Activity: Community Tour

Objectives:

• Identify important places in your community or neighborhood
• Identify strengths and issues in your community
• Develop a visual database on young people’s perspectives of their community
• Understand how these strengths and issues affect you
  

Duration: 2 –3 hours

1. In preparation for the community tour, brainstorm with the participants and list down three places that they like the most and three places they don’t like. Some of the best places may be ones you marked on your community map.
2. The next step would be to list these places on a large sheet of paper as a group but one participant or a place at a time.
3. Next to the name of each place, give reasons why it is bad or good. They should think about why it is that they like to go to some places and avoid others.
4. As a group, decide which six places (three best and three worst) you would like to visit on the community tour.
5. Plot out the trip on your map (for example, which place will you go first, and which streets will you take to get there, where will you go next, and how will you get there from the first place etc.) or create a script for your tour or use an available map. Consider time of day when planning the tour. Will it be dark when you reach your destination? Will places be closed? Also, be sure to allow enough time to see each place you want to go to.
6. While visiting the places, the participants should be encouraged to sketch those in their sketchbooks.

   A good extension to this activity could be creating a community collage or photomontage by finding images online, taking photographs (preferably with a digital camera), or creating some other illustrations of your community. As a group, put these images and the sketches together in a collage or create a photomontage using software such as Photoshop. Discuss what makes your community unique. Photography encourages young participants to look at their community in new ways and provides an opportunity to document and communicate their perspectives in a fun and creative way to the larger community. Share your work with other YAN groups and people in your community.

Comments: Allow time at the end of the session to reflect of what has been accomplished. This may be done as a group discussion, or the participants can write it on a sheet of paper that would be included in the YAN Box. Post these questions (or similar ones) for reference as you reflect:

• What do you feel are the main strengths and weaknesses of your community? In other words, what are the best and worst things about your community?
• How do these strengths and weaknesses personally affect you?
• What had made you form these ideas of these places? If there is limitation of time, the end of the session could be used to start the discussion, which could be continued in the next session.

Note: Depending on the locale, you may need a car or transportation to get to some places within the neighborhood. For example, in one of the Computer Clubhouses in Costa Rica, the kids could not walk alone with digital cameras in some parts of the community because of the presence of drug peddlers. Instead they did a project based on a radio program from within the Clubhouse. The facilitators have to make sure that the areas to be visited are safe, especially if the participants are going to carry cameras.

Examples of community tours in past YAN projects : A project about peace in the community carried out as part of YAN in the Computer Clubhouse at Charlestown, Boston, in May 2003, involved the tour of the community by the participants with the volunteers.In the first of what became a series of 2-hour weekly sessions, 10 young members between 12 and 15 years of age participated. First, we briefly introduced the goals of the project and asked them to list down the names of the places that they considered peaceful and non-peaceful in Charlestown. Then, organized in groups, they took us – the mentors – in a guided tour around those places and used the Clubhouse cameras to register everything.

In the second session of the same project, pictures of community areas taken by participants were printed and were used to foster a discussion about what was it that made some places more peaceful than others. It was interesting to realize that sometimes a single place may be considered peaceful by some and non-peaceful by others. Issues of war and religion have also been raised. At the end, young participants were very happy for the opportunity to express their opinions and find out more about what the others thought.

To see photos of community tours in past YAN projects click here