United States August 13, 2010 12:00PM
Artivism
Sarah Bever
Education Program Manager, Action Center to End World Hunger
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Students who participated in the Mercy Corps Action Centre's summer Artivism project in New York City. Photo: Sarah Bever/Mercy Corps
T’Keyah stood on the edge of the small platform on the corner of 65th and Central Park West in the non-air conditioned basement of the Momentum Project, where she told the audience “I am from a place where I can get a $5 plate of arroz con pollo y habichuelas from Sandra’s on Broadway….a place where there’s nothing you can’t do out of New York...where the Empire State of Mind is the only state of mind!” And the audience laughed and cheered.
As soon as the students left the stage, they enthusiastically went to the food service line, put on their hair nets and diner caps and began serving food to the clients they had just performed for. This was not an ordinary performance. On Monday August 9, eight public high school students from Brooklyn performed their student-written play, "Stories from the Subway," for the clients of the Momentum Project who they have been working with over the past three weeks.
For the past three and a half weeks, these students have been part of the Mercy Corps Artivism summer programme. The programme is a partnership between Urban Assembly High School of Law and Justice, Momentum Project and Mercy Corps Action Centre. Students spent one day a week volunteering at the Momentum Project Food Pantry — serving and preparing lunch — one day learning about poverty and hunger globally and locally, and a third participating in theater and creative writing workshops.
At any time over the past month, you could find students bagging loaves of bread, serving lasagna, sorting through carrots, discussing the implications of poverty in New York City, talking with Global Citizen Corps Students in Iraq and writing manifestos from the point of view of people struggling with hunger. As the programme grew, so did the students' empathy for people struggling with hunger and enthusiasm for making a difference in their communities.
The programme began with a group of students who were apprehensive about what they got themselves into. It concluded with a group of students laughing and discussing how their perspectives on poverty had changed, the powerful experience of volunteering at Momentum, and planning for a future video conference with students from Iraq to share their theatrical production. When asked for three words to describe the programme students responded: Inspiring. Extraordinary. Life changing. This was a unique summer experience, even for New Yorkers.
