Wassup I’m David Noiles. The youth and you can call me No Lies, and since September this year, I’m the new director of REEP (Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Project). REEP is the youth program within ACE where I spend most of my time talking to young people about environmental justice. If you can imagine, I used to be a youth organizer at REEP over 20 years ago. Shout-out to former ACE Executive Director Penn Loh, I told him that someday I'm going to run this place. First REEP then ACE. I'm happy to say I'm on my way. Now I get to pay it forward with a new generation of youth. Which is a humbling and remarkable opportunity and I look forward to the journey. To say that this is my dream position is an understatement. At REEP, we provide a youth led space, where between twelve and 15 young people come together three days a week. We train them on basic community organizing 101 tactics and strategies like power mapping, script writing for calls to community decisionmakers, how to do one to ones for outreach, etc. While doing the community work, we give them opportunities to discover their own voice and their own power by going to events like the Climate Strike March and speaking up to the school board about adding restorative justice to the budget. Learning and organizing all under the umbrella of Environmental Justice. We appreciate our partnership with BCYF/Successlink, so we can pay our youth to organize. But the truth is, that only handles the hiring piece. There's way more that goes into running our program. We’re just a few days from the end of the year, and we need to hit our $5,000 year-end fundraising goal. Can you give today? |
