Es"team": Because We Are People

Students at our school participated in a Red Cross "Beyond the Hurt" anti-bullying training program and have been inspired to turn it into a class/community project. Bullying and self-esteem issues have become a serious challenge in our community affecting many young people. Since "Beyond the Hurt" focuses on the bully, victim, and bystander, we would like to focus our attention on the victim and create a project that would promote positive self-esteem and self-acceptance. We are targeting younger middle school students in our community.

The main goal of this project is to create mini-workshops for students at the middle school level, which would ultimately direct them to a website we have already started to design, which would include a place to share personal stories with a positive message, inspirational photos, quotes, a youth-created “survival guide” and links to resourceful anti-bulling/self-esteem websites. We have also created a series of anti-bullying/self-acceptance videos that we would submit to the site. We also want to document our journey as a short film and include that on our website. We eventually plan to extend our website by adding Facebook, Twitter, and other online social forums to get our message out to our community and beyond. We hope to gain the attention of local newspaper KV Style to promote our cause. At the end of our project, we would like to have the artists of our class create a mural in recognition of self-acceptance, to be a continuous reminder of the “Esteam”support network in our school.

Update (May 1, 2012)

We have created an hour long, 3-part presentation to showcase to the kids at our local middle school. The presentations are built to promote activity and response discussions. The 3 segments being: acceptance of self, the acceptance of others, and the impact of your actions on other people. We have booked our final presentations for May 24th and will be speaking to several eighth grade classes that will be attending our school next year. We are quite excited to share our hard work and spread a positive message.

The domain for our website "www.esteamkv.com" has been registered. Many hours have gone into creating the best final design for the site and we continue to develop and expand daily. Our survival guide is currently being uploaded. We hope to have it up and running within the next two weeks. The survival guide is a dynamic support system for young teens in how to deal with emotional distress; it will be available in both a digital format online as well as a hard copy for classroom distribution.

Our collection of stories is steadily accumulating for the documentary. Our footage features real and anonymous stories from students as well as class discussions and project development.

Update (July 17, 2012)

The school year is over, but the memories and connections made through our Imaginaction project keep continuing to grow. We want to extend a most grateful "thank you" to Imagineaction for providing our class with the opportunity to do something different in English class this year. The students as well as the teacher have been changed because of this project and we thank you for your support and role in making this happen.

First, let us start our final EsTeam update with the final presentations/workshop that we delivered at the middle school level. They were amazing! We had such a wonderful experience with the eighth grade students at Quispamsis Middle School. The teachers and principal were so kind and helpful, but it was the reaction of the students to our presentation that made this experience so amazing. They were so open, receptive, and involved. The kids seemed really excited and interested in what we were doing. They also seemed less nervous about the transition to our high school next year, and that is something we were hoping to achieve in our presentation. We also had the students fill out feedback forms at the end and the comments they made touched our hearts. The presentations went so well, in fact, that we got a special mention in our school district's newsletter that goes out to all staff. It just shows that we truly can make a difference in the lives of others. We are excited to continue to help these students make the transition when they arrive at our school next year.

Besides the success of our final presentation, we had great success stories in other areas of this project. Let's start with our website team. Though it was a long and tedious task, our website content and design team spent countless hours trying to make our website the best that it could be. Well, it turns out the hours and hours of work were worth it because, after we finally officially submitted and registered our website, the final product was exactly what we had envisioned. Not only that, but the company wix.com chose to showcase our website as an exemplar site using their company’s tool. Our head website designer was very proud of this and is going to develop and work on the Esteam website to continue improving it next year.

Another success story would be from our survival guide team. We had a group of students work very hard on compiling a comprehensive survival guide for common teen issues/emotions.