Posted by Amber Chang, Hua Wei, Javier Acosta, and Michelle Lu
On May 19th, YAC attended the San Francisco City Youth Conference at Balboa High School. The conference was organized by students who wanted to share their voices to their peers about the social/political issues concerning our nation today. During the conference, I had the opportunity to present our teen dating violence presentation to a small group of peers who were very vocal about being informed of the issues that concern people of color. The first workshop that I attended was about remembering the healing properties that native peoples used. We were able to freely talk about our feelings and learn about how we can utilize the healing we learned in our everyday lives. The second workshop that I attended was about the history and making of silkscreen printing. I learned about the historical impact that silkscreen printing has had in social revolutions in the United States. I found this workshop extremely invigorating because it delved into how politics uses art to intersect and create a more powerful and impactful movement. The SFCYC conference was an invaluable experience in bringing together people of color to combat the big issues that plague the city today such as education and gentrification. – Amber Chang
I am a new member of the YAC. This weekend on May 19th, I got the opportunity to attend the San Francisco City Youth Conference to met with various groups of teens who fight to gain the equality they want. During the conference, I attended on the the That’s Not Love presentation about teen dating violence. I found this presentation very inspiring, since it is presented by the YAC group. This presentation gives me a direction on how to present issues and informations to raise awareness. That’s Not love is not the only inspiring presentation I saw, Another presentations that really stands out to me happened during the beginning of the conference. The presenter embraces her diverse identities and she described many of her difficulties because of her identities. She really inspire me to not give up easily when you are trying to fight for a right. Also her down to earth speech really pull me close to her, make me feel connected and willing to listen. I think her public speaking skill is really something that I looks up to and wanting to learn from. I think this trip to the conference really opened up my eyes to the various voice who are resisting against the unjust. Makes me feel motivated to attend more conference like this to connect and raise awareness against issues we see today. – Hua Wei
On May 19th, I attended the San Francisco City Youth Conference at Balboa High School with YAC. The whole point of this conference was to bring all the Bay Area youth together and talk about the social/political issues affecting a lot of the people we know. Even though I wasn’t able to attend the That’s Not Love presentation, I attended other 2 workshops. One of them was the Black and Brown United Against Police Murder, in this presentation I learned that there has always been a lot of police brutality in our community and not one single cop has been charged for their actions. The second presentation I went to was the Re-Membering Indigenous Roots, I was able to go to this presentation with some of the people in YAC and here we practiced community building and we learned that indigenous medicine can serve as a tool of resistance, we were also able to help put an altar together and we shared why we built our altar the way we did. The San Francisco City Youth Conference was a great experience that brought a lot of the youth from the Bay Area together to find ways to fight all the issues affecting our society. – Javier Acosta
Last weekend I attended the San Francisco City Youth Conference hosted by SOMCAN. For the first round of workshops, Amber and I presented to a small group of youth from around the Bay Area about issues regarding teen dating violence. Before going to the second round of workshops we all played a game of human bingo in which it involved us going to meet each person and introducing our self. After, I attended a workshop that focused on mindfulness and the idea of controlling our breathing patterns and mind to step away from reality that is constant moving. We were able to choose an item to build an alter collectively as a group and reflect about how the items made us feel. Lastly, I attended a workshop that taught us the history of silk screen printing specifically in politics and also how to make t-shirts of our own. To end off the day, we split into our break out groups and discussed the issues regarding education and solutions to how fix them. Everyone gathered back into the auditorium and we presented our posters to the audience, and overall SFCYC was a great experience where I was given the opportunity to meet youth leaders in the Bay Area and also educate others! – Michelle Lu