The next part of step three is choosing what your community campaign will be.
After mapping, it's likely that your students found more than one need or campaign idea.
Well, we started by throwing out some ideas of what we wanted to do
like helping the homeless or bike lanes or gardening.
Your group will need to narrow down the community needs to find
the one your class will develop into a campaign.
Don't forget, you can remind all your students that every need is important and
through community mapping they've all been documented and not forgotten.
But to get started they will need to decide on one starting point.
Let us give you a few examples of easy ways to do this.
After mapping your community,
there are many ways to narrow down your identified needs and campaign ideas.
For example, the sticker decision.
List each campaign idea on a card and place it around the room.
Each student gets three stickers to place on their top three favorite ideas.
At the end of the activity,
collect the cards and count the stickers to see which was voted for most.
Next, the full group vote.
This is best for group members who feel
comfortable saying what they think in front of their peers.
Each student cannot vote more than three times but must vote at least once.
Read the list one at a time and ask
the group to vote for the ideas by raising their hands.
Record the number of votes each idea receives.
Select the top three ideas with the most votes and repeat the process with only those.
This time give each person only one vote.
There should be a clear winner once all the votes have been made.
Last is lobbying for a campaign.
Post the list of campaign ideas for your entire group to see.
Each student picks their favorite and joins the others with
the same opinion to research the issue further and prepare a persuasive case.
Next, each group makes their case to
their peers and lobbies for the campaign of their choice.
Once everyone is presented,
vote using one of the methods mentioned earlier.
So let's do a quick recap.
Three ways to narrow down your campaign if you have
more than one idea are to use the sticker decision,
for group vote, or lobby for a campaign.
And a few tips for success.
There is a chance that your students might find so many problems
they want to fix through community mapping that they can become frustrated.
We actually had some great feedback from one teacher whose class
experienced this after they mapped
the community because students were overwhelmed by all the needs.
If you find yourself in that situation,
what you can do is first emphasize to them that to make change
you need to start in one place even if it feel small in the beginning.
So focus using the methods of narrowing
down ideas and don't be overwhelmed by the possibilities.
Once your young people see that they can have a real impact through
focused dedication then suddenly everything seems possible.
We've also had a few teachers come back and
say that their students are struggling to come up
with an idea even after mapping and answering the questions.
They've had success circling back to
the original observation activities and asking
the students to imagine being a local animal for the day.
Where do they sleep?
What do they eat? What issues are they running into?
And then repeating this for the local human population and the environmental habitats.
There's really no one way to choose a campaign.
It depends on what your curricular goals are and how your group is set up.
In some cases, you might have to provide more direction
in order to steer your group towards the project that will fit
your programmatic goals and that's okay as long as you maintain
youth leadership and youth voice so that students
feel connection to the resulting campaign.