Our Voice, Our Words
Donation protected
Imagine that your family is one of thousands that has been forced to flee home due to ongoing political and drug-related violence in your community. Adding insult to injury, the right to hold onto your memories—to tell your story—has been stripped from you. Your voice is reduced to cliché brochures and negatively-spun news clips by outsiders who do not understand you.
My campaign seeks to turn this reality on its head. If funded, I will join a collaborative Global Pathways team of Colombian and American families, artists, students, and faculty to tell the stories of displaced communities in Medellín, Colombia from July 20 to August 17, 2016. I hope to capture the true essence of their stories, not fetishize a faceless reality. I will go to listen, not to dictate. My end goal as an aspiring storyteller is to convey in video, photography, and words what a superficial soundbite cannot.
This project hits close to home. I am from a heavily-Dominican immigrant community in Boston, and grew up listening to inspiring yet at times heart-wrenching stories of family members whose rich life histories and sacrifice are now being diminished, reduced to one-word pejoratives in today’s toxic national debates: Illegal, Alien.
If you fund my campaign, you will not only be investing in my education alone. It is a statement that valuing an individual’s voice matters. That individual stories matter. That your story and my story close to home, but also the story of each Syrian or Colombian family thousands of miles away—we all matter.
I am extremely thankful to have been offered this opportunity, but understand I am not entitled to it. I thank you for believing in this cause, and this story.
Elizabeth Baez is a Writing, Literature and Publishing major at Emerson College in Boston. Her GFM campaign would cover the US $5,000 tuition and program costs for participation in the multi-institutional, transnational project Mobility Movilidad.
To read more about the program visit:
http://www.mobilitymovilidad.org/home-hogar/
My campaign seeks to turn this reality on its head. If funded, I will join a collaborative Global Pathways team of Colombian and American families, artists, students, and faculty to tell the stories of displaced communities in Medellín, Colombia from July 20 to August 17, 2016. I hope to capture the true essence of their stories, not fetishize a faceless reality. I will go to listen, not to dictate. My end goal as an aspiring storyteller is to convey in video, photography, and words what a superficial soundbite cannot.
This project hits close to home. I am from a heavily-Dominican immigrant community in Boston, and grew up listening to inspiring yet at times heart-wrenching stories of family members whose rich life histories and sacrifice are now being diminished, reduced to one-word pejoratives in today’s toxic national debates: Illegal, Alien.
If you fund my campaign, you will not only be investing in my education alone. It is a statement that valuing an individual’s voice matters. That individual stories matter. That your story and my story close to home, but also the story of each Syrian or Colombian family thousands of miles away—we all matter.
I am extremely thankful to have been offered this opportunity, but understand I am not entitled to it. I thank you for believing in this cause, and this story.
Elizabeth Baez is a Writing, Literature and Publishing major at Emerson College in Boston. Her GFM campaign would cover the US $5,000 tuition and program costs for participation in the multi-institutional, transnational project Mobility Movilidad.
To read more about the program visit:
http://www.mobilitymovilidad.org/home-hogar/
Organizer
Eli Baez
Organizer