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Young people pouring out of their homes to march in a peace parade, or youth running to the park to sit in a circle and play drums together shouldn’t be radical, it should be everyday. Or the everyday should be radical. But, as far as I know, Petworth has never seen a parade like the that passed through its streets last October on a pretty sunny day. The YLSN builds an infrastructure where positive community-building spontaneity will occur. Its about Destiny leading us….”And a child shall lead them.” She’s our future, and we better give her an opportunity to exercise leadership now, so she knows. So she won’t make so many of the mistakes our own leaders are fumbling through.
People’s Parade Promotes Peace
By Robin Chen Delos,
DC Free Press, September 2001
Young people marched down the middle of streets and sidewalks, chanting “What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!”
A People’s Parade to Promote the Peace was happening in the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest D.C.
Colorful puppets and banners accented the march and drew the neighborhood’s attention to the parade.
Thirty-five youth and half a dozen adult supporters participated in the September 7th parade.
“You don’t need huge numbers to have an effect,” Douglas Calvin said. “A small group of people with creative visibility has an enormous effect.”
For three days before the parade, the Youth Leadership Support Network (YLSN) had been working with the youth from the Manna after-school program, teaching them about banner painting, puppet-making, poetry, performance art, and promoting peace in their neighborhood.
The YLSN is a violence-prevention art education media and training organization serving D.C. area youth, said founder Douglas Calvin, 36.
Neighborhood organizing in underserved areas is the concept behind parades. The YLSN bring peace parades to neighborhoods where there is violence, poverty and a lack of affordable housing.
“There is tremendous potential through parades to involve people in helping to find solutions to the violence in their community and the world,” Calvin said. “People’s Parades for Peace are more important now than ever since a war is upon us.”
Parades encourage people already in groups to participate, but “a lot of young people are not in any group, and these events are for them too,” he said.
The children and teenagers in the Saw parade, who ranged in age from seven to sixteen, passed out “promote the peace” flyers to passers-by on the sidewalk and went over to the windows of cars to give fliers to drivers.
Their youth and positive energy reached the people in the community, particularly the many drivers who honked in support, and hailed the parade with the universal peace sign.
“These kids are the future. They’re the future of this city,” said YLSN organizer Jason McGahan. “For adults to see them expressing themselves like this is powerful. And you can see that in the eyes of everyone they pass.”
One young boy, holding a banner he had painted, was certainly infused with the spirit of the parade. As the parade began, he asked, “Where’s the band, where’s the drums?” then shrugged his shoulders and started chanting “Freedom, freedom, freedom.”
Enabling communication among young people is one goal of People’s Parades for Peace, Calvin said. “It’s about sharing positive activities youth are involved in, whether it is violence prevention, performance art, music, or an open-mic.”
“Young people are told in so many ways that they are powerless. They can’t vote, job opportunities are lousy, freedom of speech and student’s rights are at an all time low. And yet if you look at any movement anywhere in the world you see that it is when young people assert their voice that the world changes.”
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