Students take to SMS for organizing; Brooklyn Prodigies show connects

For the past month we at The Urban Labs have been engaged in our first experiment with SMS as an organizing tool. The Urban Labs, working with IJJRA, provided an SMS deck for an event campaign that would allow young people to collect RSVP's through SMS and subsequently facilitate event activities through the same deck.

Through the curriculum being taught by IJJRA, the students helped plan an assembly for their fellow high school students to promote street peace. The messages, were expressed through a student generated video and voted on by the assembly. The students, prepared a talent show highlighting nonviolent philosophies. The students collected close to 400 names for the show through SMS.

The Urban Labs created two use cases for the event sign in and voting system. Both were used very successfully at the event, but the sign in, a wordle activity, was a unique way to use texting at a meeting to capture individual feelings and show them collectively, while tracking all the data.

We asked the young people to text in thoughts they have concerning violence, prisons and peace. Here’s some video.  Seeing their own words, seeing the collective response experience of the room created an energetic reaction.  The young people then began texting in additional responses and IJJRA asked the students to do it again. This was a great indication of how SMS can be used to deepen face to face interactions.

The Urban Labs will be releasing a full evaluation of this experiment done in West Brooklyn High School. Big Shout out to Urban Labs board members Rick Borovoy and Chuck Baker for making it happen.

A quick conversation with Nehemiah Bey, IJJRA community liaison

What do you find the most interesting with the students at West Brooklyn High?

What I find interesting is that our sessions at West Brooklyn High School, (an alternative school), begin when the students actual school day ends, and although these sessions are "credit recovery" classes for the students, they are not simply doing the minimum to receive credit. On the contrary, the students are engaging and very interested in learning new ways to think about violence and nonviolence and how those two constructs relate to the Prison Industrial Complex, their individual lives and their local and global communities.

Who are these students?

These are students who have been, for whatever reason(s), determined not up to DOE standards and have been transferred from mainstream public schools to this alternative school. However, this group of students is proving that a more creative pedagogy is necessary to engage our children and make their learning experience relative to their lives.

That being said, with the students finding the information we are
disseminating relative to their everyday lives, they are excited about
using this technology provided by the Urban Labs to not only promote
their talent show, but also to organize and research trends.

How are you introducing technology as an organizing tool?

In the wake of the Easter Sunday, so-called, "wilding" occurrence, where it was reported that technology, namely twitter, was used by alleged gang members to message and influence others to converge on Times Square and Herald Square respectively, for me that happening, (it's calamitous consequence notwithstanding) demonstrates the power of social networking technology. It's ability to reach
people in the moment will be a paradigm shift in the organizing world that will absolutely enhance the way in which organizers do outreach, message, coalition build and bring community folks together,

Consequently, as Community Outreach Liaison for the Institute for
Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives, I am as excited as my students to implement this technology to not only expand my organizations data base, but more importantly, to deepen and strengthen my organizations relationship with the community.

Nehemiah Bey is The Community Outreach Liaison for IJJRA. Bey is also a poet and lives in Brooklyn, NY