Oct 8, 2022
The EVAC Movement started with a group of students and our teacher, Amy Donofrio, in Jacksonville, Florida. Our class was full of conflict and divided, until we began sharing our stories, and realized our shared traumatic experiences: murdered loved ones, incarceration, and police brutality. We began not only to bond…but motivated to create change. We began by inviting police officers to class for youth-led roundtables and just over one year later, these powerful in-class discussions led to us speaking at the White House, meeting President Barack Obama, making the front page of The New York Times and winning first-place nationwide in a contest sponsored by Harvard. We share this journey in our Tedx Talk, “At-Risk or At-Hope? How We Label Youth Matters.”