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Success Stories, Summer 2006
Below is a collection of success stories, hard knock lessons about individuals and groups trying to make a difference.
A young journalist named Casey Parks won an essay contest that took her to Africa with New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof. Below is her winning an essay and a reflection piece from experience in a hospital in Cameroon.
May 22, 2006
WIN A TRIP WITH NICK KRISTOF: The Winning Essay
By CASEY PARKS
Growing up poor, I saw my mother skip meals. I saw my father pawn everything he loved. I saw our cars repossessed. I never saw France or London. I didn't even see an airplane up close until I was a senior in high school and won an Al Neuharth-sponsored trip.
The older I get, though, the more I appreciate not having money. Working as a journalist in Mississippi for a handful of years, I found my past connected me to so many people. Crafting racially charged stories, I saw myself in the eyes of interviewed after interviewed. No, I didn't know what it was like to be perceived as scary because my melanin shaded me darker. But I knew what it was like to wear out-of-style clothes and want the shoes and cooler lunches that others had. As a lesbian, I knew what it was like to feel out of place.
Moving to Columbia, MO, to earn my master's, I've lost some of my soul. The city is a predominately white, mostly middle-class generally quaint town. The fury of Mississippi almost like a dream now, I've been reading voraciously articles about the poverty Palestinians sink into daily. I find, years later, Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-winning photo of a starving Sudanese girl and the vulture who stalks her, and I long to be a part of it. I consider the allegations against Carter--was he helping, just photographing her?--and I want to know those journalistic decisions for myself.
What moves me to be a journalist? It's been a career goal so obvious to me for such a long time that the question had ceased to be asked. This semester, almost muted by theory studies, I have returned to it often. I keep a binder of stories that remind me, though: Anne Hull's portrait of gay America, Andrea Elliott's story about an imam in Brooklyn saddling two worlds, Rick Bragg's Pulitzer-winning tale of Alabama inmates plagued by old age who still find beauty in flowers, Jacqui Banaszynski's Pulitzer-winning delve into the lives of two gay men, farmers who fell in love and physically fell apart because of it. I have a distinct want (it's a thirst and a flame, all at once) to create these stories myself--not for the Pulitzers, but for the reaching outside of myself, to break people's hearts so adeptly that they move into action.
The electricity that comes from crafting seeing the way journalists do--cataloguing every movement, sound, feeling, inference--is what continues to spark me. And by no means have I exhausted the stories that are to be done in America (or even Columbia, MO, in all its quaintness). But I so desperately want to leave this country and know more. I've never thought of myself as provincial, but this year, reading on the tension between the two Koreas, swallowing Rushdie's Pakistan and India, inhaling the French riots, I realize how insular my life has been. My tour of the Southern states has left me unable to fully discern what lies beyond.
But I want to.
I want to learn by seeing. I feel deeply, and I know journalism. I'm strong, and have no need for 5-star hotels or other luxuries. In person, I'm charming and sweet and considerate, but still bold and fearless. The trip you're offering is an experience that should merge experience and inexperience, skill and desire for more. I have these qualities.
September 19, 2006
Prudence
By Casey Parks
5 p.m.
Prudence died at 5 p.m. today.
I see this in an e-mail, and it should make sense. It should be what I expect.
But I don’t. That thud in the stomach is back.
I’ve hashed through the reasons, though none of them make sense (not together, not as individual pieces of blame).
It is too easy to look at numbers of maternal mortality or mortality in Africa in general, and feel distance from them. It is easy to think of death in Africa and not feel it close at hand. It’s harder to see this woman as a daughter whose mother stayed awake for days at her bed side, whose eyes blared red from tears and no sleep. It’s harder to see her as a mother whose children were at school when she left for the hospital on the back of a motorcycle taxi. It’s harder to understand that in death there is a persisting struggle, a weeklong fight through vomit and blood and infection.
I have thought myself so humane in the past because my heart broke over the slightest glint of poverty, because I cared about genocides in other countries. Tonight, I read my e-mail: Prudence passed away at 5 p.m., and I recognize the distance I have kept. I don’t know how to live and have these realities constantly close at hand, but I know that I cannot live anymore with them as a story, as a facts-and-figures news article that speaks but does not move. I cannot hear of tragedies and blanket them under the term “tragedy,” because even that has become a cliche that is so easy to recognize, it’s now too hard to understand.
http://parks.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=30
From Summer, 2006
Do you have successes, lessons learned, or some reflection in your organization’s efforts to become more inclusive?
In the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education InfoLink Newsletter Volume 12, Issue 2 February 2006, CAEE reported the following about their progress:
CAEE is embarking on a new project to help meet some of the diversity initiatives in the Colorado Environmental Education Master Plan (see http://www.caee.org/ and search in upper right corner for 'Infolink'). Goal 5 of the Master Plan is simply stated as, "increase and broaden the diversity of EE audiences, providers, and programs" yet, we recognize this isn't as easy as it is stated.
As with any new project, we felt we needed to start at the beginning -with conversation and dialogue. So, recently a group of 20+ environmental educators gathered in Denver for a Diversity and Inclusiveness Roundtable. Stacie Gilmore, and her crew from Environmental Learning for Kids (ELK), led small group discussions around how our work brings out issues of diversity, and how these issues impact our work; how we can be allies as questions of diversity arise; and if our organizations are inclusive and encouraging the kind of diversity that adds value to our profession. Some starting definitions from The Denver Foundation, Inclusiveness at Work, were presented:
- Diversity: describes one aspect of inclusiveness: the extent to which an organization has people from diverse backgrounds or communities involved as board members, staff, or volunteers.
- Inclusive: organizations have diverse individuals involved and are learning organizations that value the perspectives and contributions of all people, and they incorporate the needs, assets, and viewpoints of diverse communities into the design and implementation of universal and inclusive programs.
Our conversation centered on moving from diversity to inclusiveness. What do you think? Have you thought about what may be different in an inclusive organization or program versus a diverse one? How well do you know your audience or other members of your organization? What do we need to pay attention to so that as questions of diversity arise we can be an ally to our participants and stakeholders? How are you working to build diversity and inclusiveness, and in what focus areas (culture, age, gender, physical ability, many, many others)?
CAEE will be hosting quarterly roundtables to get to the heart of these questions, so watch for additional opportunities to join in the conversation. In the meantime, we'd like to broaden the discussion, so please think about and add your perspective to the discussion board at http://www.caee.org/ (search for "Discussion" in the upper right corner). If you have other suggestions on how CAEE can better serve you in the area of diversity and inclusiveness, please contact me at director@caee.org or 303-273-9527 (one idea from the roundtable was to build a diversity corner of the website with resources and tools).
Send your successes, lessons learned, or reflections to intertcambios@zianet.com for the next quarterly installment.