Project Description

YPAR stands for Youth Participatory Action Research. According to YPAR Hub, "YPAR is a cyclical process of learning and action – research is done not just for the sake of it but to inform solutions to problems that young people themselves care about." To learn more about YPAR, you can visit UC Berkeley's YPAR Hub Website.

Photovoice is a participatory technique that allows individuals to identify and show issues in their community through the use of photographs. The students took photos to represent the issues they see and to start a conversation about what is happening, why, and what we can do about it. To analyze the images, we used the S.H.O.W.e.D. process. Here we ask what we can see, what is happening, how it affects our lives, why it's happening, how it can educate others, and what we can do about it.

Many times we focus on the symptoms of a problem and what we can see on the surface. Attending to the symptoms won't solve the issue so we have to get to the root of it. We used the 5 Whys technique to go deeper and more thoroughly understand the issue at hand and how to address it.

Power Mapping is a way to figure out who has power and authority in a community and who can help us make change. It involves a graph with power and authority on the y-axis and level of agreement with our goal on the x-axis. Individuals and groups are then graphed based on these two variables and then we can more clearly see which groups to target to meet our goals.

We followed Mikva Challenge's Project Soapbox Curriculum to create our soapboxes. This project allows students to speak out on issues that affect them and their communities. For more information, visit their website.