The 2023-24 school year has begun and BUHS PeaceJam has hit the ground running. We met with senior members Django Grace and Eva Gould to plan their first speaker event:
On September 28, Chuck Collins, activist, storyteller, campaigner captivated students at BUHS. Collins is co-editor of Inequality.org and director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies. The author of numerous books on the impact of inequality, Chuck was born into the top 1 percent as the great grandson of meatpacker Oscar Mayer. He ‘hooked’ students with his descirption of having had a front row seat to extreme wealth. His presentation, How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It, was interactive & captivating. Freshman Eason Demarsico was thrilled to be introduced to PeaceJam by way of this event. He noted how valuable it was to learn about economic inequality from someone who grew up in the 1 percent; “I recorded it so now I can go back to his suggestions for what we can do to address the problem of wealth in this country being skewed to so few and at the expense of so many.”
Peace Jam will continue their Billion Bikes for Peace iniative and are currently in duscussion with local business owners about the possibility of creating a community bike shop.
On October 25, Brattleboro’s Sustainability Coordinator, Stephen Dotson & our local chapter of Bill McKibben’s Third Act will join PeaceJam students for a discussion about how sustainability, equity, justice, and peace are all connected and can be foundational values for any career someone chooses to pursue. We aim to foster more interactions where youth learn from the progress that the generations before they made, and older generations learn from the new battles younger people are facing and together develop ways to address them.
