Sunflower County Freedom Project

Our plan

Sunflower County lies in rural western Mississippi, a hub of cotton, catfish and soybean farms that is also one of the poorest areas in the country. Greg McCoy and his group of volunteers were passionate about creating a program that would help students from Sunflower County succeed in school and win scholarships to attend four-year colleges. If the project was to succeed, it would give birth to a new set of leaders in the Sunflower community, leaders that would then take the reins in improving the opportunities for Sunflower residents. Thus, it was important to McCoy that students came out of the program with discipline and leadership skills as well as academic success. McCoy and his team decided that the best way to help Sunflower County in the long term would be to help a set of students from seventh grade all the way through the end of high school, mentoring them in academics, as well as offering them martial arts instruction to help with their mental discipline and their physical fitness. When this new class of leaders graduated from high school, they would be ready not only for college, but also to lead in their own community. The team devised a plan to work with students: first years would be required to begin their time with the project by going on a tour of the south, visiting the locations of important civil rights events and talking with members of that movement. By understanding the past and interacting with leaders of the past, students would become grounded in history and be better able to connect real humans to historical events. After this initial trip, students would settle down into the program, resulting in the creation of a number of honor roll students.

What we did

The planning for the Sunflower project immediately paid off. With headquarters in Sunflower city proper (population 800), the initial students immediately settled into a routine, staying focused on their studies and on their martial arts training. The students participated in summer classes, Saturday classes during the school year, study sessions after normal school hours and much more. At all times, the program stayed focused on the issue of "freedom," both by addressing the ways freedom had been won in the past, and by encouraging the students to be successful in the classroom and create their own freedom in the future. Gradually, the students of the Sunflower Project began to participate in programs outside of the scope of the original plan. They began to blog about their experiences on the Sunflower Project website, create video documentaries about their lives, and even performed several plays on tours throughout the south. Each of these experiences gave the students a chance to interact with the outside community, and each encouraged them to work hard and achieve their goals.