On Saturday, high school students across Los Angeles led social justice workshops at Mann UCLA Community School in South Los Angeles. Its Second Annual Youth Participatory Action Research Conference, titled “Building Black and Brown Futures,” was created to allow youth to develop solutions to systemic issues faced by communities of color.
Organizations such as the UCI History Project, UCLA Center for Community Schooling, the California Mathematics Project, and the Community Coalition sponsored the event. Students from Mann UCLA Community School, Theodore Roosevelt High School, and Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez High School worked with teachers to create interactive presentations highlighting injustices such as pollution, violence, and gentrification.
Before the workshops, keynote speaker Dr. David C. Turner III shared words of inspiration with the students and teachers in attendance. A UCLA Mann alumni and Assistant Professor of Black Life and Racial Justice in UCLA’s Department of Social Welfare, Turner said he grew up in poverty in the neighborhood surrounding his high school but was able to envision a different future for himself because his teachers led him to that kind of thinking.
“The only way I can stand here before you, a scholar, as the son of both a cancer patient and a felon, is because someone had the audacity to establish the school and imagine the unimaginable,” Turner said. “We need to work on building Black and brown futures together, and it starts today.”
After the speech, students headed to different classrooms where groups presented their workshops to participants. Some included an interactive activity about creatively reusing plastic as planters, a presentation on the challenges of student involvement at Mann UCLA Community School, a display about air pollution on Eastside, a presentation about street safety issues in South L.A., and more.
Ismerai Calcaneo, a Roosevelt Math Science and Technology Magnet student, led the plastic bottle planter activity. Their research included informally surveying the neighborhood to determine how many residents were using the blue recycle bins.
“Our research question was ‘how many people are using the [public] resources in our community,’” Calcaneo said. She went around Boyle Heights and counted the number of blue bins she saw placed outside during trash pickup days, and her findings showed that not many people were recycling.
Another group of Roosevelt MSTMA students created a poster board display, making the case for Eastside residents to invest in solar power. Student Moi Martinez said the group decided to research solar power because they viewed it as a viable alternative to other energy sources. Martinez was also concerned about a “lot of pollution” in the area generated by refineries, factories, and other sources on the Eastside.
The group was interested to learn if their neighbors knew of incentive programs that help low-income communities get affordable access to solar panels. Students did this by going around their neighborhood and passing out flyers with a link to an online survey. Student Kaydee Alfaro said her group wanted to find out how to better their community by finding out what was lacking. However, it was challenging to get accurate results because some residents incorrectly filled out the survey.
Despite this obstacle, Alfaro’s group partner, Betsy Uribe, enjoyed learning about access to solar panels. “I found it interesting that we do have a lot of incentive programs that I didn’t know about,” Uribe said.
Martinez felt it was important to participate in this kind of research because, as a Boyle Heights native, he believes residents must participate in the change they want to see in their community.
“I want to make certain parts of my community better,” Martinez said. “It’s where I grew up, it has so much power and love in it and needs to change for the better.”
