The Meeting I Didn't Want to Go To

Last night I had a meeting in Columbus to represent PAVE or Prevent Assault & Violence Education. The meeting was at the Columbus Public Library MLK branch on Long Street. It took a while to find it and it was in a part of town with boarded-up homes and businesses.

It was after a long day at work, a long drive, and a rushed lunch. The last thing I wanted to do was attend a meeting out of town, at night and where the library’s slow internet connection made the presentation drag on. I had even taken our PAVE President along to keep me company and I felt that it was important for her to hear about the changes being made in the Strategies Against Violence Everywhere (SAVE) Awards program.

Our group has been part of SAVE off and on since its inception in 1994. We have an amazing group of teens in our program this year and they still keep coming! Over 50 high school students from all over Licking  County –from Heath, Newark, Utica, Licking Valley, Licking Heights,  Johnstown, Granville Christian Academy and more! –have signed up to be part of PAVE. And they were so interested and dedicated to participating in SAVE this year that I felt obligated to attend and see if we would be able to continue with the program that culminates with limo rides and on-stage performances in April 2011. If we were going to do it, this meeting was mandatory.

I knew that there were changes coming to the SAVE program this year. Tracy Thornton who is the Awards Advisor with the SAVE program had told me that already. Normally our teens would have to spend a couple days in Columbus with mandatory conflict resolution and media literacy training, a Peace Camp and then auditions. This year however, we need to spend about 9 hours, or 1 session a week, with SAVE and Tracy could not travel to Licking County to provide those trainings. Once we worked out a plan for me to shadow her, I could teach our teens the new SAVE curriculum. There would be different levels of accomplishment that our group could achieve and that seemed very reasonable.

Someone we had been working with during the past year joined the meeting late. DingDing Ma from Asian American Community Services (AACS) was there and she works with their Healthy Asian Youth (HAY) program. We had been on their committee to prepare for the GenerAsian Next event held at OSU this past August.. That alone made the trip worthwhile. Tawnee, the PAVE President,  and I both got hugs from her, along with the sad news of an AACS staff resignation. I told her that I would miss seeing that person at regional events, but hoped that meant I would see DingDing more often and I offered to help her in any way she needed me or PAVE. She immediately said that she knew that and that she would love to keep working with us. Not just me, but the teens in our program, too! We had already shown them so much!

During the meeting, I had the chance to share PAVE and SAVE’s history together with everyone who was there. It was great to see so many smiling faces when I talked about how empowering the work was for our group and the fact that one student had been with us since he was a high school freshman, had done the SAVE Awards, and the video of that performance was now a teaching tool that he uses as one of our contract staff in the high school classrooms. It was such a win-win-win situation!

Many other representatives who were there had never been involved with SAVE or ever heard of PAVE. It was so rewarding to leave that meeting – the one I thought I didn’t want to go to – with those thoughts of all the new youth who will be impacted by participating in this year’s SAVE. I could picture our teens enjoying their limo ride as they exit and are greeted by “hundreds of adoring fans” yelling their names while flash bulbs are popping! Tawnee talked about the possibilities that PAVE could do for our performance this year and what we had done in the past…and everything that we had to live up to after all those comments and stories.

So now it begins…working with the teens to decide yet again how to spread their messages of anti-violence at SAVE, teaching them more about conflict resolution and media literacy, raising awareness about so many issues that touch them, and giving them some alternatives and solutions that they can really use and live with. That’s what PAVE is about. That’s why so many students are involved this year – they heard us asking: do you want to help? Their answer was a resounding “YES!”

--Jan GreenRiver

Director of Prevention