This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content. You can search the text using Ctrl-F, and you can also play the audio by clicking on a desired timestamp.
I wanted to start this session by reading a little bit from a letter. This panel right here, this pink one just came into our offices this week over the weekend, and Evelyn, who is our quilt caretaker, showed it to me and she gave me this letter. I think it speaks very [00:00:30] well to why we are having this conference. Diane's sister wrote this letter. She says this quilt represents her 27 short years in pictures. Then she goes on to talk a bit about her life. And then she says, if kids in school [00:01:00] were told about condoms in the early eighties, my sister might have been alive today to lead a normal and healthy life. She would have had a family, but now we can only remember her in our dreams. And in this quilt, her dream was to go to California. She never made it, but her quilt will. [00:01:30] Before I started organising this conference, I didn't really know very much about what was going on with quilt projects around the world. So one thing we did was in your registration. We included a questionnaire and I wanted to show you briefly. Some of the results to help us get a picture [00:02:00] of what we are we are doing internationally in terms of education. And again, this is in your binder. 24 people responded through their questionnaires. 24 countries. First, we asked you to indicate your interest in the five areas education, display, logistics, [00:02:30] fundraising, media relations and volunteers. As you can see, education was the primary interest. I know you're all interested in all of these topics. We could probably spend a day on each of them. Another question we asked. We gave a whole long list of educational topics [00:03:00] and we asked you to say, which were the three most important to you. And these are them using the quilt for HIV prevention, using the quilt to encourage support for people with AIDS and designing an education programme for your quilt project. [00:03:30] I also wanted to find out how many of you are bringing the quilt into schools and into your communities. 19 of the 24 of you said that you have an active educational programme. 14 countries are bringing the quilt into schools. At least 18 are doing displays in the community. [00:04:00] And one thing I wanted to find out is how many of you teach HIV prevention safer sex, HIV transmission. When you go into a school, 14 of you said you do 10 said. You don't in this country, we don't. We work with other groups that provide that information. But whether you do that or not, you'll know best about [00:04:30] what works in your country. 16 of you said that you work with organisations that provide HIV prevention. What do we mean when we say using the quilt for HIV prevention? It's different for each of us. What I'm going to talk about in this session is what I know our model here in the United States. This afternoon we'll be hearing [00:05:00] some of your models in your countries and I hope we'll have a chance to talk a lot about those. I wanted to give you a brief sense of what our educational efforts are at the Names Project Foundation. At this point, I would estimate we are reaching between two and 300,000 students every year with a quilt through our different programmes, and [00:05:30] that number is rapidly increasing every year. We don't just reach youth. We try to reach everyone who is at risk for HIV infection, which is everyone, and especially those populations that now have high infection rates in this country. We have display programmes that go into businesses into religious settings, colleges, communities. [00:06:00] Today we'll be focusing on our high school programme. We are having a big focus on youth at the Names project here in San Francisco because most of the people who are dying of AIDS in this country were infected when they were youths. AIDS is now the leading cause of death among people [00:06:30] ages 25 to 44 most of whom were infected in their teens and early twenties. One out of two infections occurs in someone under 25 years of age. One in four occurs in someone under 20 years of age. So how are [00:07:00] we going to reach these young people? Recently, we've started a programme called the National High School Quilt Programme. Although we've been educating youth for years through our displays and with our national chapters, it was it's hard often to, as you may know, to get school kids from the community to come to a big display to have the money to have [00:07:30] them bussed in and to get the school to bring them. Also, our chapters cannot possibly meet the demand that we have to bring the quilt into schools in this country. So we started the high school programme. It's our first programme whose primary goal is to use the quilt for HIV prevention education. [00:08:00] It's also the first programme where we have done a thorough evaluation and obtained results. As Marcus said. It's very hard to evaluate the impact of the quilt. We don't really need to because we know that it works. [00:08:30] But in this country at least in order to get money, you need to show other people you need to have data that say this is effective. I hope that many of the strategies and activities in this programme you can adapt to other audiences as well in your country and each country has received a full set of the programme materials. [00:09:00] We began designing the programme in the fall of 1993 and we've had about 90 school displays so far. We're increasing that number very quickly each semester we began very small with only seven schools to test all the materials to make sure they really work and [00:09:30] one thing I wanted to say about our materials is that when it fell to me to start writing these, of course, in a very short period of time, I looked around for what was already out there and I found some wonderful lesson guides from United Kingdom Names, Project and names Project Canada. And many of those ideas are in the lesson guide for our high school programme. And that's what I mean by a network [00:10:00] of quilt educators sharing all of our ideas with each other. How does this programme work? First of all, high school in this country is for students ages 14 to 18 years old. Often these schools invite younger students in as well to see the quilt. Our programme is [00:10:30] free of charge to the schools, which means that we spend a lot of time scrambling around to get money. The centres for disease control has given us some support, and we also have foundation and corporate support. If you're starting a programme or trying to expand yours and you want ideas about raising money, Paula Harris. I see some nods [00:11:00] out there. It's the hardest part. Paul Harris is one of the people in our development department who has made this programme happen. It's been her dream. She will be here this afternoon, and she is happy to talk with you today or in the next few days. While you're here about funding ideas for education, [00:11:30] the programme is one week long. We don't send a names project person to each school because these schools are all over the country. At first we were very scared. What's going to happen to our quilt? If we ship it to a high school and you may be aware of the level of violence [00:12:00] in many American high schools and inner cities, we give them a display handbook, which is in your binders that tells them how to care for the quilt. We have been in inner city schools in New York City, where the students are in gangs and one school I can think of in the Bronx that fits that description. In New [00:12:30] York City, those students have made more panels than any other school in this country. In this country, those students are the most affected by AIDS. Some of those students have made panels for their parents. We have never had a problem. The students treat the quilt with the utmost respect. [00:13:00] The school submits an application to us, telling us how they will use the quilt to further HIV prevention in their school. Then we begin shipping materials to them. We have a lesson guide for teachers. We have a poster, We have video tapes and books [00:13:30] and we have a guide for students, which is out on the table. There they get a very small amount. What is to us a very small amount of quilt sections between one and four of the sections you see hanging here. We worried. Would this be enough to have an impact? [00:14:00] Because this programme? Because in this programme the quilts stay in the school for a week and the students organise everything with their teachers. They plan the programme. They set up the quilt. They invite the speakers, they lead their classmates [00:14:30] on tours of the quilt and we found it has a tremendous impact. These schools can't even bear to send the quilt back to us because they feel like it has become part of them. In that week, I mentioned that there's it's organised by students and teachers. We ask [00:15:00] them to form what we call a quilt display team. This afternoon you will meet a quilt display team from a school in California and you'll learn a bit more about how those teams work. I think that of all the things that make this programme successful, having the students and the teachers organise it as they see fit for their school [00:15:30] has made a tremendous difference. I want to talk for a moment about the goals of the programme. The first goal is to make AIDS real to young people. We know what this means to show the human side of the epidemic. We have a very big problem [00:16:00] with reaching youth in this country and I don't know if you have the same problem. Our young people think they are invulnerable. They are young, they cannot conceive that they could ever die or even get a terrible illness in this country. Many young people know that they should use condoms. They've gotten that information [00:16:30] or that they can abstain from sex to protect themselves. Many of them do not use that information because they don't believe that it applies to them. Our next in our next session, Julie Taylor will be talking about some of the effective ways to teach adolescents about how to protect [00:17:00] themselves, and an important component of that is to help them realise that they, too, are vulnerable for them to believe I can get AIDS. And this is where the quilt can make a tremendous contribution. Educators in this country are tremendously frustrated [00:17:30] because they are teaching some of them. They are trying to teach young people to protect themselves and they can't get through. And then they understand that the quilt can help them to get through. We send the schools panels that are made in memory of young people, and we send them panels that are from their town or their city. This is another area of the programme that has made [00:18:00] it very strong. When a young person sees a panel for another young person, it hits home. This was a panel. Most panels in the quilt are made by friends and family. Dwayne made his own panel. It reads [00:18:30] My name is Dwayne Kearns, per year. I was born on December 20th, 1964. I was diagnosed with AIDS on September 7th, 1987 at 4:45 p.m. I was 22 years old. Sometimes it makes me very sad. I made this panel myself. If you are reading it, [00:19:00] I am dead. If any of you work with young people, you can imagine the impact this panel has on them. And so we made sure that every school could know about it. By putting this panel on a poster, we found that while many students immediately get the impact of the quilt, [00:19:30] but some students have a little trouble focusing in, or maybe they're a little afraid of it. Or maybe they're overwhelmed. So we do. We do an exercise with them. It's called Looking at a panel. It's in our lesson guide, and the teachers in the schools give these worksheets to the students when they visit the quilt in their school. [00:20:00] It's in your binder. We have it in Spanish and in English under Section two. It's a few pages in about the student. Um, Well, actually, what we do is we get the lesson guide. That's a good question. We get the lesson guide. Uh, I'm sorry. The question is, do you give this worksheet [00:20:30] to the students when they arrive at the display. I recently went on a trip and observed this programme in action and I saw a teacher who's never met anyone from the names project. Teach her class, take out this worksheet and prepare them to do the exercise. But you can also hand it to students right at the [00:21:00] display. Either way, we have it in our student guide as well. Recently went on a trip and observed this programme in action. And I saw a teacher who's never met anyone from the names project Teach her class, take out this worksheet and prepare them to do the exercise. But you can also [00:21:30] hand it to students right at the display. Either way, we have it in our student guide as well. What I would like you to do right now is to do this exercise. It'll get us standing up and also it's a way to be close to the quilt. And I have to admit I also have a selfish reason, which is I hope you will come and tell me later what you think about this exercise. [00:22:00] And could it work in your country? Um I would like to ask to please not use this as a time for the break because we are running behind schedule, and as soon as I'm done, we'll have the break. You may not even have time to complete the whole exercise, but you can get started on it. So what I would like you to do is to pick one panel, get up out of your chairs, pick one panel in the room. [00:22:30] You might want to try imagining that you are 16 years old in your country. What panel might interest you and try answering these questions that I think that in addition to reminding students that they, too, are mortal, the [00:23:00] quilt has a very positive message to adolescents. That message says these people in the quilt were loved, and now they are missed. They are mourned, just as you would be missed and mourned if you died. It reminds them of [00:23:30] the value of human life, sometimes the troubles of adolescence and of poverty, racism, homophobia. These problems can overwhelm young people and make them feel that their life isn't valuable. Many of them are self [00:24:00] destructive or take dangerous risks with their lives. Because the quilt is a celebration of human life, it reminds young people that everyone's life is valuable, including their own. The second goal of the programme is to initiate discussion about HIV and AIDS. [00:24:30] As we know, the quilt makes it easier for everyone to talk about AIDS and the issues that go along with that which are not openly discussed in many countries. We have a lesson God that helps teachers to lead their students in discussions about the quilt, [00:25:00] and I know that many of you have lesson guides that you use as well. The third goal of the programme is to act as a focal point for HIV prevention education to create an environment conducive to teaching HIV prevention information. [00:25:30] In this in this country, there are some schools that teach almost nothing but some schools. They are getting this information a lot and they're tired of it. The quilt invigorates them to keep talking and to keep learning about AIDS. It motivates young people [00:26:00] to learn this information. I think for our programme with the high schools, what has been most successful is we tell the schools the quilt is the centre of your HIV prevention programme and we give them some ideas of what they can plan to go along with that, [00:26:30] inviting in people with AIDS and HIV, preferably young people doing theatre, having classroom discussion about transmission, the kind of instruction that Julie will be talking about soon. That really helps young people to know how to use these safer behaviours. What's been amazing for me is I've travelled around, [00:27:00] is how each school has created their completely own quilt programme. I visited three schools in South Dakota, a very rural state, more cows than people, and one of those schools was on a Lakota Indian reservation, and those students made this panel up here. [00:27:30] Another one of those schools was a school for the deaf run by the state government. I'd like to take about 10 minutes to show you a video tape from that school's opening ceremony of the quilt. I'll pause at a couple of points to orient you to what they're doing. Yeah. Oh, could you pause a moment? [00:28:00] This was shot videotaped by the students, and the whole programme was planned by the students. The first person they have 4 12 by 12 S up on their school stage, and there's a sign language interpreter. So the English is pretty clear and slow. I think you'll be able to get most of it. The first person speaking is the state HIV prevention [00:28:30] coordinator. Could you roll the tape? Each panel tells the story of someone whose life has been cut short by AIDS. Today, the quilt travels all over the world. Can you get to convention centres to colleges and universities, to churches and now to high schools? The National High School Quilt programme is about people working together here at the South Dakota School for the Deaf. It's about students and teachers, parents [00:29:00] and community members who care about AIDS and who want to make a difference. AIDS is sometimes hard to talk about. People are frightened or embarrassed or simply do not know where to begin. The quilt is the tool that initiates that dialogue. This event has brought your school together to work on one of the most alarming health issues facing young people today. [00:29:30] AIDS. On behalf of the South Dakota Department of Education and Cultural Affairs Office of the Secretary, Dr John Bonito, it's my pleasure to publicly acknowledge the overwhelming contributions of the students here at this school. Your participation in this pilot project has exceeded all expectations. I'm touched by the commitment of this entire community by the dedication and the cooperation [00:30:00] of administration faculty members and staff who continue to open wide the doors of this school for new experiences for students here. Most importantly, though, are the contributions that are made by you the students, whether your volunteer hours included helping with media displays, making red ribbons, guiding people to the quilt display, reading the names, taking photos, [00:30:30] offering special music or designing leafs panel each and every one of you has reason to be proud. Thank you also to the family, for sharing your stories of life with these students and for allowing them to use fabric and pictures and symbols to create something as beautiful as this panel. In honour of him as students of the South Dakota [00:31:00] School for the Deaf, you are a positive role model not only to students across this state, but today you are role models to students nationwide. You have truly met the challenge of keeping the love alive, and we thank you very much. Panel for a graduate of the School for the Deaf, This winner, the South Dakota [00:31:30] School for the deaf formed an improvisational group, South Dakota School for the Deaf. Students were trained by students and advisers from Washington High School. The advisor for this group are Jana Carlson from SDS and Betty Charlton from CSD. And these students have developed several skips that they will perform now to help in AIDS prevention education. If you pause the tape a moment, please this activity, these skits that they're doing [00:32:00] was not something they ever did before the quilt came to their school. In fact, many of the students in this school had never even heard of AIDS before this quilt display. Because they're deaf, they're cut off from the culture more. In the first Theatre skit, you will see the theme is Who here has AIDS? In the second skit, you will see two Studentss [00:32:30] boyfriend and girlfriend trying to decide whether to have sex, whether to use a condom. OK, please roll the tape. I [00:33:00] you'll notice that some of the students in the audience, when they ask them questions they don't seem to understand completely. They just have some troubles communicating. That's great. [00:33:30] My name is Helen, and I have five Children and I'm a wife. I What? Hello? My name is Dr Teff. I work at the hospital and save people's lives in er. Hello. My name is April. [00:34:00] I am a prostitute from California. My name is Jeff Michaels. I am a psychiatrist. I have three kids. Hello. My name is Susan. I'm a counsellor. I have two Children and I'm from Montana. My name is Sarah. I am a lesbian. [00:34:30] I'm a nurse in a hospital. Which one of us has AIDS? Which one do you think has AIDS? Which one? All of us. All of us. Why? Why? The fact [00:35:00] that none of us have AIDS. How do people get AIDS? How? How do you know? Be sick. No [00:35:30] people trading blood fluid contact. That's how we get AIDS today. By drugs. By sex from the sun? No, you don't get AIDS. It's by contact. Through blood. Thank you. Yeah. [00:36:00] This is called boyfriend and girlfriend. Hi, sweetie. I'm fine. How are you? Work is tough. It's boring. [00:36:30] They give me a lot of work. That's sad. How would we go out? We We've been dating for about six months. Well, how about how about we have sex tonight? Oh, come on. Think about it. I don't know. I'll bring a condom. I will. You Sure. Hi. What's up? Everything's fine. [00:37:00] You know, my boyfriend. You know he wants to have sex, but I don't know. What do you think? No, it's not a good idea, but why not? You have been going together for six months, right? Come on. It's showing him that you really love him. Yeah, but I don't know. [00:37:30] OK, you can turn off the tape at this point. Thank you. I actually can turn it off. It's done. Um, they go on to discuss with the students. What should she do? And they have a discussion in the question. Can you ask the students to, um, do something like that? We suggest it as an option [00:38:00] to do theatre, and we tried to give them resources and ideas over the phone from San Francisco, but we found that they are incredibly resourceful on their own as well. In the rest of the ceremony, they bring out the quilt panel that they made. We also have a signature square that we send to each school. This is incredibly important. It [00:38:30] gives the young people a chance to express what they are thinking on time. So I'm going to collapse a bit. The rest of the presentation Um, could we have the data? We did a very thorough evaluation of our programme. It's been interesting for us and it has also helped us to get money. We could not get money without this [00:39:00] data. This is from the first phase of the programme. We now have a whole thick report from the second phase and you have that in your binders. You'll notice that some people have bigger binders than others. Each country gets one binder that has all these appendices. So [00:39:30] each country has all the educational materials. If others of you want them, we're happy to provide them. We just didn't want everyone to have to lug around this big binder. OK, we asked the students because of seeing the quilt. Will you be more likely to take steps to reduce your chances of getting infected with HIV and AIDS? Of [00:40:00] the students who said they were not already taking steps, 87% said that they would because of seeing the quilt. I think now that's up to 91 or 94% of course, if you know young people what they say and what they do can be two different things. But what we're seeing is we're reaching our programme [00:40:30] goal of motivating students and reaching them. I'm going to skip now to the last question and again you have. There's also a copy of the report on the table and you can read more because of seeing the quilt. Will you be more likely to find out more about how to protect yourself from getting HIV? And 82% said that they would. [00:41:00] So, again, we're reaching our programme goal there of motivating students to learn more to really learn questions. That's a good question. He asked. How long afterwards? We send the schools these questionnaires and they do them within the week following the display. Now. This time we're also going to do a follow up with some students six months later to see we're [00:41:30] also doing focus groups where we actually discuss with them about more. Yeah, we do and you'll yeah. All of those materials are in are in the master what we call the master binder with the appendices. We also have I meant to bring it If you're interested, let me know. I have a very simple one page questionnaire that I give to our chapters. It's [00:42:00] much easier than this, and it asks the really key question. So I'll bring that. What? I'll repeat it. OK, The question is, what do we do about schools and teachers that have no information about AIDS? That is a critical question. [00:42:30] And what we have found is that the quilt works in schools that have no AIDS programme and schools that have a complete AIDS prevention programme. If we find a school that wants to start, they don't have very much. They're not doing much yet. We give them the quilt and we don't tell them what [00:43:00] to do. We don't say you can't have the quilt unless you teach them how to put condoms onto a plastic Penis in front of the classroom. Because in some parts of this country they would say, Take your quilt back to San Francisco then. But what we find is that once the quilt is in the door, that school is changed, their programme begins to expand. After [00:43:30] that, I now um no, because most of them they're Oh, I'm sorry The question is, do we find it hard with high schools that don't have AIDS education? To use the curriculum in this country, the government requires most. Almost all the states are required [00:44:00] to do AIDS education, but they most of them can do that as they see fit. And for some people, that means not at all. But we find that most of them are using the materials, especially now that we're sending them on time. We've had some kinks to work out as we've started the programme, but they are using the programme materials. Did you have a [00:44:30] question? OK, I know I've only got about five minutes and I wanted to talk about some of the things that we've found out about how to strengthen the HIV prevention impact of the quilt. We know how the quilt works very well to encourage compassion and support for people living with AIDS [00:45:00] and HIV, and that's a very important role of the quilt. We've also found out some ways that help increase the HIV prevention impact, and I think the first and most important one, although it is not always possible, is to send quilt panels that match the audience that match the [00:45:30] demographic characteristics of the audience. So we try to send panels of young people to schools we tried to match by the region of the country. If a school has a large number of Asian American students, we will try to send panels that were made for Asian Americans and so on. Because in this country, people AIDS [00:46:00] is always someone else's disease. It always belongs to someone of a different race or a different sexual orientation. You may not have enough panels yet to do that. We have a lot of trouble trying to find the right ones to send to the right place, and we're working on that. But one way to increase your ability to do that is to have the groups you're trying to reach, make panels so young [00:46:30] people are making panels for other young people. I'm just going to touch on a couple of these points, but I would be happy if you have questions about the other ones. One of the most important things is to create opportunities for hands on activities for youth. They like to do things, and that's how they learn. This is a section of the panel you see hanging there. [00:47:00] This panel was made by homeless youth in Seattle, Washington, and we must always remember that we need to reach youth who are out of school as well as youth in school, and the quilt is a great way to do that. I'm just going to read you a little bit about what these students, what these young people said about making this panel. But I will leave their explanation [00:47:30] out there. They did this, and they said the panel is made in memory of their homeless youth centres, young people who have died of AIDS that OK, it was made by a 15 year old girl and a 13 year old girl. We find [00:48:00] lots of boys like to make panels. It has surprised me. The top of the panel represents the streets, and what they have up there in the corner is a homeless youth sleeping on a bench. They have an ambulance coming. They have homeless youth who are prostitutes, they say, because many street kids have sex for drugs, money or a warm bed. [00:48:30] They have a marijuana leaf to represent the drugs that are part of street life, so our chapter in Seattle uses this panel a lot with young people. Again, I could talk for a whole hour about my trip. As I know, we all have our quilt stories [00:49:00] to this Lakota Indian reservation. They adapted the quilt to their own culture with no help from us, and it was incredible. They had the spiritual leaders of the community come in and talk to the to the young Indian Children on the reservation about AIDS for the first time. They [00:49:30] have their own quilts they make, and they wrapped these around the quilts of the family members of the boy who died. That beautiful panel was made by Lakota Indian High School students for a youth from their reservation. And then the tribe took the panel, a group of them on horseback, and they rode with the [00:50:00] panel on horseback to a sacred spot. And there they released Chip's Spirit, and they turned the panel symbolically over to the names project. Our culture we have, we have so many cultures here in this country that we need to let people adapt this as [00:50:30] it works for them, and as I know you do in your own countries, I just have a couple of minutes left. Are there any questions this afternoon we'll be breaking up into small groups and you'll have a chance to talk a lot with each other about the problems you're having with your education programmes and to help each other solve those. [00:51:00] Right now, we're going to have a break for 15 minutes and we will see you back here at quarter of 11. Thank you. Oh, if you want to give me your sheet, I would love to see it. That would be great. Your worksheet on the panel. Thank you.
This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content.
Tags