Next ONE WILPF Call--Thursday, September 13
4pm Pacific, 5pm Mountain, 6pm Central, 7pm Eastern
Ultimate Civics
Student Activism Informed by the Rights of Citizenship
We're seeing amazing grassroots organizing from activist students across the US, exercising their First Amendment rights to defend what is most important to them.
- In Oregon, a group of students is suing their state over the state's lack of action on climate change.
- In Florida the Margery Stoneman Douglas students are campaigning for stronger gun control laws and keeping guns out of schools.
What motivates these students to action? What makes them so effective? It turns out it's education about their rights and access to the tools to organize.
Ultimate Civics Founder Riki Ott to speak at September 13th ONE WILPF Call
WILPF's National Corporations v Democracy Issue Committee is partnering with ULTIMATE CIVICS, a program that offers a curriculum for middle and high school students and gives them the tools they need to know their rights and use them for the issues that matter most to them.
Teaching students their rights as citizens has been largely gutted with the diminished number of schools that actually still teach government and civics classes.
There's a reason for that:
Students uninformed of their rights don't exercise them.
Students who don't understand the difference between how our government was designed to work (with real citizen representation, checks and balances and citizen participation) -- as opposed to how it's failing to work today for ordinary Americans -- turn out to be more compliant, if more hopeless 'consumers' instead of 'citizens'.
ULTIMATE CIVICS builds on the Corporate Power Study Course and the Timeline of Corporate Rights that WILPF authored and promoted during the 1990s and early 2000s, working with our ally POCLAD (Program On Corporations Law And Democracy). They give WILPF full credit for inspiring their curriculum.
"We stand on WILPF's shoulders" says ULTIMATE CIVICS founder RIki Ott. But they've expanded the Timeline of Corporate Rights and developed our curriculum into one that's aimed at kids, to make use of their energy, drive and passion.
Ott has piloted the program in California and Oregon and is now ready to roll it out across the US. She's hoping some of our WILPF branches will provide a link to local teachers, librarians and retired teachers/librarians who might learn the curriculum, become trainers and take the course to young people, either inside classrooms or in after school, church or civic programs. She's found that wherever these courses are taught to kids, their parents also want to learn this information.
Topics for Discussion During ONE WILPF Call:
- How has Riki Ott from Ultimate Civits succeeded in getting this curriculum taught in public and private schools?
- What is included in the curriculum?
- How did she get students to help shape the curriculum?
- What are her goals for a partnership between WILPF and ULTIMATE CIVICS?
- How can YOU get involved?
Please Note
The October ONE WILPF Call will include Reports Back from Ghana, the International WILPF Congress just concluded. That's on Thursday, Oct. 11th. Mark your calendars!
Thursday, September 13
4pm Pacific, 5pm Mountain, 6pm Central, 7pm Eastern
ONE WILPF Call instructions
- You can call in with only your phone, or using both your phone and your computer for a fuller communication experience.
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All voices will be muted during the general part of the call and open during Break Out Rooms.
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PRESS 5 on your phone keypad if you have any technical problems
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PRESS 1 on your phone keypad during Q&A to raise your hand and get on the stack, or to vote in real time polls.
Every WILPF Member, in a branch or at-large, is invited to attend to connect and be part of strategy setting from the ground up at WILPF US.
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