The focus for this week was collaboration and understanding intentions.
We started the week with a meeting of NC FIELD’s Poder Juvenil Campesino (PJC) group where Chris, founder & CEO of Kinston Teens, presented to the group. Poder Juvenil Campesino stands for “Farmworker Youth Power,” and is partnering with Kinston Teens for the Civic Spring Project. Chris is considered a hometown hero so the PJC group found it fun to have him and learn more about Kinston Teens and the relationship between our groups.. Everyone enjoyed his presentation, and it was a great way to expound on what we discussed at our first joint meeting.
We later had our second joint meeting of Kinston Teens and NC FIELD’s PJC. During this meeting, we introduced our youth to the project scope and objectives as a way to get the ball rolling with our project. Chris presented to our combined youth group our intentions that we are striving to equip them with the proper tools to be effective and conscious. Our monthly youth group meetings will continue to serve as working sessions focused around this project with civic education and organizing training, combined with our programming and events throughout the month.
Collaboration between our organizations demonstrated that there is strength in numbers. This is the first time our organizations will collaborate at this level so we are super excited to do so in a major way. Moreover, by introducing the intentions of the project we were able to teach our youth that meaningful change begins with themselves individually and that they should never underestimate the potential of their impact.
COVID has certainly remained our biggest obstacle in terms of being able to gather, however we are exploring socially distant in person options as we did earlier in the month. We find our impact is greater when connecting in person. Additionally, our organizations operate in a particularly rural and impoverished part of North Carolina. Because of this, a lot of our youth don’t have access to adequate technology or reliable internet. This is another reason why we are exploring socially distant in-person meeting options so that we can support and encourage our youth to participate