Arts Activities Support

This project was intended to provide an opportunity for Somali youth to speak to the community based on their own lives and experiences. Our aim was to create a safe space for the kids to explore the basic structures and challenges in the kids’ live. The stories they chose to tell addressed family, being an immigrant, overcoming racism and islamophobia, and their desire to good students. When Average Mohamed began this project, we set out the following goals: Short-term: serving 15 students, teaching the required skills, producing videos within schedule and budget, creating an experience which empowered the students. Long-term: Connecting with the broader audience, encourage dialogue within the Muslim community as well as externally. We feel that we met the short-term goals in that we had a group of approximately 20 regular participants. They met each Saturday for six months, and learned how to create a message, write a script, provide constructive criticism, create story boards, record voice-overs, and edit their cartoons. The five videos focused on Family, Islamophobia and Racism, School, Soccer Star, and Being a new Immigrant. There were several things that did not go as planned, the most significant of which was that the Young Achievers group backed out due to scheduling conflicts. This left us scrambling to find another group of kids with which to work. Fortunately, we were able to connect with a group from West Bank Athletics that fit the same demographic of teenagers from the Somali community. We did have to readjust as the language skills of this group were a bit different from what we had anticipated. Several participants had only been in the U.S. for a short period of time and were uncomfortable communicating in English. This group was also coming directly from a soccer practice, and were always famished. We soon learned that providing food for them made the sessions much more productive. This was also a transient group, with many students changing housing locations 3-4 times within the six month period. They were all enthusiastic about participating, but transportation was often an obstacle. The director of Average Mohamed often ended up providing transportation for the participants. Although most of the project went as planned, there are a number of things we would do differently the next time around, the most important of which is shortening the duration. Originally we had planned for one-hour sessions to meet once a week for six months. In hindsight, it would have been better to do two-hour sessions for three months. One hour was simply not enough time to go into depth and it often seemed as if we would have to wrap just when the conversation was getting interesting. Since the sessions ended in June, the unveiling of the videos coincided with the month of Ramadan, which was less than ideal. Our release party was not as well attended as we would have liked since many of the families were fasting and often do not go out during the day. The surveys we conducted at the end of the project indicated that the participants felt empowered by the project, and the feedback was overwhelming positive. Some felt that we spent too much time talking about the challenges they faced, and not enough time talking about solutions, so that is one thing we will try to incorporate in future programs. In our proposal we defined the community we wished to serve as kids, ages 8-14, from the Somali community. The group we worked with was slightly older, 12-18, due the switch from Young Achievers to the West Bank Athletics group. The greatest obstacles to participation were language, the fact that the kids were hungry and had a hard time focusing, and the fact that the kids lacked transportation. These obstacles were overcome by having the instructor translate into Somali, providing food during the sessions, and providing rides to and from the sessions. The group discussed issues ranging from family, the challenges of being new immigrants, their experience with racism and islamophobia, and about their dreams and ambitions. More of the classes were conducted in Somali than we anticipated, and the language issues created more challenges in recording the voice-overs than expected, but we were able to work with the recording studio to bargain for some extra time. We would love to be able to offer the program to a larger group of kids, but keeping the class size relatively small was crucial to keeping a manageable dialogue where the participants had an opportunity to share their ideas. We would often break into small groups, and a larger class size would have been difficult to manage. We were able to reach a broader audience by hosting a public event to launch the videos and by posting our videos online. MPR did a short story on the creation of the videos and the community event, which brought out quite a few people to the launch party that might not have otherwise attended. For many of the participants, this was the first time they had ever been involved in this type of discussion. This experience provided an opportunity in which the students could voice their frustrations in a safe space, develop language and public speaking skills without fear of failure, have an open discussion with one another, and frame the conversation around their own thoughts and ideas, rather than in response to community events. We were able to make the project open and accessible to all who wished to participate. In the future, we will plan more resources for language translation.