Jews for New Orleans

Sharing a meal

Corps members live communally in their Jefferson Avenue house uptown

Purim Masks

Corps members prepare for Purim celebrations by creating masks

Planting trees in Central City

Rachel Glicksman works with residents to beautify the neighborhood

Celebrating Chanukah

Corps members welcomed coworkers and community members to their home

Learning about Bayou Bienvenue

Alum David Eber teaches the group about deforestation in the cypress swamps

Highlighting the Jewish Community's Involvement in Rebuilding New Orleans

This site is hosted by AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, which launched its New Orleans program in the fall of 2008. AVODAH engages young people in direct work on the causes and effects of poverty in the United States. This work partners Corps members with service providers and residents in low income communities and equips our Corps members and alumni to emerge as lifelong agents for social change, whose work for justice is rooted in and nourished by Jewish values.

Writing 2.0: Using new technology to inspire a new generation of (re)thinkers

May 15th, 2009 by admin | 0

by Rachel Lee
AVODAH New Orleans Corps Member

Writing is so much more than putting a pencil to a piece of paper. This is one of the basic ideas of the Rethink Writers’ Group, which I co-facilitate as part of my AVODAH placement at Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools. When I joined the Writer’s Group, they were in the midst of a number of ongoing projects, such as contributing a column to a community newspaper and developing a graphic novel about their experiences as youth organizers in post-Katrina New Orleans.

When I sat down with Candace Perry, a professional playwright and author who volunteers as a coordinator of the Writers’ Group, we immediately turned to the question of how to present writing as a powerful tool to middle school students who may associate writing with boring classes and tedious standardized tests. We realized that we needed to take writing into the 21st Century. The printed word is no longer the primary means of communicating information. We live in a digital age, where “writing” takes the form of text messages, emails and even YouTube videos.

One of my first projects with the Writers’ Group was creating an entry for a YouTube contest about school cafeterias. The youth watched other videos online for inspiration and then we had a big brainstorm session. We decided to model our project on Will.i.am’s “We are the Ones” video, which was an online sensation during Presidential campaign. We would work in black-and-white with an inspirational chant in the background and Rethinkers speaking directly into the camera about their experiences. We shot the video in one afternoon and then I did the editing in iMovie. Our video, “Real Food Now!”, ended up being a finalist in the YouTube contest and over 1,000 people watched our video. Four Rethinkers went to the Farm-to-Cafeteria conference in Portland, Oregon that sponsored the contest and spoke in front of 600 people about their efforts to get healthy, local food in their cafeterias. We also published a transcript of the video in a community newspaper called The Trumpet.

This project was the first of what promises to be many videos from the Writers’ Group. We are currently working on a video about how to use the media to get out your message. Ultimately, we will use these videos as a starting point for the graphic novel that we are writing. The book will be an illustrated guide for other young people who want to make a difference in their schools.

You can check out all our videos on YouTube: www.youtube.com/rethinkNOLA