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I started every morning by leaving an hour before I needed to be at work. It would usually take me about 30 minutes to get there, but I loved being able to leisurely look for parking on the Sixth Avenue portion of Balboa Park. I would love the smell of morning dew on the grass as I walked to the office, sometimes having enough time to stop for a tea before arriving 15 minutes early to make a good impression on my mentor. Those days when I had enough time to treat myself were my favorite! I always loved walking 2 blocks down Fifth Avenue to the best cafe in town: Cafe Bassam. The decor and menu reminded me of the Parisian coffee shops that artists would spend late nights at in the 1920s. With what must be over 100 different teas, I had a great time smelling and choosing a different one every visit. This is my beautiful and passionate mentor, Gerrlyn. Each day, she would come in and greet me with a smile before we discussed today's agenda. She took me from being fairly clueless about the ACLU's Smart Justice Campaign, to being an expert! She taught me everything I know about how important the district attorney is when it comes to criminal justice reform. This already happened to be an issue I was particularly interested in, Gerrlyn showed me what to do about it. I really liked the space that I worked in. It was so cool seeing all of the posters for previous campaigns that the organizers had worked on. It made me see that I was truly in a place where justice was being fought for. I also really loved building relationships with my coworkers. They were all so funny and we had a lot of great laughs together. One of my biggest duties at the ACLU was following up with volunteers. I would spend a few hours every day making phone calls, leaving voicemails, and writing emails to make sure that as many people as possible were learning about and, more importantly, staying engaged with our campaign. While doing this, I spent a lot of time organizing my data on responses through several spreadsheets. I even came up with a few cool ways that we could see the urgency of follow up needs through conditional formatting. (Meaning I programmed it so that if text contains ___, the computer would automatically color code it, etc.) On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would help to organize volunteer nights for phone banking. We had about 3 locations on average, each with roughly 10 volunteers making calls. We also had a paid team of about 10 phone bankers, all previously incarcerated with stories that made the issue of mass incarceration, police accountability, and racial bias personal. This is a picture of one of the volunteers that I phone banked with. His name is Albert and he has an inspiring story about being unfairly sentenced to life in prison, but getting out after 17 years. He recently was accepted into UCSD and hopes to study law to help others who may be in a similar situation. Stories like his are what motivated me while working at the ACLU and made my experience so impactful. Having so many amazing people with amazing stories at the ACLU was really helpful when it came time to start working on my own outreach plan. In the background of the photo are my noted from a meeting with Maria Elena, Special Projects Assistant and overall amazing, strong, woman where I talked with her about her experiences as someone who had been previously incarcerated. I wanted to use all of the skills that Gerrlyn was teaching me and all of the insight that Maria Elena shared with me to create an organizing project that could bring the Smart Justice Campaign into schools or juvenile diversion programs. The goal was that I would in some way show my peers that their experiences with incarceration or mistreatment by police were not isolated incidents, but part of a greater web of injustice. In the picture is a book that was given to me by Gracie (one of my mentors!) to help me understand what it meant to take the lead in a project like this. I decided that I would take my skills from teaching Ethnic Studies and create an hour long workshop that I could take to different locations. My goal was to find juvenile diversion programs because I felt the issue would be most relevant to young people who were actually going through the justice system, but after reaching out to several organizations with no luck, I shifted my focus to classrooms in low income communities of color or community resource organizations. The first step to creating this workshop would be to learn everything I could about voting, mass incarceration, juvenile justice, and more. I found out that I actually knew a lot about the subject already from teaching about it in Ethnic Studies previously. Based on feedback from Maria Elena, Jhon, and Gerrlyn, I tried to include as many personal stories as possible. I wanted to create a space where people felt like they could talk about some of their more personal experiences with the justice system. I also tried to include interactive pieces like you see in this slide to the left. The organizers may use this as a format for other Smart Justice presentations in the future! My first presentations were at Lincoln High School for 3 different classes of seniors. I really loved coming in and meeting them all. I also enjoyed working with Mr. Merritt and Mr. Thurman. They are both truly inspiring teachers, Mr. Thurman and I especially connected because he is an Ethnic Studies teacher. I loved all of the amazing work he was doing and how much effort he put into fighting to make Ethnic Studies a requirement for high schools. The seniors themselves were, of course, goofy, but I could tell that many of them resonated with our fight. We shared stories and laughs and in the end I hope that my presentation was a call to action. I did another 3 presentations at MAAC Charter School later in my final week. I loved coming here because the school is very close to where I live and I felt like I could have a deeper connection with the students. These are issues happening in OUR community, not yours or mine, ours. The students were really rowdy here but I had an amazing time with them. It was really motivating to see how many of them would be voting by the end of my workshop! I also got to eat at this BOMB Cuban place for lunch across the street and spent time with students between periods in the independent study room. By the end of my internship, I felt like I learned what it really meant to be an organizer. I even found out that the word for organizer in Spanish includes my name in it. I will forever be an organIZADORA!!! |