By Caroline Smith

New Haven’s heart beat a little faster on Saturday.

Donning dresses, bow ties, and leopard-printed pants, 50 students from New Haven Academy marched down Shubert Theater’s red-carpet staircase, quiet pride tucked in the corners of their mouths and eyes as Revolution: New Haven kicked off.  They had become celebrities, surrounded by raucous cheers and camera flashes. They were New Haven’s first-ever Future Fellows.
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Save the Date! The Revolution is approaching, and fast.

For the past seven months, Future Fellows and Coaches in three cities have been putting their noses to the grindstone, creating products, running campaigns, starting clubs and reinventing their own roles in their schools and communities.

And it all culminates at Revolution, a day where we will celebrate the revolutions Fellows have caused in themselves and their community—a day where Fellows will lead by example and call on others to put their dreams into action, too.

Why are we calling it Revolution? Because that’s what our Fellows are igniting. Revolutions that are small and personal, but powerful for them and their communities. And this is their chance to show just how powerful they are.
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Taylor Gatison is a member of New Haven’s Team SWAGG, which is working together on a multimedia project about bullying and its effects.  They’ve got someone filming, someone interviewing, someone directing, etc.  Taylor is the official photographer.  And here is a set of photos she took to express how some teens feel when called certain words, along with Taylor’s own captions.  It’s confrontational, powerful, devastating and shockingly honest.
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Last Saturday afternoon, as Ashoka Youth Venture staff, New York’s social innovators, and NYU’s young leaders gathered to hear 15 future changemakers present their big ideas at the NYU Ashoka Youth Venture Dream It Do It Challenge, all were pleasantly silenced as 16-year-old Future Fellow Mariely Garcia of Richard R. Green High School, and Future Fellow Jacssel Concha of Legacy High School,  took the presentation stage.

“In the short amount of time I have had to get to know Future Project Fellows Jacssel Concha and Mariely Garcia, their messages of hope, courage and teamwork have inspired me to dream big and to never give up, ” said Cosmo Fujiyama, the Ashoka Youth Venture NYU Program Leader.  ”Zoe Young and Megan Quinn, their Future Coaches, are powerful examples of incredible changemakers who are making an positive impact in the lives of the fellows and leading by example.”

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The Future Project’s Co-Founder and President, Kanya Balakrishna, gave the annual Chair of Ideas speech at the Lausanne Collegiate School on Monday.  Past Chair of Ideas awardees include Margaret Mead, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Aldous Huxley.  In her speech, Kanya encouraged the members of the senior class each to be the Chair of Some Idea, to understand that to dream and imagine and create is everyone’s right, and everyone’s responsibility.

Chair of Ideas 2.0

Reimagining School for the 21^st Century 

Remarks of Kanya Balakrishna

2012 Chair of Ideas

Lausanne Collegiate School

Memphis, TN

March 19, 2012

Good morning! And thank you all so much for being here… though I imagine, students, you didn’t have much of a choice!

What a privilege it is to be your Chair of Ideas speaker and to have this chance to come home to Memphis and talk to you all today. I’m incredibly honored and touched that Mr. Blackmon and the administration at Lausanne invited me to join such an esteemed group of speakers. Especially because, like most of you, I feel as though I am just beginning to figure out my journey in life and in my career. But I see today as a chance to bring you along on that journey… and I’m very excited to do so.

That said, I was feeling a bit bad for you seniors that you didn’t get someone more famous as your Chair of Ideas speaker… you know, like the founder of a preeminent political movement or the greatest anthropologist in history or a widely-recognized actress. So I thought the best thing I could do was prove to you in these first minutes of my talk that 1) I am very cool… and 2) that you can therefore totally relate to me, because I basically graduated from Lausanne like five minutes ago.

So to prepare to make this argument, I did three things.

First, in one of the most self-indulgent moments of procrastination I have ever had, I scrolled through all of my Facebook messages… back to the ones I exchanged with other soon-to-be-college-freshmen the summer after I graduated from Lausanne. Remember that back then, high school students weren’t allowed on Facebook, so my class was basically in a silent competition for who would get their college e-mail address first.

Anyway, I thought this might take me back to my days in high school. And it certainly did… in a completely mortifying way. I found such gems as… and this is a direct quote: “I’m DEFINITELY excited about college parties too… I hope you’re fun!… o-m-g Facebook is so, sooooo (that’s “so” with 5 o’s) addictive.” A few more like that, and I had to close Facebook and very aggressively open up The New York Times.
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Shania Billups is a senior ar the Legacy School for Integrated Studies.  Her project is a one-on-one mentoring program pairing homeless youth with mentors who have experienced homelessness themselves, and can help the youth get back into school.  Shania Billups also made me cry.

I knew that New York City’s first-ever Project Primetime on March 3, held at the Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, would be a bustling day of project-building, flyer-making, budget-writing, button-ordering, space-booking, proposal-writing, Twitter-creating, Facebook-posting, team-building and, of course, hummus- eating.  I had no idea, however, that I would find myself with tears in my eyes before the day was over.
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Terrance Draughn is a freshman at New Haven Academy. He’s also a Future Fellow whose project aims to work with special needs kids and get them dancing. Here’s his own dance group, Trouble, Inc., doing exactly that.

I don’t think it’s an kind of secret that we think our Coaches are just as ridiculously wonderful as our Fellows are.  So we’re going to show them some love, too, and let you see some of the Impact Statements they’ve made for their Fellows.

Below, Coach Gordon Deans tells his fellow, Amanda, his hopes for her.  For the second time, grab a Kleenex.

We’ve got more of these to come, but Gordon’s special, partly because he’s the only one from Scotland.

Future Fellow Mariely Garcia, a student at Richard R. Green High School in New York, is working on a campaign called Perfectly Made. Mariely is aiming for nothing less than an entire world of people who know that they are “more valuable than they can possibly imagine.”

Since this week is National Awareness Week for eating disorders, Mariely made this video featuring one amazing young man’s story. Her message: “So many out there are suffering and they need to know that we love them just the way they are. No one has to feel alone in this struggle.”

Go Mariely! And go Steven!

My mom always tells me, “Thanks for DARING to be different!”  That’s where the name of my Future Project, Daring Imagery, comes from.  It grew from my passion for photography.  I love photography because a picture can say so much. Photography is a divine and beautiful way of art. I’ve only understood the world through pictures and dance for as long as I can remember. I hope to capture wonderful pictures that show the major beauty of New York and the wonderful people in it and later around the world. The good and The bad.

Ultimately, I aspire to have an organization called A.F.I.M. (A Friend in Me). This organization will be a visual arts organization dealing with photography, and other arts for and by young teens/young adults ranging from ages 11 to 22.  Soon, I’m going to be setting up an online photography contest for all of NYC.  So watch out!

Check out Justice’s project on Daring Imagery’s Facebook Page!

To learn more and get involved with projects around New York, send a shoutout to nyc@thefutureproject.org.

Justice is a senior at the Legacy School for Integrated Studies.