who has paved the way for you? How did the issue become a problem in the first place? What is the scope of your issue and what do you hope to achieve? These questions made our audience think for a while\ and we gave them time to do so. These 5 steps helped each individual in locking down their motives, establishing role models, understanding their historical context, focusing their issue, and paving the way forward. At the end of the day, even when some of us were scared first, the workshop was a success and we had great feedback from our audience. It is a fact that MAP teens helped others to advocate for the issues they believe in and we couldn't be happier.
To get full access to 5 steps of being an advocate, our workshop, visit the link below:
https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:d71a4176-8c5c-4268-abf6-85c4f4ed8770
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