Allies

The Climate and Culture Committee, the Gay Straight Alliance, the Olympia School District Diversity Committee, the Institute for Community Leadership, Village to Village.

Action Highlights

STAND coordinates with student government to organize every year the school’s assembly in honor of Marting Luther King Jr. We have also sponsored discussions focused on the experience of students of color, the experience of LGBT students, and on Olympia’s diverse faith communities and their different interpretation of social justice. After an African American family's house was vandalized with swastikas, STAND members wrote a letter to the family to express their support. The father of the family was so touched by the students reaching out, that he said it brought tears to his eyes. STAND participates and helps organize workshops and retreats of Village to Village, the non profit group focused on getting students from different high schools and cultures to interact with each other. We have sponsored several events in which students play leadership roles, including a race relations conference at the Squaxin Tribe Reservation, a community wide MLK celebration, and a day-long event focused on immigrants. The group has also traveled to Seattle for a day of focus on the African American experience. STAND members have continued to participate in workshops at the Institute for Community Leadership, where many students have ended up later working during the summer or after high school.

Challenges

Our main challenge is maintaining strong leadership. Over the past two years, we have graduated perhaps our best leaders ever. With a new group of students every year, we are starting all over again Every STAND event has not been met with open arms. Sometimes our student body reacts negatively to speakers or topics.

Lessons

Students have some of the most powerful stories and perspectives on diversity, race, and sexual orientation, and teachers and adults should be encouraged to listen to them. We also encourage students to read the newspaper and keep an eye on the community for emerging issues and opportunities to get involved. In the last eight years, five of our students have won Seattle’s Diversity Makes a Difference Award sponsored by the Northwest Asian Weekly, Microsoft, and other local businesses. In 2008, student Malcolm Moore was awarded the honor for his work on a chilling video about his grandfather's lynching in Georgia, which he showed to our students at the MLK assembly. In recent years, two STAND students have also the Princeton Prize in Race Relations [http://www.princeton.edu/pprize/], which recognizes high school students whose efforts have had a significant, positive effort on race relations in their schools or communities.