How Student Activism Thrives: Ultimate Civics on the Sept. 13 ONE WILPF Call
Published on September, 45 2018
A 2016 photo of some of the 21 youth plaintiffs, ages 8-19 (now age 10-21) who brought a landmark constitutional climate change case against the federal government and the fossil fuel industry. Read more about the lawsuit at Our Children's Trust. Photo: Earth Guardians.
By the ONE WILPF Call Team
We're seeing amazing grassroots organizing from activist students across the US, exercising their First Amendment rights to defend what is most important to them.
In Oregon a group of students is suing over the federal government’s lack of action on Climate Change. In Florida the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School are campaigning for stronger gun control laws and keeping guns out of schools.
What motivates these students to action? What makes them so effective?
Turns out it’s education about their rights and access to the tools to organize!
A program called Ultimate Civics is offering a curriculum for Middle and High School Students to give them the tools they need to know their rights and to use them for the issues that matter most to them.
WILPF’s National Corporations v Democracy Issue Committee is partnering with ULTIMATE CIVICS. Their founder, Riki Ott, will be the speaker on our September 13th ONE WILPF Call. (Read Riki Ott’s story below).
It’s no accident that in the months before the shooting in Florida, the Stoneman Douglas High School was visited by Marybeth Tinker, a Des Moines, Iowa, woman whose Vietnam-Era activism landed her and her brothers in a famous Supreme Court Case about First Amendment Rights when they insisted on wearing a black armband to signify their opposition to the Vietnam War.
Tinker spoke in an assembly at the high school about the power of civil disobedience and grassroots organizing to stand up for what you believe in, even for students.
Teaching students their rights as citizens has been largely gutted with the diminished number of schools that actually still teach government and civics classes.
There’s a reason for cutting these classes:
Students uninformed of their rights don’t exercise them! Students who don’t understand the difference between how our government was designed to work (with real citizen representation, checks and balances, and citizen participation)—as opposed to how it’s failing to work today for ordinary Americans—turn out to be more compliant (if more hopeless) ‘consumers’ instead of ‘citizens’.
ULTIMATE CIVICS builds on the Corporate Power Study Course and the TIMELINE of Corporate Rights that WILPF authored and promoted during the 1990s and early 2000s, working with our ally POCLAD (Program On Corporations Law And Democracy). They give WILPF full credit for inspiring their curriculum.
“We stand on WILPF’s shoulders,” says ULTIMATE CIVICS founder RIki Ott. But their group has expanded the Timeline of Corporate Rights and developed our curriculum into one that’s aimed at kids, to make use of their energy, drive, and passion.
Ott has piloted the program in California and Oregon and is now ready to roll it out across the US. She’s hoping some of our WILPF branches will provide a link to local teachers, librarians, and retired teachers/librarians who might learn the curriculum, become trainers and take the course to young people, either inside classrooms or in after-school, church, or civic programs. She’s found that wherever these courses are taught to kids, their parents also want to learn this information.
• How has she succeeded in getting this curriculum taught in public and private schools?
• What is included in the curriculum?
• How did she get students to help shape the curriculum?
• What are her goals for a partnership between WILPF and ULTIMATE CIVICS?
• How can YOU get involved?
Next ONE WILPF Call
Thursday, September 13 at 7pm eastern/4pm pacific.
Encourage active or retired teachers and librarians from your community to listen to the call, too.
Who Is Riki Ott?
Riki’s father was a toxicologist who sued the state of Connecticut in the 1950s for their unannounced spraying of DDT in heavily populated areas and suburbs. Riki says that case would never even be allowed to come to trial today, because of the unfettered power of corporations to bend the law and steal the Constitutional Rights that were intended for human persons, not ‘corporate persons.’
Riki herself became a marine toxicologist. After completing her PhD, she wanted to take some time off. She moved to Alaska and became a commercial fisherman, working hard to win the respect of other commercial fishermen. As luck would have it, Riki was working in Alaska waters when the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred. The fisherman, who knew her toxicology credentials, tapped her to represent their interests with Exxon, and she became embroiled in controversy about the toxic chemicals used to contain the oil. She counseled hundreds of fishermen and their families who became ill because of those chemicals. And years later she was tapped by commercial fishermen in Louisiana after the BP Oil Spill.
Riki has written books about these maritime oil disasters. And she has a new film being produced that is due out in 2019.
Please Note: The October ONE WILPF Call will include reports Back from Ghana, the International WILPF Congress just concluded.
That’s on Thursday, Oct. 11. Mark your calendars!
