Conference Reflections
This page showcases the number of conferences I have attended while a student at St. Mark's
White Privilege Conference
2018
I attended White Privilege Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2018. It was not only a fun experience, but I also got to learn so much from it. I got to meet so many new people that I still talk to today. I learned about other cultures, views, and morals in life. WPC 19 was focused on finding your personal superpower and preparing the youth to be the future of social justice as a whole. Every day, we were asked what our superpower was and why. From the first day to the last, almost everyone’s, including mine, superpower changed from a surface level superpower to a much deeper down superpower. They changed from, “I can talk to others,” to “I can use my communication skills to have deeper conversations with people about their world views and find the meaning behind them to understand them and help them understand me.” That was my personal as the conference advanced. The conference helped me to accept who I truly am. I am not just black. Rather, I am African American, Caucasian, and Latina with family from a long list of countries around the world. I learned more about the cultures of where I come from and where other people come from. I now understand more about other cultures around the world like how there is a tradition in a village in Madagascar where every 5 years they kill a zebu, a cow-like animal with a hump on its back, and feed over 100 people along with many different sides. Without going to this conference, I would not know nearly as much as I do about the multitude of different and diverse cultures around the world.
AISNE High School Students of Color Conference
2018, 2019, and 2020
This was my first, and luckily not my last, AISNE HSSCC. My three favorite parts about AISNE HSSCC 2018 were hearing Sarah Kay read some of her poetry, learning a new dance routine at the dance workshop, and getting to learn more about Middle Eastern culture, especially the dancing. I have known for a while now that I have loved to dance, but after attending AISNE HSSCC, I learned that dancing is a very large way to spread culture around the world. I then noticed that in every country that I have ever been to, I took my personal time to learn about the culture through dance in one way or another. At AISNE HSSCC in 2019, I was a presenter, and I ran my immigration workshop, with my sister once and once without her, to help teach students more about the hardships of immigration. In each workshop, there were about 30 people. We were expecting only 20, but we were prepared by making extra notecards for the workshop beforehand. Even though I presented a workshop and did not have time to attend any other workshops, I was still able to attend the keynote speakers which were amazing. I have heard Dr. Walter Clair speak before, and it was refreshing to hear him speak again. I had also met Laura Sanchez beforehand about a year prior to the conference. Going in 2020 was very different from the last two years, especially because it was all over Zoom. It was so much fun to hear people's opinions with everything going on right now. The conference this year taught me about being a global citizen within not only your country but also within your city or town. I can be a global citizen by standing up for people living less than 15 minutes away from me. I went to a workshop about cultural appearances, and we talked about how big of an issue cultural appearance is for some people. After the workshop, I thought about how being a global citizen can be fighting for something small because even though it may seem small to you, but it is the biggest thing in somebody else's life. It was also really sad because this was my last AISNE conference.
Global Citizenship Institute
2018 and 2019
I attended the Global Citizenship Institute for the first time over the summer of 2018. At the conference, a friend from a school in New York, my sister, and I planned an immigration workshop to help show people how hard it actually is to migrate from one country to another. My sister presented the workshop at Community and Equity Day 2019. Then, after reworking the workshop and adding to it, I presented the workshop at AISNE 2019. The process of creating a prototype to help fix or combat a certain issue was very interesting because when I first got to GCI I thought that this would be a quick and easy thing to do, but it actually requires a lot of deep thinking. one of the phases of the process is the embassy pay phase. The infancy phase focuses on researching and understanding what the people are going through that you are trying to Aid. I did not notice just how hard it is to immigrate to the United States until I heard some first-hand stories of people who have either immigrated or if they try to immigrate to the US. I think about those stories until this day, and I will continue to fight for equity among immigration policies for the rest of my life. GCI taught me a lot about the different aspects of being a global citizen. Before going to GCI, I thought being a global citizen meant traveling the world and understanding people's cultures, but after attending it I learned that it is about so much more. It is not only about learning what someone's culture is, but it is also learning about what the government is like, what the economy is like, and what climate change is doing to a specific place and the world as a whole. Being a global citizen means raising awareness for the issues that you believe in. GCI helped me to understand that a lot better. I attended the Global Citizenship Institute for the second time in 2019. It was interesting to not only see some of the same lectures but also see new lectures with new perspectives on the world. One interesting thing about attending a conference and hearing the same lectures for the second time is looking deeper into the true meaning of the lecture. I had an entire year to research about the lecture topics and analyze the issue the lecturer was speaking on. Being able to analyze the lectures on a deeper level helped me in coming up with my prototype to bring back to my school. Four fellow St. Markers and I created an Instagram page that shares the migrant stories of different people from all around the world. We also are making a journal to be put in different publications in the school to talk about the struggles of being a migrant in this day and age. I hope the project keeps running for years to come at St. Mark’s.
Student Diversity Leadership Conference
2020
Sdlc was by far a life-changing experience. At the conference I learned about other people, but most importantly I learned about myself. This conference taught me how to listen to others. Everybody who came to us DLC had a very important story to tell about their life or the life of someone that they love. During this two-day conference, I learned that just sitting down and listening and understanding someone's story is so important in the world as a whole.Making connections with people at this conference showed me how important it is to make connections with people all over the world. I still talk to more than 20 of my friends from sdlc this year. We can all go to each other with our problems, and this reminded me of GCI when we learned about networking. Networking is so important in all actuality and it is a large part of being a global citizen. I cannot change the world by myself, but by going to conferences and meeting new people we can form a large enough group 2 seriously make a change in this world. Icoc taught me that and being a part of the global ambassadors program taught me that because a lot of the times I think I should do it by myself, but in actuality it would be much better if a group worked on something together. I learned that it is smart to stand strong together.
Young Environmental Stewards Conference
2018
The YES conference taught me a lot about both the positives and the negatives of global warming right now. It taught me how the world is warming up and biodiversity in many different ecosystems is decreasing rapidly. It taught me how I could start small and work hard until I changed the world. On the other hand, it also taught me about what positively is going on in the world right now. This was a really good conference because it not only focused on the negative. A lot of the times when I think about climate change, I can only think of negative things and how it sometimes seems useless to try and fight it. This conference tries to focus on positive things going on in the world right now that encourage us as young Global Warriors 2 fight against climate change for as long as you can and as hard as we can. At this conference, I met friends that I still talk to till this day, and we all communicate with each other what we are doing at our school to help combat climate change. We also meet over the summer every year for a little bit of time in Baltimore Maryland to hang out and come up with different initiatives to help combat climate change. This conference taught me that being a global citizen is not only about accepting someone's culture and understanding someone's culture. It is also about the world as a whole and keeping that world alive. Sustainability is one of the most important things in the world, and personally, I would like to do everything that I can for the rest of my life to help combat climate change.