Project: Amnesty

Arssema
Jan 20, 2019
6 min read

Updated: Mar 31, 2020

LO1 Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

LO2 Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

LO3 demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

LO4 Show commitment and perseverance in CAS experiences.

LO5 Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

LO6 Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.

LO7 Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.

What CAS did I gain from this?

• Creativity, activity and service since we have to be creative with how we approach things like for example making nice cards, when we for example collect signatures we have walk around the school and service because amnesty is an organisation for the better of society.

My first meeting September 2019

This was the first meeting that I attended to in Amnesty. The challenge was that it was at the same time as my MUN meeting and therefore I had to plan out how to do both at the same time. It worked out well at the end and I attended both meetings. Here we discussed the first signature collecting we were going to execute. They had already decided on what we were going to collect signatures for in the previous meeting( the very first meeting that I was not able to attend). It was a petition fighting online hate against women, especially woman politicians that get hate for being simply just a woman and not even for what they stand for. The amnesty leaders had arranged so that we each took about three postit notes each and had to write the mean comments against women that could be out in the net. Then we took the same amount of post-it notes and wrote nice comments that could cover the bad comments we wrote. This was an experience that I will carry with me so that I can become more of a positivity spreader online.

Collecting signatures

-Petition for support for a law about no abuse on women on the net just for their gender. We went around the school around lunchtime and tried to collect signatures. Every girl that we asked did not have a problem with the signing, which I expected since this is also about them. But what surprised me was that more than half the boys we asked generally said in their own words that they do not support this. This really hurt and disappointed me but at the same time, it shined a brighter spotlight on the case because they just proved to me how real this case was even though I knew how severe it was from before.

Skriv for liv 10.12.2018

-This a yearly event that Amnesty holds and this time the leaders of our amnesty group held one at our school where everybody was welcome to come and write a letter or two in support of humans that amnesty seeks support for. I wrote a letter for Nonhle Mbuthuma who is a woman from South Africa where she fights a deadly battle against a mining company to preserve the local communities and natural resources. It was a touching experience and I hope that my letter will make her smile a little in the midst of the dangerous fight that she is fighting though. I really do admire women like her!

Meeting 15.01.2019

-In this short meeting, we discussed our last stand with the 3IBs and the case we were going to collect the signatures for. This being the 3IBs last stand, they asked us if we wanted to take over as leaders to keep Amnesty going. Me and my friends were happy to do so. Plus, this gives me the chance to arrange the meetings so that they don't clash with the MUN meeting that I also am in. This gives the next Ib students a chance to be in both without having to choose only one.

Leaders meeting 12.03.2019

- In this meeting me, Marte and Ida from my class talked with the previous leaders of Amnesty Sandefjord from 3IB since we three are going to take over after them. They told us everything we needed to know and do before we started etc. I took the position as next leader with Marte as leader and Ida as SoME. We were all planning on being leaders and as the 3IB and the contact person for Amnesty told us that we had to only have one, we had to discuss. I chose the position, next-leader because I already had other responsibilities and the others wanted and needed that position more than me. We discussed again and they figured it out. We solved it by agreeing that everybody had positions but that we divided the work equally.

16.04.19

General talk in the Sandefjord library about what be could possibly do forward and talked about talking to the pre-IBs about this so they at least have it in their minds when choosing CAS next year and in general anybody who wants to join. We got to talk to Therese throughout the next days and arranged so that we could take five minutes of her class to present Amnesty.

30.04.19

We (the leaders) planned a group meeting where anybody can come and listen to what Amnesty is about and have some pizza afterwards. We made posters about this meeting and hang them up around the school. I had the specific task of making the powerpoint presentation. It was not that hard but the topic that we were going to talk about (sexual harassment) was a very strong topic so I would not call this fun, but it was definitely a learning experience where I got myself further educated around the topic.

07.05.19

We had the meeting where we presented Amnesty to those who attended and took time to answer questions. Afterwards, we had a good time eating pizza. Everybody who attended was convinced that they will join Amnesty next year and so the meeting was successful.

Latest update

We had several meetings in school with the new members, which was fun. But it was challenging to be in the leadership of three as we all had different opinions and got into arguments. But it was always resolved privately and did not affect the members. We also went to bigger meetings in Oslo to learn to be good leaders and so on. In the meetings at school, we worked with two big petitions. The first petition was about the people trying to protect the Amazon rainforest but instead are getting hate, getting thrown stones at, and also being in a situation where their life is threatened and their houses are being burned down. All they wanted to do was to protect the place they live in and something we all need as it is the lungs of the earth, but big companies benefitting from it are threatening them through people and horrendous acts. The problem is that the government is not doing anything to help or protect these poor people at all. Therefore we wanted to collect signatures help a lawyer there prove to the government that this is a case a lot of people care about and worth noticing. We managed to get many signatures and the new members got training on being confident and asking people to sign for a case they cared for. The second petition was surrounding the topic "gruvearbeid i Kongo for å skaffe kobbolt" which was about the fact that very young children and grown-ups are risking their life and mining for cobalt in Kongo for a little amount of money just so that we can have batteries on our phones and we are not aware of this. So we wanted the companies we buy these stuff from to be more aware of where they get the cobalt from so that we know that thy got it from a place where people worked in good conditions. Therefore we worked for some weeks on a big poster where we showed the "journey of the cobalt" so that people could sign this petition. This went very well and the members came with good ideas for the design. After this, we trained the new leaders up and they seem to be very interested in Amnesty, which is good. I also hope and think that they will be better leaders than us as we struggled to agree several times and to set up meetings due to our busy 3IB schedule. But all in all, I learned about leadership, the hardships of this world and tried to do my best to help such situations through my work in Amnesty.