Support the SELMA Cultural Exchange Trip 2018!

From Tuesday, March 27th – Tuesday, April 3rd 2018 a group of 12 students and community organizers from Santa Cruz will travel to Selma, AL for week-long trip to build the beloved community.

 This program is designed to promote community service projects that expose individuals to people from different cultural, religious, geographic and socio-economic backgrounds and in so doing provide the opportunity for participants to develop a greater understanding of diversity – both in the United States and worldwide.

Our group of 12 will be comprised of representatives from The Resource Center for Nonviolence, Project Pollinate and Holistic Veterans with students from both UCSC and Cabrillo. While in Selma, the group has been asked to engage in an array of community service projects along side local residents to focus on three primary areas of service: Permaculture Design, Holistic Self-Care and Re-building infrastructure.

Community Service Projects Include:

1. PERMACULTURE: Help to design and establish a 1-acre organic farm to support their new farm-to-table coop.
2. HOLISTIC SELF-CARE: Meditation, yoga and qui gong workshops with an emphasis on healthy eating and the importance of movement.
3. BUILDING: The Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation (where we will be staying) is in need of some clean up and some re-building. This will take the shape of installing gutters, building stairs and other maintenance jobs.

Other Community Service Projects include:

• Collecting oral histories of foot soldiers, transcribing of oral histories and/or archiving at the National Voting Rights Museum
• Cleaning the Civil Rights Memorial Park
• Voter registration, education and mobilization
• Canvassing communities to hear current concerns for strategic planning to include the community’s voice
• Teaching nonviolence and/or conflict resolution to youth using the arts
• Helping with the Community Garden in Ward 4
• Co-hosting a community radio program regarding current social justice issues
• Neighborhood cleanups and city beautification projects
• and much more!

 

To send each student or community representative the trip costs $1,039.

We have already raised over $1000 in donations and registrations but we need your help to be able to offer travel subsidies to students and underserved communities!

Please donate what you can to our crowdfunding page and share it with your contacts while encouraging them to contribute what they can.

Here is a PDF PRESENTATION for additional info.

Donate HERE: https://www.gofundme.com/selma-al-cultural-exchange-trip

“In Selma today, the town of about 20,000 people is roughly 80 percent black and more than 40 percent of residents live in poverty, Reuters reports.”