What Can I Do? Project with Arsenal in the Community
Pupils in Year 5 have been very fortunate to be selected by Arsenal in The Community to be part of a Social Action Project called 'What Can I Do?'. The project is aimed at
• Educating young people in our community on the subject of race
• Encouraging a sense of personal responsibility
• Helping to promote change and support young people in taking a leading role in this change
The project is being delivered over 5 weeks. Last week was the introductory workshop with Arsenal in the Community coaches discussing the concept of Social Action, sharing examples of Social Action Projects and developing the pupils understanding of how they can make a difference in their school and/or local community. This week, Year 5 worked with special guest, external facilitator, called Jordan Jarrett-Bryan. Jordan is a journalist for Channel 4 News and the host of an online discussion platform which focuses on race called “It’s All Blakademic”. Jordan brought an enormous amount of knowledge and expertise on this topic and his insight was extremely valuable to this programme. The session focused on celebrating diversity, the importance of learning black history and what it means to be anti-racist. Alongside Jordan, a local artist named Stazzy took part in the workshop. His role was to capture the thoughts, views and experiences of those involved and from them, he will create a mural which we hope will be displayed on the Emirates Stadium concourse as a permanent feature.
The project will continue over the coming weeks to develop the social action project with pupils taking the learning, ideas and thoughts from discussions and workshops to identify a cause/issue they want to raise awareness of or challenge at school/their local community and take action to positively impact it.
The programme will be encouraging all of those involved to ask themselves What Can I Do? as well as What Can We Do? and to get their peers asking the same question.
- This is a call to action and we hope that the social action projects that are created as part of this programme will be meaningful and empowering to those involved.
- Pupils will work alongside Arsenal Coaches once a week to plan and develop their plans for action.
