A Different Approach to Tribal Youth Education

Project Report | Jul 7, 2020
Ina'am project goes Horizontal

By Benjamin Blevins | Executvie Dircector.

Covid-19 has put the Ina'am training program on hold. The foundation of the program is holding workshops for youth in the skills of organizing to empower communities to participate in the political process to gain concessions and support for programs beneficial to their communities. During this lapse of programming, the staff has not stayed still.

Downtime can provide opportunities for engaging in the networking and capacity building that often gets overlooked when the demands of program implementation on limited budgets have everyone stretched thin. During this time, we have invested efforts in expanding our networks to grow the communities and develop a better sense of how we can organize to be effective allies for youth in marginalized communities.

Currently, we are working on tweaking the workshops so that they can be virtual. Originally, the design of the program was to create a sense of community developed through the participation of youth from different communities together. The program is organized around weekend retreats where fellowship and community building corresponded with skill development. While we are still exploring how to create the same results from virtual training, the problem does present an opportunity to expand the program beyond the geographical restrictions of a limited travel budget and create international links for youth sharing similar cicumstances.

What is community organizing? The foundation of the Highland Support Project is to support community organizers to create change and generate hope. We have seen the tremendous impacts that community members can have in transforming their communities.

Community organizing is typically divided into three different categories.

Organizing a community to have the power to get something. To get a law changed, obtain water from the Municipality, have poor labor conditions improved. This type of organizing is about assisting communities to find their power and use it to obtain concessions or services from an outside entity.
Service & Advocacy. This is doing for someone else. An example of this is medical organization providing health care to a community or collecting food items for distribution. Advocacy is when outsiders work to raise awareness for policies to be changed. Both of these represent outsiders organizing as allies for a community.
Community Development. In organizing language, community development is about creating the capacity and/or infrastructure that are beneficial and empowering for a community. To describe what community development starts with describing what it is not. Housing is an example. A government can provide loans and tax credits to Real Estate developers to purchase homes and then rent them out to community members in need of housing. This is not considered to be community development because wealth creation, ownership, and opportunity are vested in people outside of the community in need. An alternative is programs that assist communities with financing for community savings and loan and supports homeownership or community-run properties.

What is a community? We are all familiar with the concept of community as a geographical description of people that live in close proximity. But, there are also faith, sexual orientation, social media influencer communities. Community organizing is about identifying people with similar interests and needs and networking them together to obtain the social capital necessary to have the "agency" to improve their lives and our world.

The Ina'am project is about building a community between young Indigenous people of Arizona with young people from other communities in the state and around the world. First, it is about networking experiences and ideas. Second, it is about defining shared goals and objectives. Third, it is about developing power for influencing systems that have an impact on everyone. Finally, it is about informing allies how they can best serve through services and advocacy.

To this end, Muna Hijazi, the Ina'am project coordinator has spent the last three months developing connections with migrant organizers, indigenous youth education programs, and Palestinian communities to formulate an agenda around issues of systemic dehumanization, the use of borders and prisons to control populations, and cultural identity of controlled populations.

I have attached video to this report of Muna Hijazi conducting the last training with student organizers in Virginia as part of HSP's advocacy campaign for the Tohono O'odham nation.

Thank you for your support of community organizing and youth empowerment. The future is in their hands.

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Mar 6, 2020
We Are Over The Hump

By Benjamin Blevins | Executvie Dircector.

Muna Hijazi speaking about border issues.

We are excited to report that a generous funder has assisted us in passing the halfway mark to obtaining the amount needed to begin the Ina’am project in Arizona. During the last quarter, we have been focusing on the outreach to secure the remaining funding required to launch the program. We are confident that we will be able to initiate this programming in May of 2020.

The Ina'am project is a non-partisan training program for indigenous and refugee organizers in Arizona focused on developing their legislative and electoral ability in the run-up to the 2020 elections. The program will include training and mentorship for running successful candidates and issue campaigns on every level, as well as topics identified and prioritized by participants. Participants will hone pre-existing and essential organizing skills while simultaneously learning how to share them with others, thus building ability, confidence, and networks. This train-the-trainer program will focus on sharpening skills, talents, and interests to support participants’ own organizing goals and exponentially increase the political engagement and effectiveness of their communities.

Muna Hijazi is the program director and author of the Ina'am project. As a Palestinian American, she can feel the parallels in the experience of the first nation communities of Arizona and the growing refugee community in the South West. Over the last quarter, Muan has been conducting outreach with University and faith-based groups to promote unity and solidarity between grass-roots organizations to facilitate the scalability of independent movements into a collective voice for political impact.

Check out www.highlandsupportproject.org collection of videos in the next few days to watch one of Muna's outreach events.

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Dec 5, 2019
Inaam Youth Organizing Project

By Benjamin Blevins | Ben Blevins

The Ina’am Project has identified 10-15 accomplished and active organizers throughout Arizona who are currently dedicated to critical and often urgent campaigns in their indigenous, refugee and immigrant communities. Examples include an Apache organizer training his community on how to effectively advocate to legislators and pass good laws; and Oodham organizer and her collective who are fighting back the construction of the illegal border wall through their reservation; several young Muslim Arizonans who currently volunteer for free to help protect the rights of their community; recent Sudanese and Somali immigrants who are trying to teach their communities about how to engage in their new democracy; and many Arab community leaders intent on sharing their culture with their neighbors and working together to establish a stronger, more united voice civically. The Ina’am Project will launch officially in January 2020, after a brief delay in Fall of 2019 in implementing in order to better assess and tailor the program for participants, as well as wonderfully take time to plan for better, expanded programming after generous match donations increased the budget and thus timeline for this project.

Ina’am Project Initial overview

The Ina’am Project would be a first-time non-partisan training program for indigenous and refugee organizers in Arizona focused on developing their legislative and electoral ability in the run-up to the 2020 elections. The program will include training and mentorship for running successful candidates and issue campaigns on every level, as well as topics identified and prioritized by participants. Participants will hone pre-existing and essential organizing skills while simultaneously learning how to share them with others, thus building ability, confidence, and networks. This train-the-trainer program will focus on sharpening skills, talents, and interests to support participants’ own organizing goals and exponentially increase the political engagement and effectiveness of their communities.

The immediate goal of the Ina’am Project is to identify, recruit, train, support and mentor potential and/or current nonprofit and campaign staff, as well as possible candidates for office, from the indigenous and refugee communities of Arizona in preparation for 2020. If the Ina’am project proves successful, the eventual goal is the establishment of the Ina’am Foundation, a home-grown think tank and speaker’s bureau of indigenous and refugee activist experts with local, national and international reach.

Why

On the heels of largely successful midterm elections in 2018 with record-smashing levels of engagement and voter participation, it is apparent that the progressive community of Arizona is full of talented organizers at many levels with almost limitless potential, hungry to excel and succeed in their shared goals. Indigenous and refugee populations across the Southwest and Midwest are building their collective power and using it to win elected office and issue campaigns, a trend that promises to continue into 2020 as critical issues force them to urgently organize effectively. Rightly so, many outside organizations are eager to invest in strengthening the progressive community in Arizona as it prepares to yet again take on electoral and legislative fights on all levels that have regional, national and international consequences.

However, outside engagement has historically been intermittent and unreliable. Organizers and stakeholders in Arizona, often one and the same, have seen crucial campaigns lost because of the sudden departure of such actors and resources, sometimes with brutal consequences for themselves and their communities. Meanwhile, an estimated 80-90% of the funds that came into Arizona to support election work here in 2018 went directly to out-of-state consultants, who take with them that investment when they leave. Given this incessant pattern, it’s no surprise that Arizona today has almost no progressive infrastructure with which to effectively capture the majority of outside investment. As proven best actors whose campaigns have consequences for everyone, local dedicated organizers deserve this investment finally to flow more directly to them and stay within their local economy.

With Arizona on the precipice of becoming a majority-minority state, once seemingly disparate groups are connecting their issues and struggle to one another. Indigenous and refugee people are natural allies given the challenges they face. In fact, these labels are often interchangeable depending upon which side of a border someone happens to be on at the time. For instance, many recent migrants across the US/Mexico border were, up until making the trek north, living in their indigenous communities and now are refugees in the US. As another example, the Tohono O’odham reservation straddles the US/Mexico border, splitting their community and making them each refugee in effect stranded on their own indigenous homeland. Additionally, generations of refugees from places such as Somalia and Palestine are finding common cause with Natives in Arizona as they all address issues such as racism, representation, militarism, and land/water resources.

Thank you for support Indigenous Youth Empowerment through capacity building and training grants.

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