STORY NO.

21

Silver Lining

Our plan

Ideas can come from anywhere. That's what Shelah Lehrer-Graiwer's discovered. The idea for Project Silver Lining came to Lehrer-Graiwer a few years ago, when she was working with the City Housing Project in South LA, teaching programs that combined yoga instruction with fine arts projects. For a while she'd been disturbed by the amount of kids that were dropping out of middle and high school in Los Angeles. She knew that there was something that she could do to help, but she didn't know exactly what. Then it hit her — the very program that she'd been working on for the City Housing Project could easily be turned into a productive program for at-risk students. Lehrer-Graiwer and the organization Kids for Peace teamed up and applied for a grant from the Mildred Greene Fund of the Jewish Community Foundation. They got the grant, and within a short period of time, an opportunity emerged for a pilot program at the Oscar de la Hoya Animo Charter High School. Lehrer-Graiwer planned out the first program: it would consist of yoga instruction, to get the kids relaxed and in the right mindset, be followed by a screening of the film The Devil's Miner, a harrowing documentary about child labor exploitation in the silver mines of Bolivia, and conclude with a four-Saturday effort to paint a mural focusing on the issue of social justice and the student's response to the film at the entrance to the high school. The program was intended to give the kids a sense of worth, to help them realize that no matter their situation, they were lucky to be in America, to have the opportunity to set goals and work towards reaching them.

What we did

Everything went according to plan — and turned out better than Lehrer-Graiwer could have hoped. The students all had strong reactions to the film, the mural became a powerful record of the emotional reactions of the high schoolers, many of whom were members of the local "graffiti club," and the yoga centered the students physically.

Our results

Since the pilot program, Lehrer-Graiwer has had two subsequent versions of the Silver Lining Project funded — the second took place at a Title 1 elementary school and was funded by an LA Fest Residency Grant, the third was paid for and took place at the 2006 Irmas International Teen Media Summit at Cleveland High School, where 66 students from 28 countries came together to learn, exercise and create banners depicting their experience. Lehrer-Graiwer is especially proud that the response from the Teen Summit was so similar to that of the students involved in the pilot program — despite wildly different backgrounds, the students all understood how lucky they were to have so many opportunities and were eager to go out and take advantage of them.

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Community Collaborative for Youth
Chico, CA