Miriam: Can you talk to me a little bit about what this word ‘empowerment’ means to you as an educator?

Lynn:

Yes – I know you love this word! I loved how you brought that up in a meeting one time. Well, when it comes to literacy, and some of the obstacles I think that youth face – sometimes they are greater depending on your social class – has a lot to do with self-esteem and confidence. Not having accessibility to the needs that you need to nurture to your own self-esteem and your own confidence to know that you can actually have a role in society and express what you have to express; write what you have to write.

Our society is heavily based on reading, writing and arithmetic, and if you don’t fit into that kind of box, then you have a hard time feeling confident that you can. So, it’s important to start from the base, and that’s about confident, self-esteem, and self-empowerment.

We also get the kids to develop a self-awareness of themselves – sometimes people don’t invest a lot into self-awareness, and when you have that as a base, then you are able to mobilize people to change. That’s what we start with at our program.

Miriam: When you say change, what are they going to change into?

Lynn:

Active citizens of society; not being passive. I find that nowadays, our society is really big on keeping people passive – giving information that is not related to their life or how it’s affecting their world; we’re over-saturated with tabloid magazines, and other insignificant things in my opinion. People are not being involved anymore, so it’s about getting people engaged, being active, and understanding how their actions really do have an affect on the world – being part of that bigger global picture.

Miriam: You use the term ‘people’ – not students, and not youth. Can you talk a little bit about choosing to use the word people and not kids, or children?

Lynn:

Every human is a person, so it’s just to not put people in boxes. Yes, they are students, yes I work with youth, but in our program I also work with – some of our volunteers are university students; some of our partners are teachers, and it’s more like a community – a community approach of how we’re going to teach. Kind of the approach of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. I don’t use the word ‘child’ or ‘student’ because I don’t like it – I don’t want to use a term that would come off as isolating, or limiting, or putting people in a certain box.