Reflecting on YLA- Kamala Ghanea-Bassiri
What has YLA meant for you?
YLA meant the world to me. I was constantly surrounded by like-minded people who were just as passionate about global and local issues as I am. Being in the program made me feel empowered and more confident in my abilities and what I had to offer. Because of YLA, I am motivated to step outside of my comfort zone and interact with others in constructive ways that instigate change.
What are some of your favorite memories from YLA?
One of my favorite memories was of a service Saturday volunteering at the Rebuilding Center. It was so much fun and I learned a lot about an issue (deforestation and repurposing wood) I didn’t know enough about.
What lessons did you learn or what skills did you acquire through your participation in YLA?
I learned how to be more self aware of my nervous tics while speaking in public. I have become more aware of the many issues facing our local communities that echo similar ones in underdeveloped nation.
What did you do for your action project? What were the results? What were the successes and challenges?
As a member of WorldOregon’s Youth Action Council I was charged with creating an action project that benefits my community in some way. I ended up creating three action projects, two of which I will be discussing below.
1. My first action project focuses on issues of homelessness in the greater Portland-Metropolitan area. It was conceived after I met Manuel Padilla, the Executive Director of Portland Meet Portland, at World Ties’ Diplomacy Begins Here Summit for the first time. After hearing him speak about what it means to be a citizen in the United States, I was absolutely enthralled and decided to introduce myself. I told him about some of the work I was already doing to address homelessness and we immediately hit it off. In January, I became an Intern at Portland Meet Portland (PMP) and worked closely with Manuel to attempt to address the stigma surrounding homelessness. PMP ended up taking on a fellowship through the Encore Program of Social Venture Partners which is now being led by Tony Salvador and I, with the help of Manuel. The purpose of this fellowship is to investigate the systems we live with that purport to serve vulnerable individuals and communities. We are looking at people in Portland who are 1. struggling with housing instability or houselessness and 2. refugees as a microcosm of the real impacts of these systems. Through this work, we seek to re-imagine local Portland systems to see how to maximize compassion as a natural product of these systems, and see if we can design systems that take care of people by default instead of by exception. To investigate this, we created a podcast series called Deconstructed to highlight the voices of people experiencing homelessness and/or are refugees and those who have a policy perspective on the issue. From our work, we hope to develop a systems map focusing on 'compassion' that can support the work of systems change across sectors.
2. My second action project was created because I was frustrated by the lack of acknowledgment of Black History Month and continuing issues with racism at my school, Lake Oswego High School. I wanted to turn my negative feelings into something positive, so I decided to create a zine where I could organize all of my ideas. My friends, Phyllis Chen and Juliana Sahni, and I started the COLOR zine on February 9, 2018, in hopes of connecting with marginalized students who may feel isolated, ignored, angry, or just tired. Creating the zine was not easy. After filtering and suppressing our own voices for so long in school, we had difficulty at first being completely honest in our writing. We were afraid of what people would think and whether our work would even be read. Despite being afraid, we made a conscious effort to put ourselves out there not just in hopes of opening people’s minds to new perspectives but also for ourselves as a way of organizing our thoughts and feelings from our years in the Lake Oswego School District. We only hoped that it would make even the slightest impact, change maybe one person’s outlook and make one person feel like they have something to relate to, but now it is so much more. People are reading, thinking, feeling, and changing when they read our issues. Our zine’s outreach continues to expand, friends and strangers are sharing it with people across the country and around the globe. COLOR is doing more to change our community for the better than we could’ve ever hoped or dreamed of. To anyone reading this, I implore you to see potential in yourself to create inclusive and positive spaces when they are not provided.
Where do you go from here?
I plan on going to study International Relations, Urban Planning or Public Health at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. In college, I also plan to continue the COLOR Zine and use the skills I learned from YLA in my volunteer and extracurricular work.
