By: Amany Killawi
“My brain hurts!” said my sister, as we walked out of one of the
allies’* house after an intense program development session.
“Trust me. So does mine.” I answered back.
We had just finished helping to develop a part of the program for
the Detroit Minds and Hearts fellowship. For those of you who are not familiar with it just yet, its a fellowship that aims to empower disengaged youth and transform them into agents of social change by recognizing their potential, refining it, and retaining their drive for social justice by helping them launch their very own community action plans and initiatives.
This incident happened approximately a year ago, and many like
this one were to follow. Yet today as I reflect back on my journey with being involved in this program I realize many things:
For one I can still to this day remember the extreme hesitation I expressed in being involved. I had just freshly graduated high
school and I was genuinely traumatized from being over involved and burn out during my senior year. This led to a strong commitment phobia. When asked to join the DMH team, at first I wasn’t sure at all. All I wanted was a summer to relax and take a break before I started classes in the fall. So what made someone like me eventually get on board?
The cause.
The cause drew me in. It was such a powerful cause. And it scared
the hell out of me as well. I mean we were going to be designing a program thats goal was to successfully transform the participants, who were your average teenagers into advocates of social change.
If the cause was one strong magnet so was the passion behind it. I knew that I would be working with a team who believed in this cause like Terry Jones believed Islam is of the devil.
In addition to the fact that I was personally sick of organizing flash mob events. Events where you would put so much work behind it in which people would attend en masse and get all inspired for that day, and then they leave and you wouldn't hear much from them after that. I wanted to see how my work was affecting others on a more personal level, and how it was helping their development in the long run.
Today I reflect back on year journey of involvement in this program and the fact that my ability to critically think has dramatically improved. At first a session or two with the adult allies would cramp my brain. Now we run through marathon sessions of fleshing out the program.
A skill no doubt we are aiming for the fellows to have.
Because it takes critical thinking skills to take the Prophet PBUH practices and translate that into community action. It takes critical thinking to take ideas that well-known civil rights leaders like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and others championed and define how they translate into our specific context.
I’m not going to say it was easy. We had, and continue to have
our challenges. From worrying about funding, to deciding how to best measure change, and how to design the implementation month where the fellows launch their action plans, it’s all enough to make anybody’s head spinning.
Yet in those challenges lay so many opportunities for personal
growth and development. At times I could literally feel the internal growth
after I had resolved an issue or completed a challenging task.
Sometimes I joke about how being in this program and working with
the allies is like a marriage, except your married to 3 other people as you have to learn how to navigate their working and communication styles, resulting in many “pulse” check meetings in which we learn how to confront each other on specific issues so that we can improve our interpersonal relationships.
So looking back at this journey and what a journey it has been, I can only be hopeful for what we have yet to overcome. And I know that when the goings get tough all I have do is I bring some perspective to the picture and I remember why this program is so powerful. So that even when my brain hurts (which it still does sometimes) I know it’s hurting for a good cause. :)