Creative Activism: AIUSA Youth Working for Human Rights

The 4th R, Creating a Human Rights Culture:
The Role of Service Learning, vol. 8 No. 1, Spring 1997.

Amnesty International USA has a proud history of youth activism and human rights education. Students have been innovative, bold, and generous _ in short _inspiring in their commitment to speak for those who have been gagged by governments in their own countries. Here are some highlights of young people in action through the past several years. Wherever students are involved _ writing letters in classrooms, interning at Amnesty offices or leading a human rights club on a high school or college campus _ they are developing new skills and fine-tuning old ones.

Law students in Davis, California ran an "Amnesty-o-matic" for several years. It was an honor system letter-writing station not unlike an automated teller machine. Amnesty's Urgent Action casesheets were available in quantity as were stationery, envelopes, airgrammes, postards, and postage stamps. The device was decorated with informative news clippings and had a mail slot for completed letters. Activist students serviced the Amnesty-o-matic daily.
Students at a high school in the Midwest arranged a weekend "lock-in" one Saturday night each year with plenty of pizza, pop, and letter-writing; hundreds of students attended and dozens of new students were attracted to the campus AI chapter. In Colorado, a cluster of a dozen high school chapters put on a spring "Jamnesty" with half a dozen bands, each of which gave a pro-human-rights rap before performing. Almost a thousand students attended and signed petitions on behalf of prisoners of conscience.
A number of scout troops and Campfire Girls in the Northeast have created human rights badges for which youngsters write letters, create posters, watch and discuss human rights videos, and study about human rights problems around the world. In some elementary and middle schools, the BIG Letter is the human rights advocacy vehicle of choice. A few times a year students make a splash by co-writing an appeal for a victim on 3' x 4' butcher paper and mailing it to a public official in a very large envelope.
In a school in the Boston area a few years after the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, activist students put together a huge Democracy Wall in the school cafeteria. Fellow students were invited to attach poems, essays, drawings, and collages celebrating what democracy means to them. Later that year the wall was reassembled at AIUSA's Annual General Meeting in Boston to the delight of attendees.
Students from high schools and colleges intern at all the AIUSA offices and are an invaluable asset. Many undertake very specific projects that they carefully devise with regional or program staff and carry out with the cooperation of members of their campus groups, local community activists or members of specialized task forces and steering committees. Students play a major role in running AIUSA regional meetings and the national Annual General Meetings from the planning stages through the intense three day programs to the massive "break-down and clean-up" stage.
A young member of a synagogue in California created a human rights activity for Passover which included six stations that members of the congregation visited, each dealing with a basic human right: canned food donations to address the right to life, donation of books to be sent to flood victims, clothing donations, letter writing and petition signing on behalf of prisoners of conscience.
In Boston, a local TV station devoted part of its morning children's show, Ready To Go, to activism on behalf of a teen-aged girl in Eastern Europe who was removed from school and jailed because she protested losing the right to take classes in her native language. Several students were selected to accompany the TV crew to the Yugoslav Embassy to hand-deliver hundreds of student letters written on the teen's behalf. The whole trip was televised, spreading the good news of student engagement and activism on behalf of human rights throughout the Boston metro area.
At Stanford University and at a midwest high school, students taught for-credit human rights courses complete with lectures, discussion, research papers, video watching, and letter-writing. And the students who taught earned credit themselves.
A middle school class in Minnesota wrote and put on a human rights drama for the whole school and sent copies of the script to the Urgent Action Office to be distributed to teachers who might want their students to produce the play.

It's impossible to describe all the inventive and effective ideas that Amnesty student activists have come up with, both in the classroom and in campus groups! Here is just a list of some more of the lively endeavors that have worked and enriched students and their schools, as well as the larger community, which is our needy world: banner contests, kissing booths, bike-a-thons and road races for human rights, a competitive softball team, school dances, lunchtime tabling, "teach-in's," and face-painting to raise postage.