CA: In January and February, the Westboro Baptist Church [1], a hate group from Topeka, Kansas, targeted schools, religious institutions and other organizations across California.

We'd like to share a few of the creative, peaceful ways students and community members are responding to Westboro's message of hate, and open our comments section up to spread the word about any other unity activities taking place across the state.

• Yesterday, one NIOT member posted on the NIOT Facebook [2] page about Phelps-A-thon.com [3], a pro-civil rights group that channels anger against Westboro Baptist Church into donations that support groups affected by WBC's hateful message. This week, for every minute the Phelps clan is protesting, Phelps-A-Thon will collect donations to benefit GSA’s and equality groups at the targeted high schools and Hillel.

• Students from Lowell High School [4] and Gunn High School [5] have created Facebook pages with about 700-1500 fans each, to generate dialogue about acceptance and respect on campus.  * The Not In Our Town Crew went to both Lowell and Gunn High School to document the community response. Check out these videos that spotlight the creative responses by students at Gunn High (Palto Alto) and Lowell High School (San Francisco).

• In celebration of creative community response, we decided to spark the conversation with a flash back to the past, and put a special spotlight on Newark, California's "Angel Action."  (Short video excerpted from our longer documentary "When Hate Happens Here: Not in Our Town Northern California [6].”)
  

If you have video or photos of creative actions, feel free to get in touch with us [7] so we can share this with the larger public as well.