The WE Club empowers and inspires girls within the Marymount community to take action and change the world through channeling a passion to create awareness for a specific global issue. We are very excited to report we finished our first campaign “We Scare Hunger,” by collecting 130 cans of nonperishable food for St. Margaret’s Center. Our club will start our attack on our next campaigns “WE are Aware” and “WE Bake For Change”.

On November 19th 2016, four of our fellow Sailors attended the WE Youth Summit. The summit took place at Lakewood High School, and was arranged in an effort to bring students from different areas of Southern California together to discuss the current issues pertaining to poverty and privilege.

The day opened with a series of keynote speakers. The first speaker talked about the history of the WE movement. The WE movement was founded with the ultimate goal of creating social justice throughout the world. Brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger, two of the most inspirational speakers, described how they were profoundly moved by the life story of Iqbal Masih, a twelve-year-old Pakistani boy who was sold into child labor at the age of four due to his family inability to provide for him.

They described how Iqbal was forced to weave carpets in an inhumane and hostile environment. Underfed and maltreated, he was expected to work tireless hours in exchange for an appalling salary. Iqbal was later freed at the age of ten by a local organization that promoted the end of child labor. Instead of being ashamed of his past, Iqbal spoke out in hope that all children sold into child labor would be freed. He travelled from town to town spreading awareness of this cruel practice. One day, while Iqbal was enjoying his newfound freedom and finally enjoying his childhood with a group of friends, a car approached and he was shot and killed. The alleged criminal was Iqbal’s previous owner, and his crime was believed to have been an attempt to silence Iqbal’s movement. Despite this tragedy, Iqbal proved that age does not hinder you from achieving greatness and impacting the world.

This idea paved the way for the WE movement. WE educates students on making a change within the world by utilizing the following formula: passion + issue = change. They inform youth about injustices in the world, but leave it to their audience to determine their own method as to how to best combat the issue. The WE Club speakers that followed spoke openly about their experiences with injustice to inform and inspire the students to take action against the presented issues.

After listening to the speakers, each student was assigned a small group based on their age, and the students sectioned off into different rooms. Each student received a biography of someone living under different circumstances, and was asked to imagine this person’s house, family, socioeconomic status, etc. We were then asked to take a step forward or backward based on the circumstances found in the biographies (for example, if the person in your biography had access to clean water, you would be asked to step forward, and if they did not, you were asked to step back). At the end, it became clear that those who had access to clean food and water, education, healthcare and legal citizenship had a distinct advantage over those who did not. We also noticed that while many of us were representing people who had access to these necessities, there were other factors, such as sexual orientation, gender, or race, that may lead to more “invisible” disadvantages. After the exercise, we reflected on our experience, and spoke about ways to educate others about issues regarding privilege and unfair advantages.

Following our first small group discussion, we went to lunch, spoke with students from different schools about their life experiences, and shared many of our experiences from Marymount as well.

After lunch, all four of the Marymount girls attended a disability workshop, where we discussed the differences between physical disabilities, intellectual disabilities, learning disabilities, and chronic mental illnesses. We spoke about ways to approach those who suffer from these conditions and the difficulties and disadvantages that they face.

As our final activity, we received a worksheet that was based around the concept that “passion + issue = change”. We were asked to list our individual talents and world issues that interested us. We were then asked to pair one of our talents with an issue to create an action plan. Here are the action plans that we came up with:

“I put the formula into action and decided to use my passion for film editing to make a short film to create awareness about the outrage that big companies pollute peaceful communities threatening the health of the locals.” (Jenna Soong ‘19)

“I combined my passion for dance and my experience with mental illness/disability to choreograph a dance portraying the difficulties faced by those who are affected by various mental illnesses.” (Dani Glenn ‘18)  

Overall, the Youth Summit was a very informative, eye-opening experience for all four of us, and we hope to continue to spread what we’ve learned through our daily interactions and WE Club Meetings at Marymount.