This is the first of a series of spotlights on our summer 2016 student volunteers. Learning Life’s student volunteers this summer are translating documents, conducting research and doing outreach locally and internationally for our new Citizen Diplomacy Initiative established this year. CDI will connect American families in Washington D.C. with families in other parts of the world through live online video-dialogue starting this summer. As a Ph.D. student in sociology, Britany is helping with CDI research and outreach.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in New York but I was raised in Michigan in the metro Detroit area.
What school do you attend, and what is your year and major there?
I currently attend Howard University in Washington, DC. I am a second year doctoral student in the Department of Sociology.
What do you like to do in your free time?
In my free time, I like to travel (internationally and domestically), cook, read, and attend different cultural events or festivals.
What is the most beautiful place you have seen on Earth, and why is it so beautiful?
There are two places where I have been which I think are the most beautiful, Dubai, UAE and the state of Bahia, Brazil. They are two very different cultures and climates therefore they are beautiful in different ways. In Dubai, many of the buildings are new or decorated in a lot of gold accents. The Grand Mosque was breathtaking. It was made with marble, pearls, and gold with giant chandeliers encrusted with jewels.
In Brazil, I traveled to the state of Bahia, located on the country’s northeastern coast. There is a rich Afro-Brazilian culture in Bahia. They have many buildings that have been there since the Portuguese colonial era and some African traditions are still alive from that time of slavery. Bahian residents are proud of their heritage, and their passion made me fall in love with their culture.
Is there a particular life experience you have had that has shaped you as a person? If so, what was it, and how has it shaped who you are?
There have been many experiences that have shaped me as a person. The one experience that confirmed the path that I am on was a specific experience in Brazil. I was mistaken for an Afro-Brazilian while I was there because I did not look like a stereotypical Black American. Due to racism and discrimination against Black Brazilian citizens, I was looked at and treated differently at times. At one point, one white Brazilian shook everyone’s hand in the group except for mine. Everyone else in our group was white American. My host family told that person I was American too, and then their expression changed from dislike to welcoming and friendly. It was experiences like these that verified that I want to dedicate my life to eliminating social inequalities.
Why did you choose to volunteer with Learning Life?
I chose Learning Life because of the Citizen Diplomacy Initiative’s (CDI) goal. It gives lower-income people a chance to connect with others in different countries when they may not otherwise have the opportunity. In a global society, international connections are becoming increasingly important, therefore programs like CDI help to bring people together from other countries.
What are your career plans?
My career plan is to become a professor at a four-year university after I graduate. I would like to teach classes related to social inequality such as race, gender or class. I want to help bridge the gap between academia and community and continue to be a scholar-activist.
A F.A.C.T. Approach to Citizen Diplomacy
The Problems:
Worldwide, families are looking for ways to make a living. But often, this means working for employers, foreign or domestic, who dictate harsh terms of employment (i.e., where, when and how you will work and for how much pay) and care more about profits than their employees and the families and communities their workers support.
Further, globalization is enriching a relative few who make and shape international relations through businesses, governments or nonprofit organizations they own or direct. In the globalization process, people and their communities are, for better or worse, becoming more like each other as millions of individuals across the world become the employees and consumers of major transnational companies like Walmart, Apple, Toyota, ExxonMobil and McDonalds. Transnational companies are not going away, but people and their communities do not have to, nor should they, lose what makes them unique.
What if there were ways for people to provide for themselves, nurture local ownership, and build the unique assets of their families and communities?
The F.A.C.T. Nexus:
People can and do often pursue food, art, community and tourism (FACT) separately. However, they can form a complementary nexus for people to provide for themselves, nurture local ownership, and build family and community assets.
Food
Everyone needs to eat every day, and many if not most people enjoy eating. Moreover, growing, processing and serving food constitute major sources of jobs in communities worldwide. In many places, food sector workers work for chain restaurants controlled by large domestic or transnational companies. But they could, alternatively or in tandem, work for themselves, offering residents and visitors a unique taste of their family, region and country’s culinary traditions at home, in restaurants, or community spaces and events.
Art
Art in all its forms — paintings, photography, video, dance, music, jewelry, makeup, clothes, etc. — is a way to nurture creativity, expression and dialogue, and a way to make homes and communities more meaningful and attractive. Art can also be displayed and sold to residents and visitors to help families earn a living and nurture community economies.
Community
Every community has stories about its past, present and future. These local stories often connect with national and international stories that can make local stories interesting to residents and visitors alike. Examples include a local person who became famous, a product made locally yet widely known, the local imprints of a national or international war, remarkable local events that connect with universal human experiences. Families and communities can record and tell these stories in unique, engaging ways, using manifold media — photos, audio, video, painting, music, dance, etc. — to create temporary and permanent community exhibits and events that can attract local to global viewers.
Tourism
Tourism can be top-down or bottom-up. In many places tourism is top-down: controlled to varying extents by large foreign or domestic hotel and entertainment chains that create profitable, packaged experiences. Perhaps the most problematic are deluxe resorts that fly vacationers in and out of their all-inclusive enclaves, with no need for their clients to experience let alone connect with the (often poor) communities that surround and serve the resort.
However, tourism can be and sometimes is bottom-up or grassroots: owned by local businesses, employing local people, and devoted to building the assets of their people (e.g., experiences, knowledge, skills, products) and communities (e.g., art exhibits, museums, memorials, murals, monuments, gardens, parks, farms, restaurants, cafes, markets).
A F.A.C.T. Approach:
Organizations devoted to international exchange can help nurture children, families and communities in developing countries through food, arts, community and tourism projects. Working long-term with individuals, families or local groups in the developing world, they can provide training and other resources to turn localities’ food, arts, community and/or tourism into income. They can also connect those localities to audiences eager to learn from them. Further, they can create collaborative, cross-national FACT events and products, like comparative photo or video displays that can add an eye-catching international component to local art or community exhibits and installations. Simpler projects can lead to more ambitious for-profit and non-profit international collaborations for mutual benefit.
The FACT approach is not the big-donor project that withers or dies when the funding dries up or moves on, and that can thus accentuate the chasm between rich and poor communities. This is grassroots development that strengthens communities, if its collaborators commit long-term.
Inequality is a major issue worldwide because it adversely affects the lives (health, longevity, safety, education, work, etc.) of millions of people who were unlucky enough to be born into families, communities and/or nations with few resources. Inequality is usually measured in terms of income (what a person or household earns in a given period of time, usually a year) or wealth (the value of the things a person or household owns).
Wealth is more unequally distributed than income, but both income and wealth inequality have risen due to various social forces, including the global expansion of trade and markets, rising pay for top executives and people with higher education, and the “mechanization” or the replacement of people with machines in many industries. The following five facts give a brief sense of the enormity of the inequalities worldwide.
Thanks to Learning Life intern Maria Luevano for helping to research and draft these five facts.
1) The percentage of the world’s people deemed poor (i.e., living on $2 or less per day) has dropped by nearly half in a decade, from 29% in 2001 to 15% in 2011.
5) About 71% of the world’s population has less than $10,000 in wealth, 21% has between $10,000 and $100,000, 7.4% have $100,000 to $1 million, and 0.7% have more than $1 million.
This year Learning Life has been quietly working on our Citizen Diplomacy Initiative (CDI). Since 2013, Learning Life worked on creative projects printing information of public value on everyday surfaces, like napkins, coasters and even fortune cookie slips (you can learn more about these early projects here). Starting in January of this year though, we have shifted our focus to CDI, which aims to advance international peace and youth and family development by nurturing live internet dialogue and project collaborations between families in different countries.
We will have more to tell about CDI as it develops, but for now you may have noticed that our latest Learning Life website educational content — our quizzes and five facts in particular — have accordingly taken a decidedly international turn. For this post, we want to share with you links to all of our international facts and quizzes. Feel free to favorite this post as we will update it as our able volunteers produce more interesting and timely international content.
What do you like to do in your free time?