Roughly 95 percent of the high school students in America today believe the world will be a worse place in thirty years, with more violence and more pollution. Some of us feel so overwhelmed by the problems, and so depressed by our planetary mess, that we've turned cold. It's hard not to turn cold in the face of it all; especially when that's exactly what so many people around us are doing.
It was often hard for me to be growing up in this generation. I felt deeply concerned about the state of our world, and had been raised to think of service as a fundamental part of my life. Questions of the arms race, homelessness, ecology, and planetary survival were discussed in my family daily, and I learned early to consider myself and my actions in relationship to the great issues of our time. Most important, I was raised to think and feel that the choices I make and the way I live can make a difference. Most of my peers did not feel so empowered and supported by their parents. They seemed more interested in shopping malls and MTV than stopping global warming and feeding the hungry. I often felt isolated among people my own age, for few of them seemed motivated to do something about the problems and pain of the world.
When I was fifteen, I attended a summer camp sponsored by an organization called Creating Our Future. There, for the first time, I met other young people willing to really talk about the state of our world, young people who wanted to work for positive change. It was exhilarating for me to realize that there were in fact many young people all over the world who cared. We explored issues ranging from saving the rainforests to healing sexism and racism, and looked at how we could bring peace to our families, our communities, and our world. One of the people I met at that camp was Ryan Eliason, then age eighteen.
Ryan and I quickly became good friends, and we decided that we wanted to work together. We knew many young people were lost in apathy and despair, and we wanted to let them know they could make a difference and help them to learn how. So in the spring of 1990 we started Youth for Environmental Sanity, or YES!. EarthSave International, the nonprofit organization my dad had started, took us on as a project and gave us office space and a computer. My dad's work had inspired many people, some of them wealthy and prominent. So with help from him and the people with whom he put us in contact, combined with the hardest work of our lives, we were able to raise money, find other young people to join us, and start an organization.
Our first assembly presentation was at Galileo High School in San Francisco. An inner city school surrounded by a barbed wire fence, Galileo is one of the tougher schools in Northern California, with a significant gang population and a high drop-out rate. Upon arrival at the school, we realized we had forgotten to ask for a sound system. No problem, the principal said, handing us a megaphone. So there we were a half hour later, standing in front of three hundred kids, half of whom didn't speak English well, with a battery-powered megaphone amplifying and distorting our words, in an enormous gym that seemed to keep each sound echoing off the walls for at least ten seconds. Annoyed by the strain of trying to hear us, the students began to chatter among themselves, while we stood there like a bunch of fools and lectured them on the virtues of living in harmony with the Earth.
I don't think many of the students could have heard us even if they had wanted to. We hadn't yet arrived at the end of our presentation when the bell rang. The students got up and left, without waiting for us to finish, or even clapping. I asked one departing girl what she'd thought of the assembly. "Bo-ring," was her only answer. At that moment, I wished I could crawl into the nearest hole in the ground and never come out. We had so many hopes and dreams invested in the YES! tour, and now I wondered if it might all be for naught.
As we left Galileo, we were one dejected bunch. We might have canceled the whole tour and given up on changing the world right then, except for the fact that we had an assembly at Los Altos High School already scheduled for the following morning. We went out to a restaurant that night and made a list of everything we had done wrong in our presentation. The list went on for eight single-spaced pages. The bottom line was that we had talked, and given statistics, but we hadn't related to the people in the room. Our presentation had lacked humor, music, visuals, entertainment, and perhaps most important, personal depth. We stayed up all night brainstorming ways to improve our presentation and then talking about how to implement them. When we arrived at Los Altos the next morning, we were nervous, exhausted, and yet excited to see how our ideas would work. The response was outstanding, with dozens of students coming up to us after the presentation to thank us and tell us how much the assembly had meant to them.
As the years went by, our presentations improved. The more we did it, the better we got at reaching diverse audiences. The YES! tour has now reached more than a half million students through assemblies in thousands of schools. We've conducted hundreds of day-long workshops in thirty-five states. And realizing that assemblies aren't enough time to really change lives, we've organized fifty-four weeklong summer camps for young environmental leaders from thirty countries, camps that have taken place in not only the United States but also Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, and Costa Rica. YES! camps bring together diverse young adults who share the vision of a better world and offer support and skills for compassionate and effective action...
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