Avalon Levey's "enough" moment came during her American history class last year at Maplewood's Mounds Park Academy. During a one-day Holocaust seminar, Levey became "extremely emotional." Looking around, though, she noticed that most of her classmates "were not even listening." Bothered, she approached a friend who confessed: "It was too horrible, so I tuned out."
Levey, 18, is not about to tune out, even when faced with world-sized horrors. On Tuesday, she presented opening remarks at a conference at William Mitchell College of Law titled, "Child Soldiers and Bullying: Taking a Stand Against Genocide and Hate." The three-day conference is sponsored by the college's Summer Institute for High School Students and World Without Genocide. It has brought together 18 high school students from Rochester to Robbinsdale, St. Paul and Minneapolis, all trading late-summer repose for 12-hour days packed with leadership and legal training, and coaching on how to advocate for a bullied classmate, or an entire group being dehumanized by a powerful elite.
"We speak at high schools, do exhibits and show films, but to have a three-day experience for young people, I think, is unique in the country," said Ellen Kennedy, founder of the nonprofit World Without Genocide.
Kennedy calls these students "the best of youth today. Their engagement will be powerful and profound."
Many of the participants already have tested the waters of grass-roots activism, through school anti-violence programs and the Model United Nations, or by volunteering at Feed My Starving Children and Habitat for Humanity.
Isaac Marshall, 18, remembers his father's involvement on the school board years ago on behalf of minority families not being treated well. His mother is a longtime community activist. "I have a lot of friends in the Hmong and Somali community," said Marshall, a recent graduate of Mounds Park Academy. "We're lucky they're here, but we're not lucky because those people had to leave their homes for us to have a wake-up call."
Sixteen-year-old Jeron Mariani, of St. Paul Academy, is here, in part, because of concern about cyber-bullying. "It's a prevalent issue right now." Mai Chai Lor, 17, of Cooper High School, brings a unique perspective. Her mother was a child soldier in Thailand. "It's very important that I inform others about issues in Thailand," said Lor, who is heading to Iowa's Buena Vista University on a four-year leadership scholarship.
The conference is the brainchild of University of Minnesota graduate Rachel Beecroft, 21, who heard Kennedy speak last fall and "it just clicked," Beecroft said. By 8 the next morning, she and Kennedy were pulling together this conference's logistics and a powerful lineup of speakers, including Carl Wilkens, an American rescuer during the Rwandan genocide, where nearly 100,000 children were orphaned, and Jamie Nabozny, who won a landmark lawsuit against school administrators in Ashland, Wis., after enduring brutal bullying for being gay.
