Update from Allendale/Aiken

Hi Everyone,

Glad to be on the conference call tonight and I definitely feel re-connected after hearing these familiar and wonderful voices and ideas!

I am in Aiken, SC, and Alani, Sameia, and Christine are in Allendale, SC. Aiken and Allendale are about an hour away from each other. So Alani and Sameia are our youth leaders in Allendale and we have three new team members who will be joining us from Aiken. This is exciting.

Now that we are growing our team, we are hoping to have a meeting in October, where we plan to get our ideas down about how to get out in the community and start taking action.

Alani and Sameia are working to establish a reading/tutoring group at the elementary school in Allendale. One of the things Alani and Sameia wanted to respond to is the new SC mandate that all children must be pass reading tests at the end of third grade or they will be held back. To help kids in third grade reach this goal, Alani and Sameia wanted to get some other youth from the high school together to go to the elementary school once or twice a week after school to work with readers.

In addition to the reading group, we really want to gather our youth representatives to brainstorm what the immediate needs and interests are for taking action in the communities. There may be a project in Allendale and one in Aiken, with the intention of the youth from both sites working together. We hope to make the meeting place the Allendale Public Library. Trying to adopt some of the practices of our sister sites, we would like to do a big brain storming session with the students, which results in a top one or two projects everyone wants to work on.

One thing that we are going to be concerning ourselves with is establishing transportation between the sites and making that we can get students together across our local (SC) distance and the greater distances between our NGLN sites. I really like the idea of getting social media integrated into the NextGen website so that young people can do what they love, which is to compose on the fly. We are also looking forward to strengthening our ties with NGLN Atlanta and NGLN Kentucky at the upcoming Southern Education Foundation.

I’ve included some very recognizable pictures of Allendale (above) and Aiken below. Hopefully, these will just be placeholders until we upload our own images of the worlds we move and live in. The mural above is in the foyer of the Allendale Elementary School.