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Herndon High School French Students
With his mother working on an exhibition about genocides after the Holocaust at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Herndon High School student Alex Sink would often hear about contemporary genocide issues and the lives of those affected. One story in particular caught his attention.
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Banaa .org
After attending a Committee on Conscience symposium about the genocide in Darfur, a group of students at The George Washington University decided to become involved in the movement to end mass atrocities in Sudan. Their goal was to bring long term development to Sudan and thus started with a crucial resource: Sudanese citizens.
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Rachel Robichaux and Carly Knaff
Rachel and Carly learned about Darfur through a course they took at Colorado State University. Their initial idea was simply to raise a small amount of money to donate to an organization working on these issues. They figured they could create and sell some t-shirts about Darfur, and donate the profits. Little did they know how successful this venture would be, and where it would lead them.
"We came up with a conceptual design and actually found a graphic artist who did the work for free as he had been to Sudan," Rachel explains. "We ordered the shirts and before we even received them they were sold out. It was that simple. And thus was born Deliver Darfur, our not-for-profit, student-run advocacy group."
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Amani Matabaro Tom
Growing up in Congo, the grim reality of war has long been a part of Amani's life. In 2006, two of his cousins, like many other women in Congo, were raped and abducted. Amani decided to do something to help them begin to heal, and regain their independence and self-esteem. He created a sewing workshop for them as a means to learn a valuable skill and be able to focus on something other than the atrocities they had suffered. The workshop was a big success and soon other women from the community began to join.
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Maia Boitano
Maia's involvement with Darfur began when she read Elie Wiesel's account of his Holocaust experience, Night, and attended a lecture he gave at a nearby university. Dr. Wiesel encouraged her to start a group with her classmates to discuss ways to end the genocide in Darfur. Maia left the lecture, immediately began learning all she could about Darfur, and devised a plan for how she could help.
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St. Catharine Academy High School
St. Catharine's work on Congo began when Roseanne Riolo, an English teacher at the Academy, read an article in Glamour magazine about the violence being committed against women in DRC. She shared this article with her students, and what started as a "women's awareness" lesson soon spread across the entire school community into a Congo Awareness / Mercy Outreach campaign.
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Elizabeth Hankins
Elizabeth's involvement with Darfur started with a unique approach: fiction. She began writing a novel, The Calling, about the plight of Southern Sudan.
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Paul Clay-Rooks
When Paul learned about the devastating and rampant sexual violence taking place in Congo, he decided to walk 200 miles from his hometown of Lynchburg, VA to Washington DC over his Spring Break in an effort to raise awareness about the violence and funds for its victims.
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Ntama Jacques Bahati
Jacques is transforming his own experiences of violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) into a call for action within his new community in the United States.
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"Change the world. It just takes cents" TM Organization
As a part of the curriculum on world studies, the 8th grade students at Herzl RMHA Upper School in Denver, Colorado elected an in depth study of the Sudan conflict.
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St. Francis of Assisi Middle School
St. Francis of Assisi School strives to make social justice and peace education a centerpiece of the academic experience for all middle school students. The result has been a curriculum called Familiae Pacis, or Peace Families, which teaches compassionate listening, interconnectedness, and service to others. The goal is to show students the immense power they have to be agents of positive change.
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Brenda Butler and La Amistad Learning Academy
Brenda Butler, a teacher from Orlando, Florida, began educating about Darfur as an extension of her Holocaust Studies class. She teaches at La Amistad Learning Academy, which helps young people dealing with difficult life circumstances.
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Tim Salem
Tim Salem was doing course research for a class he taught when he learned about the atrocities in Darfur. As Assistant Principal he visited a number of his school's classrooms giving presentations on Darfur.
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