Random stuff

Join STAND's Education Team!

nmcmurry — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:30:17 -0500

Interested in getting involved with STAND on the national level? Want to help empower STAND students all over the country to become better anti-genocide activists through education? STAND's EduTeam is currently looking for Conflict Education Coordinators (CECs) for Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). CECs serve as STAND's resident conflict experts and help keep STAND's leadership and membership informed and updated about the conflicts we address.

Click here to read the full job description and apply! Questions? Contact Nina McMurry at education@standnow.org.

Unstinting Resolve: The New President and Darfur

brome — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:48:30 -0500

There has been much talk on the campaign trail of hope and change, rhetoric which is largely responsible for the victory of President-elect Barack Obama. Across the nation and world, there is unprecedented excitement about the new administration and its potential to change.

As the Obama administration makes its transition to the White House, every constituency has high expectations for change in their specific areas of concern; the people of Darfur and the anti-genocide movement are no exception. As I listen to Omer Ismail, the ENOUGH Project advisor for Sudan, at STAND’s National Student Conference, I sense his frustration and urgency. For the past five years, the people of Darfur have received empty promises of change.
Millions of dollars have been poured into Darfur each year in the form of humanitarian aid since the conflict began; a solution which seems focused not so much on resolving the atrocities in Darfur as on appeasing the conscience of the international community.

It is appalling that after a century of genocide in Armenia, Germany, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda, Washington is stands baffled as a deer in the headlights when confronted with genocide. Humanitarian aid has become an increasingly expensive and ineffective band-aid on almost every humanitarian crisis the United States has dealt with in recent years.

Real change lies in assembling twenty-four helicopters and an effective peacekeeping force. Real change lies in the indictment of Omar Al-Bashir. Real change lies in true diplomacy with China.

If the Obama administration wants to make good on its campaign promises of hope and change, it will have to engage in the creation of a comprehensive plan for confronting genocide, now and in the future. In the coming year, the new administration will need to confront a host of status quos in need of hope and change. There is a need for new direction in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in the way our economy is run.

It is up to the anti-genocide constituency, on behalf of the victims of genocide in Sudan to remind the new President that Darfur is in need of hope and change as well.

Finding Our Way as a Movement

sredding — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:17:09 -0400

The first time I heard Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, speak, she told a personal story that’s remained extremely meaningful for me in considering how to approach my role as an activist. The story had to do with the pitfalls in her relationship with the atrocities that she works to portray; she recounted how, working in Bosnia during the war, she was able to begin to make a name for herself as a journalist. She eventually realized, however, that she was beginning to want to see her stories on the front page more than she wanted to stop the events that she was chronicling, and it was at this point, she told the audience, that she knew she had to quit.

Many of us have probably gone through similar iterations of this what could be called the “activist existentialist crisis”- questioning our motives, questioning our effectiveness, questioning why we think we can advocate for areas of the world that most of us have never even been to.

This kind of thinking can be paralyzing if we let it be, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to dwell on it a little. We often talk about how far STAND as a movement has come, and it’s true- we’ve gone from a smattering of small, independent student groups to a national network coordinating campaigns, building its members’ skill set, and engaging with US policy. We can tell that we’ve progressed because many of us now possess suits, Blackberries, and caffeine addictions, and many of our members can throw around acronyms (FPLA, R2P, ICC…) with the best of ‘em.

Obviously, I’m being a little facetious here- this is not what STAND is about. But the question remains nonetheless, what IS STAND about? Soul-searching as a movement, like as an individual, can be a painful process, but I believe that it’s just as necessary.

I love talking to chapters and hearing about all the important work that they’re doing, but I know that I didn’t get involved with STAND to hold a position called “Great Lakes Regional Outreach Coordinator.” Instead, I remember hearing a speaker from Rwanda who had come to my middle school and being horrified that the events he described had occurred during my lifetime. I remember how upsetting learning about the Holocaust for the first time was in elementary school, and I remember beginning to read newspapers at the same time that they were filled with stories about victims in Kosovo.

I think that many of us have a shared experience in this respect- having lived out our childhoods largely unaware that such terrible things could happen on such a large scale, we became cognizant of the larger world community at the same time that this community was abandoning victims in Rwanda and Bosnia, and we thus became aware at a very young age that this was not the world we wanted to live in.

For me, this is at its core what STAND is about- knowing that this is not the world that we want to live in and truly believing, independent of any particular political philosophy, that it can be otherwise. We’ve begun to articulate a much more concrete version of what it is that we would like the world to look like and to learn the skills necessary to make it so, but I think that staying attuned to the purpose of STAND and staying energized in our work has a lot to do with taking the skills and the nuances that we’ve learned and reconnecting them with the pure, uncomplicated passion that we felt about these issues when we decided to act on them in the first place. That we formed as a movement because a number of small, disconnected groups realized that they had this same passion and were working for the same goals is extremely powerful- we are truly a grassroots movement founded on the shared energy and motivation of people committed to building a better world. I believe that as we expand, improve, regroup, reorganize, grow up, get fed up, and sometimes, yes, become temporarily cynical, STAND, fundamentally, is still about this kind of energy.

-Rebecca Burns, Great Lakes College Regional Outreach Coordinator

Moving Past Generation Q

sredding — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:12:07 -0400

Today’s youth have been nicknamed Generation Q– the Quiet Generation. While this may seem ironic to those who have dedicated themselves to the anti-genocide movement– or any of the other critical movements of our time– the reality is that too often today’s youth are associated with ipods, video-games, MTV addictions, and perhaps most tragically, apathy.

Why should we, as anti-genocide activists, care about such stereotypes when we are perhaps already doing “our part” to enact global change? I would argue that as much as I like to scoff at such stereotypes we should care because on some level they are true. Youth voter registration, up until this election, has been at a low. Youth involvement in politics, advocacy, and community service has declined in many parts of the US. And perhaps youth are not to blame for this– it’s hard to envision yourself as an empowered individual when represented by a government you don’t respect, foreign policy you don’t believe in, and a consumer culture that places you as an object of consumption instead of agency. If you are reading this, chances are that you are an engaged citizen (at least sufficiently engaged to read the STAND blog), but unfortunately you may be in the minority.

Moving beyond our role as students in the anti-genocide movement, it is critical that we also re-position ourselves as agents of social change. Not only do we stand to gain legitimacy for our movement by allying ourselves with our predecessors, but we stand to learn that even in moments of frustration and doubt, youth have always been at the forefront of calls for social justice. As youth, we have the unique possibility to enter this world and challenge that which is so often taken for granted– to imagine change in the way that we fundamentally conceptualize human rights, healthcare, education, the environment, and a host of other issues.

We have a high standard to live up to when we consider those who have gone before us in the times of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, apartheid in South Africa, and women’s rights (just to name a few). My mother, who grew up in small town North Carolina, still remembers when the Ku Klux Klan marched in the downtown Easter parade as well as the first day that she was joined by African Americans in school. She still remembers the importance of college not just as a means of education, but as a means of avoiding the draft, and the automatic assumption that she, as a young girl, would never earn as much as her male counterparts. These days were not as long ago as they may seem. But the norms my mother recounts are ones that were fought– and changed– by youth movements such as SNCC, the anti-war protests, international condemnation of South Africa, and the insistence that women deserved equal treatment under the law.

Today these changes remain incomplete when we look around at continued racial inequality in the US, a controversial war in the Middle East, and the remaining gender disparities in opportunity. But when we look at how far we have come, the change is an enormous one– one includes a fundamental alteration in the way that people view and accept the state of our society. As STAND activists and as youth activists it is critical that we look upon these movements as reminders that change can and does happen, and that as youth we have the potential to serve as agents of that change.
Our challenge– mine and yours– is to redefine ourselves, moving from the quiet generation to a generation of ideas and actions like those before us. This is what the past generation did for us and this is what the past generation proved can be done.

And because one day, I want my daughter to ask me about the days when genocide occurred in the same way that I ask my mother about the days where the KKK marched through her neighborhood. I want to hear the mix of sadness and wonder and disgust in her voice as she imagines a past world so antiquated as to allow the slaughter of innocent civilians, the way I imagine a backwards world where white supremacy was paraded about. And finally, I want to be able to know that in the back of her mind brews another vision of the world– one more just than the one I helped create for her– and I want to know that she is thinking of the many ways that she can change that world for her own children.

-Anna Ninan, Northeast College Regional Outreach Coordinator

The STAND Way

sredding — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:06:54 -0400

As activists we often feel like we are alone in the world and that we are some of the only people that care about making genocide history. However, this outlook on the movement is totally false and thankfully there are other crazy people in this movement (known affectionately as members of the STAND Leadership Team, or SLT) that have no quells staying up till after one in the morning to discuss the ICC indictments and the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. We are so concerned with moving the movement forward that we seem to lose track of everything else in our lives(sleep included) and can look at our iPods and see that the STAND song has over 100 of plays when everything else only has 5-10.

I spent the last weekend totally living it up in Washington, DC, and I had so much fun! STAND had its Fall planning retreat with all the members of the Managing Committee and the Outreach Team (we are great at filling up a room!) and we put together this totally awesome Fall semester. I have to say that this semester is going to be epic and the upSTANDers across the world will not be let down. Even though we did some amazing things inside the conference room my favorite part of the retreat was hanging out with my fellow STAND Leadership Team members.

My favorite part of STAND is that, we as students, who know how to make people listen to us will work countless hours into making this the fastest and most organized movement in the world today! The wonderful people of the STAND Leadership Team are all students, the STAND chapters are all students, and it is STUDENTS that are calling all the shots. It is students that are juggling STAND, school, work, friends, and everything else to make the world a better place for people so far away that it would take a day of travel to get there.

If you ever feel lonely, call your Outreach Coordinator for your region/state because we know what that feels like to be a student waking up our campuses conscience, and I promise none of us bite (not to mention its impossible to do over the phone).

I will miss our totally amazing retreats in DC this semester but at the same time I cannot wait to make this semester the biggest in STAND's history and be one step closer to making Genocide a thing of the past.

In Peace, Change, and Activism,

Zach Peirce
Southeast HS Regional Outreach Coordinator

Teaching Against Genocide in Massachussetts

sredding — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:39:30 -0400

I thumb my way through the dry, holier-than-thou-government-language, thirty-five page document entitled “The Massachusetts Guide to Choosing and Using Curricular Materials on Genocide and Human Rights Issues” as I stand outside of State Senator Augustus’ office, nervously waiting for the wall clock to strike 10:30, or at least 10:20. It is currently 10:15, and I am fifteen minutes early for the appointment that I requested with the Senator to discuss the Massachusetts Teach Against Genocide campaign as a result of underestimating my ability to navigate the State House, and, (probably rightfully) calculating on my general history of getting lost often. To avoid the awkward looks I receive from staff members and other interns rushing by on their way to meetings or the first of a cardiac arrest-inducing number of coffee breaks for the morning, I pretend to be enthralled in this poor, disenfranchised self-help for teachers manual hidden deep within the crevices of the Department of Education’s website. For a document that promises to highlight the evils of genocide, it is pathetic. “From Pearl Harbor to Victory” a subheading reads, failing to mention at what cost to hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians “victory” came for America. I’ve highlighted manically throughout, wherever there is a whisper about “Nazi Terrorism” or a mention of “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia. “Ethnic cleansing?” Massachusetts is using the same euphemistic terminology to describe the genocide, the mass slaughter of thousands of Muslims in Bosnia, as the radical Serbs who facilitated these killings did? And what of Cambodia? The Kurdish genocide? Rwanda? Burma? Darfur?

I’m seated in the Senator’s office five minutes later, and after a brief discussion, I’m delighted to see that I finally have an ally in state government (specifically one that can correctly pronounce “genocide”). He tells me to be wary of the controversy that a bill such as this might generate, given Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide, teacher opposition to mandates, and the like. I still wonder what is controversial about the systematic slaughter of over one million Christian Armenians or the novel idea of NOT leaving out the eradication of tens of millions of innocent civilians when teaching social studies. It seems to me it is fairly important subject matter. Senator Augustus will not be returning for the upcoming legislative session, but he will mention the campaign to his colleagues favorably. Score one for the good guys.

Often times, in our little STAND bubble, we tend to forget that there are those that fail to understand the implications of Bosnia, Darfur, or even the Holocaust. We forget how dire the need for education on these subjects, however “sensitive” or “controversial” they may be, truly is. Make no mistake; there is a need for change in school systems across America. How can we call ourselves Americans if we fail to mention to future generations the ultimate failure of the international community to act, time and again, just in this past century? How can the world plan to make good on the promise “never again” if millions of stories are left to die on the killing fields?

-Emily Cunningham, Northeast High School Regional Outreach Coordinator

To get involved in the Massachusetts Teach Against Genocide Campaign, please contact Emily Cunningham at ecunningham@standnow.org

Get Cash to Support Your Activism

sredding — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:58:12 -0400

Not getting enough money from your school to STAND against genocide?

Check out CGI U, a new project of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI)! CGI U is made for students like you who are trying to tackle the most important global issues of today. CGI U will be distributing $150,000 to student projects dealing with global issues.

Apply, and your STAND chapter could get financial support for your anti-genocide efforts. The deadline is July 28th, so check the application out NOW.