My relationship with community service is an interesting one. If you read my first blog post you might come away with the idea that I value large social change over small acts of service to the point where I might not even be able to see the benefit of something like community service. And at one point or another in my life, that may have even been the way I thought. However, over the course of my educational career, I have grown to see the extreme value of service learning both in and outside of the educational pretext. I have learned that volunteering and community service keeps me grounded and, however much I value social justice advocacy on a systemic level, I have to have those values grounded in something. Serving the community at the ground level can provide a motivation for anyone to continue that trajectory of community serving. In an educational environment, service learning and community service becomes almost necessary to foster a well-rounded individual. Service learn...
Something that I’ve noticed about youth climate activism is that youth activists are constantly compared to older generations. However, it’s about how they are compared that really intrigues (and annoys) me. Younger generations of activists are, generally, not presented as following in the footsteps of older activists, nor are they shown to be working with older activists at all. Most of the time, I see these young people presented as our “last hope,” completely separate from older generations. Xiye Bastida sums it up well in “Calling In” when she says that “many people are now giving all the credit to young people when looking for key players in the climate movement. But as youth, we know that we didn’t start the movement at all.” The journal Nature does this exact thing when an article from 2019 says that “because young climate protestors don’t represent someone else’s agenda, their message is strikingly direct and unvarnished.” The article then goes on to talk, in part, about...