VOICES SELECT | Cool NonProfit |

CityKids |


CITYKIDS REPRESENTS A SAFE HAVEN FOR YOUTH. Recently I attended a few workshops at the Center 4 Arts Conference and they were terrific. One workshop was given by Taina McField, a young woman who participated in a program with CityKids when she was a teen. CityKids develops experiential exercises and one that we participated in was an assumption exercise. We worked in groups of 3-4 and were handed (3) 5 x 7 photocopied portraits of different types of people, ie: a policeman, a transvestite, a man with makeup on, etc. Simultaneously we were given a sheet of paper that held 2 statements: "People assume I am" and "just because..." As a group we had to fill in the blanks making judgments about our pictures. Although people in the workshop wanted to be politically correct, it was virtually impossible. We were fortunate to see a brief snapshot of what one City Kids group created for their own project. They went out on the street and asked to take ordinary people's photo and then had them fill in the assumption statements about themselves. The participants were shown with their photos and assumptions in a gallery show open to the public. What a great project! CityKids is available to hold a workshop in your community or school. Contact them.