The service group “Justice and Equality” works towards creating a community that is a safe space for women and highlighting and informing the general public on gender-related issues. I’ve been a part of this group for around two years and each year we would set a certain amount of goals that we would work towards achieving. For example, last year our goal was to raise enough money to donate to Emerge, an organization in Sri Lanka that works with survivors of abuse. We also opened up a sanitary products donation drive at the end of last year and this year, we were finally able to donate those products to organizations around Sri Lanka. This year, we planned on starting a social media campaign that would inform people within our community, and also outside of our community about women’s issues/gender equality etc. Our first post on social media, which was titled “Sexism doesn’t exist anymore” campaign was posted on October 22nd and it was basically an introduction to the specific topics that our service group is involved in. Through our first post, we addressed misconceptions and ignorance towards women’s issues within our generation. Planning our first post made me realize how much work actually goes into the social media campaigns we see on a daily basis. We researched a lot about current feminist issues, mostly related to DV and economic inequality. We also worked together to come up with ideas for a title that would catch other people’s attention, to gain a larger audience to spread awareness on these topics. We did this by creating a document with all of our ideas for future posts. This way we are able to stay organized, while also making sure that everyone is able to contribute equally to the social media campaign.
Our second post, which was titled “A woman’s worth is defined by her beauty” was a lot less broad and specifically focused on body positivity. Our second post addressed the importance society gives to beauty and defines a woman’s worth by how she looks. While working on this post, we researched how societal standards for women affect our youth mentally, especially through media and we also addressed the sexist notions behind certain comments made about women’s bodies. Along with being able to inform other people about these issues that may not be so widely known, I feel that I am also gaining a wider understanding of how broad of a topic feminism is. The process of researching numerous topics for our future posts, reading about women’s personal stories, and reading data and statistics about the injustice women face in this world has made me gain a lot more knowledge about this topic and my goal is to use our social media campaign to help other people gain this knowledge and understanding as well!
Following this game, we had a break, after which we had Grade 10 do a court roleplay in which there were five roles they could choose (witness, jury, judge, lawyer, and criminal). We gave them three sets of scenarios in a court scene for them to act out in their roles in order for the jury to determine whether the alleged “criminal” was guilty or not guilty. At the end of this court roleplay activity, we again asked them to make connections to SDG 16. Through this workshop, I think that I was able to improve my organization and leadership skills, as I felt that everything went just as we had planned, with everyone cooperating, contributing, and willing to learn, even though we had limited time. This was a great learning experience for me.
During the first two rehearsals, we just read our entire script. The third rehearsal we had was when we first started working on our songs/choreographies/entrances which we learned pretty fast. This schedule mainly consisted of going to the music room first, learning and practicing our songs and making sure we sounded decent, then going to the auditorium and practicing our entrances and putting it all together. For the first part of the play, we decided on how we were going to enter the stage while singing the prologue and created a choreography for the entire song. We did the same for three other songs during the course of the following rehearsals. I feel that I have already gotten more confident with singing/performing in front of people, or at least much more than I used to be. I’m also getting used to the lines that I have been assigned and don’t need my script for the first part anymore. In the most recent rehearsal we had, we went through the entirety of ACT 1 without stopping and it ended up going quite smoothly, without too many noticeable mistakes. In two weeks, we will start working on ACT 2 and we will be having more Saturday rehearsals as the dates for our performance ( The first week of December) will be approaching soon.