Polaris Charter Academy | Chicago, IL
Our Proposal
Polaris 7th graders are working on having one day of peace where there is no violence for 24 hours. In addition we are trying to organize communities to have a Sweep and Greet where you can clean your neighborhood and get to know your neighbors. We are also working on getting alternatives for young adults so they won’t make the wrong choices in life. These alternatives keep youth busy, so they won’t have time to get involved with the wrong things. On June 9th, we are organizing a Sweep and Greet. This Sweep and Greet will lower violence because when you clean up in our community it will attract people that want to live in a community or block that is nice, clean, and safe. The Greet is so no one in your community is a stranger. Together you can clean up your community. We will also be publishing a book on peacekeepers. The purpose of our book is to inform others in our community about the hard work our peacekeepers do to stop the violence.
What We Did
We care about our community and we noticed other people do to! A local high school in our community called Westinghouse noticed that they are affected by the same situations as us and wanted to help do something about it. So we partnered up with the seniors. They helped us with filming our scenarios, editing our PSAs and also act in the scenarios that we created. We contacted peacekeepers that we knew about in our community that want the violence to end and asked them to be a part of our project. Westinghouse let us use their equipment to make the interviews more professional. We took sound bites out of the interviews with our peacekeepers to put in our PSAs. We also used the interviews to write biographical sketches about our peacekeepers for a book that we are working on which will be called “Peacekeepers Of Chicago”
