During the first week of ACE, students engaged in two workshops centered around this week’s focus, youth-led activism. In these workshops, students discussed what youth-leadership and activism meant to them and learned about the significant impact youth-led movements have made in our local community, the United States, and globally. Students then engaged in a Graphic Design 101 workshop, learning and developing their fundamental graphic design skills using Canva and Adobe Spark. These skill sets and tools were taught so that young people, as avid patrons of the internet and social media, were equipped to digitally protest and be activists online.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION & EXPECTATIONS - In “self-selected” project groups of 3-5, students will be required to:
1. Create a visual showcasing their learnings about youth-activism: the history, impact, why it’s important, and how they plan on being youth-activists themselves. This can be in a form of a video, multi-component Instagram post, multi-paged infographic, flyers/brochures, etc. The amount of components must reflect the number of students in your project group.
2. Share a song/movie/show and a paragraph explaining how it inspires them to rise up as youth leaders.
3. Write a thoughtful reflection and description of their culminating group project.

 The topic for the second week of ACE was understanding the oppressive systems in place in America. With a modified schedule of 4 days of learning, an independent mini-project, and a presentation day, you were able to have more time and space to reflect and discuss the heavy topics covered. As a group, we learned about the origins of policing in America, and its long history of brutality and violence, particularly towards Black and people of color. We then learned about the prison industrial complex, mass incarceration, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Independently, we watched the documentary “13th,” which depicts how the 13th Amendment created a loophole to enable and maintain modern day slavery. On the final day of workshops, we learned about the rights stripped from former inmates, and explored the harm caused by voter suppression. Throughout our workshops this week, we were collectively disappointed, angered, but awaken by the generations of systemic oppression America has put in place and maintained. We engaged in crucial and meaningful discussions, sharing our personal experiences with law enforcement, and respecting and supporting one another’s opinions and views towards the criminal justice system. However, as a collective, we all understand and agree that we must do better and push for change.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION + EXPECTATIONS - Individually, students will be required to:
1. Choose a word/concept from the vocabulary list provided by ACE to create a definition visualization. This visualization will be in the form of a muti-component (minimum)
2) Instagram post. 2. Create one “slide” with the word/concept and its paraphrased definition.
3. Find at least one image/video as your second “slide” that provides an accurate visualization of the word/concept being defined.
4. Write a description explaining why you chose that word/concept and the images to depict it.
5. Write a reflection about your experience learning about the topics covered this week.

After a week of workshops and discussions regarding America’s prolonged history of police violence, the prison industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, the 13th Amendment, and the loss of rights for former inmates, ACE Interns will be participating in a group project called “Justice: Reimagined.” Justice: Reimagined provides opportunities for young people to unpack their biases, uncondition themselves to believe that incarceration is the definition of justice, and to innovate a new justice system centered around the protection and healing of communities, particularly communities of color.

PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS - In project groups, students will:
1. Providing their own, student-written definition of justice. (All definitions will be cross-referenced on search engines to ensure that no plagiarism was committed.)
2. Think, reimagine, and innovate a new form of justice for their communities. This can be on a school, community, or systemic level - addressing the needs of their target community. (in Google Doc)
3. Answer the following questions (in Google Doc) : a) How can justice be more community-centered? b) How can justice be used to address the needs of individuals and communities, rather than punishing them? c) How can justice be achieved without perpetuating the school- to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, and prison industrial complex?
4. Create a proposal for the implementation of their new justice system. a) How is your justice system community-centered? b) How does your justice system address the needs of individuals and communities, rather than punishing them? c) How is justice within your system achieved without perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, and prison industrial complex? Your proposal can be in a form of a Google Slides Presentation or infographic using Canva or Adobe Spark.
5. Create a marketing toolkit to promote and spread the news of their new justice system. (in Canva or Adobe Spark)

This summer, ACE Interns engaged in a series of social justice workshops and group projects, holding space for one another to have critical conversations, as well as gaining a deeper understanding about systemic oppression and structural racism. Collectively, ACE Interns came to a consensus that the information learned and discussed are key to dismantling oppressive systems, and these conversations of empowerment must begin at a young age. As a result, for their final project, ACE Interns will collectively create social justice children’s books, designed to spark conversations about social justice, empower young people to rise up, and to amplify the voices of the misrepresented, underrepresented, and often-silenced.

To counter racism and racial bias, experts recommend naming and acknowledging race and racism with children as early and as often as possible. Children’s books are one of the most effective and practical tools for initiating these critical conversations, and can also be used to model what it means to resist and dismantle oppression. Children not only need to know what individual, institutional, and internalized racism looks like, they need to know what they can do about it. These student-created social justice children’s books will be printed and distributed to preschools and day care facilities in the Bayview District of San Francisco, one of, if not, the most socioeconomically challenged and marginalized neighborhoods of the city.

PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS - In project groups, students will:
1. Take their learnings from their summer in ACE and decide on a person, topic, or story they’d like to create a children’s book about.
2. Work collaboratively to reframe these complex stories and topics into children-friendly literature.
3. Create an impactful storyline to empower children to not only learn about racism and social justice, but to resist and dismantle systems of oppression.
4. Create compelling visuals/illustrations that accurately portray and represent the storyline for the young reader.