In this documentary, we see the youth of Oakland gathering on a rooftop downtown gearing up to perform candid conversations surrounding the portrayal of said marginalized youths. The students were tired of being placed in boxes by the media and never given the opportunity or chance to be seen or heard as multidimensional, normal teens. In “the Roof is on Fire” Suzanne Lacy and the collaborators utilized many strategies when trying to paint a full picture for the audience. They gave community members a space to actually have these conversations (in this case, the rooftop garage, which facilitated an open-air conversation between students at which other residents and media representatives could also congregate to hear them speak.) This project was also followed by other community engagement initiatives centered around the same objective: to partake in a six-week long series of discussions between high school students and the Oakland police department. Through this, they were also giving them the space to properly represent themselves and take control of their image. By encouraging these dialogues, the project was, in my opinion, a huge success.
Issues that have been impacting my life and the ones around me mainly revolve around environmental issues. One of the pressing issues that affects the agriculture community in California is the State’s distribution of water. Now a tactic that the State Government has had for many years is to take water from Northern California and send it down to the South. The south is in need of water as they do not get enough to support themselves, but the issue is a bit larger and encompuses the states refusal to create more reservoirs to store water to be used during the dryer months. But the main issue is that the focus is uneven and falls heavily on the side of sending it to the south instead of distributing it evenly so farmers in all regions but mainly central and southern california have the proper amount of water to grow their crops. California is one of the leading states in the production and exporting of agriculture products due to our vast and wide scale of geological environments, but ...
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