The Justice Project was a massive project in Humanities 12 that went through many phases of studying real-life issues, philosopher's texts, and movies. We started out by looking into the various philosophies of justice from multiple different philosophers. These would include Justice as Fairness, Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, and onwards. We were encouraged to really look into these texts and not just use them as research, but also develop our own ideas as to which philosophies we personally agree with. We would take this new knowledge with us as we studied real life cases of environmental and racial instances of injustice. For example. we studied both the Bears Ears and Dakota access pipeline incidents, applying our own definitions of justice to them. We also watched two movies, the most notable being about the experience of POC at the hands of the justice system, and the other about Standing Rock. We had mock-debates which would further flesh out and develop our understanding of these topics. Everything we learned was building up to three large projects; two justice monologues, and the final Justice Project.
The justice monologues were essentially written speeches we would perform in front of class, or in front of a camera. My first justice monologue was about what I think the true definition of justice is, and the second was about the balance between resource gathering and being fair to the environment from the lens of the Bears Ears situation. For the final Justice Project, each of us chose from a list a topic we were most passionate about. I joined the COVID relief group, even though our final product ended up not being too related to the virus. Below, you will see the final product for each.
Justice monologue #1
justice monologue #2
final justice project
The supplies we compiled for the donation.
project defense
Our justice project took on the role of a community service deed. Essentially, we got in contact with the community compassion outreach who requested that we compile clothing, blankets, tents, gift certificates, food, and water to donate. Since all of these things combined is pretty expensive, we set up a GoFundMe to help with the costs. My role in this project was as a co-creator of the GoFundMe and helping with little things that were needed. I wrote the GoFundMe description and was essentially responsible for tweaking the whole thing. This project reflects my personal philosophy of justice because I believe in justice as fairness. The concept of justice as fairness would state that everyone should have the basic necessities needed to survive no matter what, and the fact that we have such a large homeless community in this town is a tragedy. Nobody should have to worry about whether or not they’ll be able to survive until the next day, and yet we have hundreds who are doing just that. By donating to this community, we are evening out the playing field just a little bit, and someone who usually worries about surviving the night will have at least a few days with no requirement to do that. Perhaps people will not only donate to our GoFundMe, but also be inspired enough to make their own donations sometime in the future.
This project did not require too much initial research, as all we needed to do was find an organization that works to help the homeless community. We also had to know a bit about the homeless community for this project, but that was done just from living in Durango. As of now, not all of the items have been donated yet as the GoFundMe goal has yet to be reached. While I have my doubts that we will reach the $300 goal, I am confident that we will be able to use what we do get to compile the rest of the supplies, even if that means scavenging through old house supplies or pitching in some from our own wallets.
project reflection
I was mostly successful in meeting the goals of my project proposal, although that is a little bit hard to say as the proposal went through many different revisions. In terms of the final proposal, we were successful in contacting an organization as a means to donate supplies, and we will eventually be successful in actually donating the supplies. With that being said, we did not accomplish everything. For example, while the GoFundMe is still open, we will likely not be reaching the goal of $300. This is going to create the obstacle of having to find the rest of the materials without GoFundMe money, meaning it comes from our own wallets. This is likely because of our second fail in goals met, that being the fact that we were late on getting the GoFundMe out there. We were only able to release it on Fridays’, and we missed the chance for the first one. As a result, we had to get an extension and wait another week to release the GoFundMe, likely reducing the amount of donations we will get.
I will be honest, I feel like there is more I could have done for this project. As I mentioned in the defense, my only real role in this project was writing the GoFundMe page and editing some little things. This is partly because of the size of our group, but, I also feel like I could have simply asked the question “is there anything I can do?” more, despite having done it a couple of times. I also feel that the workload was somewhat unbalanced. Although this can be partly attributed to the nature of our project, it still felt somewhat unfair that the responsibility of reaching out to the organization fell entirely on Kian's shoulders. I believe that this was partly his intent, but I feel like the phone call he had with them could have been something more like a group Zoom call. As it stands, the parts of the project that needed to be good we put our all into, and even went somewhat over by creating additional COVID safety postcards. However, I do feel it all could have been balanced between us a bit better.
I think the biggest key lesson I learned from this project is the importance of planning. As I have mentioned, we were a bit late on getting what we needed to out on time, and I would attribute this to a slight lack of plan. We kind of just came up with what we needed to do without setting deadlines. I also blame myself for this somewhat. Sometimes I would show up to our group meetings without a real idea of what I wanted to know or get accomplished, and as a result there were a couple of meetings that I kind of breezed past. The second key lesson I learned was the importance of choosing something I am passionate about. Not to say I had no passion for the topic our project was on, but instead it encouraged me to find something I was very, very passionate about for the senior project. The moments of the justice project where my engagement was somewhat low told me that I needed to find something for the senior project which I thought about almost daily, and also had a very personal connection to me. How would I write a ten-to-fifteen page essay on something that I was only 75% passionate about? There’s no way I would be able to keep the enthusiasm up for that long. At this point, having already started on the senior project, I can confidently say that this project made me choose something that I am 100% passionate about which does personally relate to me. I can already see that the implications of what this project was will continue to have ripple effects on my life for the foreseeable future.