About once a month a group of teens from all over Jacksonville, Fl meet together to discuss social issues that affect them daily. This group has come to be called Jax Teen Alliance!!!

Once convened, the teens use their brain juice to solve issues in the community. The rest of Team Gaia and I are a part of this wonderful group as well as LOUD, One Jax, City Kids Arts Factory, PAL, and The Bridge to name a few.

Our purpose, as a whole, is to:
A) Build a sustainable, replicable coalition of youth
B) Be a catalyst for youth voice
C) Create a dialogue across differences
D) Create a space for youth to empower themselves
E) Create opportunities for youth to be heard by the entire community
F) Dialogue leading to action leading to change
G) Provide a viable future for tomorrow’s youth

Within this supergroup, we are divided into four groups or teams to work on a topic of our choosing. My group is tackling prejudice and stereotyping.

Our group decided that in order to fully bring awareness to the community we needed to have a booth at the annual World of Nations Celebration at Metro Park in Downtown Jacksonville this past May weekend. After months of anxiety stemming from trying to get people committed to the project searching for and gaining sponsors, and organizing some way to get people’s attention at the booth we finally came to the agreement that we would ALL work together as a team to make the booth a success.

We decided that a mural would be one way of getting our message across and we invited people to add their own thoughts to the panels we started. To make it a little more exciting we also filmed a documentary filled with interviews of people expressing their thoughts on the subject, “What do you see when you look at me?”

And through all the hard work, we came out really good. Better than I ever expected. We ended up having T-shirts, a documentary interview, and stamps for the visitor passports, as well as tons of fun! Check out the photos at www.teamgaia.com and see for yourself!




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