ARTS knows no culture, gender or religion

The project has been going on and the students are passionate about their ARTs work, we spent this week teaching students how to work with creative Arts materials and produce what is in their mind.
And we have opened them up to the dimension of creative arts and how to communicate their minds through arts.
The students are excited and many of them are beginning to value their arts gift, a student of one of the polytechnic who saw the project banner came into the hall and volunteered to also assist us in teaching the students about the art project and how to work with paper.
Pictures we have attached are those of one of the arts class we were teaching and they were asked to do a practical work of the map of Africa and also to write about peace.
We have a little set back on the cultural dance because we now observed that most schools have not been very particular about cultural dances, so we have also as part of the project started carrying out enlighten campaign on the role of culture in peace building.
The beauty of what we are doing now is that, in the schools we also have Muslims and Christian students working together in their various arts project groups, this is aimed at passing a message that we can work together regardless of our differences and that ART truly can bring us together, because paints knows no gender, race or colour that is what we are projecting.

P.E.A.C.E. Project progresses to the next stage

Project Update





The students after going through their rounds of practicals from our peer instructors on Creative Arts, been able to express their thoughts and feelings through simple Arts and also going through the basics of Essay writing, they would this Saturday compete amongst themselves in the area of Creative Arts and also essay writing to know which of them would be able to express the best of what PEACE means to them.
Through the project funding we are making all materials free to them and the students are eager to show case what they have learnt.
The objective of teaching them this is that they can make the best of their emotions through the arts and use them as a tool for peace building and solving inter religious fights. Instead of drawing what will offend people (The case of the cartoon of Mohammed that drew wide spread criticism and almost a global case of violence) we can use arts for peace and also instead of writing stories against people in their classes or schools and other religion that can stir up strife and violence as young people we can turn that tool already.

Through the skills I learnt from the YAC course on Creative writing, I was able to also inform them on basic keys and shared with them the experience we had with the blog and also the importance of headlines and we encourage as many as have access to the internet to start blogging and they were greatly excited about the project.
A lot of school principal that their student could not participate were so angry that they have asked us if we can make it an annual event, increase the number of participating schools and also make room for more participants.

FD Participant uses knowledge gained from FD Course to impact peers.

When I got in contact with the Youth Action for Change I knew it was going to be a lifetime experience that will positively impact my life. The introduction of courses during the FD project was of immense benefit, one of the courses we did then was on communications and writing especially on blogging.

Since the course I have been a blogger and an author of three books, August 14th specifically, I passed on the knowledge by organizing a creative writing workshop for young people and over 21 of them came from different locations around my region.
We had three guest lecturers the prominent been a USA best selling fiction author DR Sherri Lewis who was the main resource person and other includes Mr. Alexander Ighoro and Chima Ochemba.

The participants were happy about the course and requested for more of those forum to be created and were willing to sign up for an online course.

Ogaga E. Maxwell
Dare 2 Dream Youth Initiative
Warri, Delta State, Nigeria