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A grant from the Center's Mix It Up project helped New Hampshire and Baltimore middle school students understand each others' culture. Both groups pose in front of Baltimore's Stadium Middle School.
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BALTIMORE -- Shanae Peoples and the rest of her Stadium Middle School class here are crossing state borders in order to break down more difficult cultural ones.
Last spring, Peoples and her class participated in the second part of an ongoing exchange between her Baltimore classmates and classes from the Orchard School and Vilas Middle School in rural Alstead, New Hampshire. The exchange, which began in 2002, is supported in part by a Mix It Up grant from the Center.
The idea for the interstate exchange, according to Peoples, was to give the New Hampshire students a taste of what life is like in an urban area such as Baltimore.
With the receipt of the Mix It Up grant, the students were indeed able to show their peers what Baltimore life is like, a life that for the exchange participants included dancing, seafood, weekend home stays, a trip to the National Aquarium and diversity training. All those activities were designed to expose the New Hampshire students to experiences not readily available in New Hampshire.
Even ice-skating, something with which many New England 7th and 8th graders are intimately familiar, came with a twist. For Peoples, skating was less about being on the ice than about hearing "the music and (tasting) the food we like," she said.
Project benefits millions
The students who participated in the interstate exchange are just a few of the millions of students who have benefited from the Mix It Up program, which includes a popular Mix It Up Day — set this year for November 16 — the grants program and support of Mix It Up dialogue groups.
An estimated 2,500 schools nationwide participated in the first Mix It Up Day in 2002, a number that nearly tripled to almost 7,000 schools for the second Mix It Up Day a year later in November 2003.
The Center's Mix It Up program supports student activists who want to take on the challenge of questioning, addressing and crossing social boundaries.
In addition to promoting Mix It Up Day, the Center also distributes grants to fund projects similar to that of the Baltimore-New Hampshire exchange. In 2003, the Center awarded 85 grants for a total of $21,250. As of this month, 44 grants totaling $11,000 have been awarded in 2004.
Jennifer Holladay, interim director of the Center's tolerance programs, said Mix It Up is necessary because despite social gains of the past 50 years "many unspoken rules continue to divide people by color, religion, class, ability, appearance and other factors."
Holladay said Mix It Up's success was due in part to generosity of the Center's donors who "had a direct impact on hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren."
Additional information about the Mix It Up program can be found at www.mixitup.org.
SPLC Report
June 2004
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