Who We Are

We are a group of high school girls who all traveled to Southern Africa for our fall semester of 2007 with the Traveling School. Four countries in all: South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia. We traveled with our teachers and completed our schoolwork while driving around all these countries in a huge beige safari truck.
While in Cape Town, South Africa we were inspired by a youth group called Generation for Change. These students of middle to high school age lived in the Capricorn township and participated in various service projects in the community: the soup kitchen, the library and the schools or crèches (like our daycares). They also exercised their individuality through self-expressions like dance, poetry, and acting. Such talents are used to unite the youth and, by extension, alleviate the struggles of a community ridden with poverty, drugs, violence and HIV/AIDS. After four days of aiding them with their service projects and sharing our own talents, they encouraged us to create our own Generation for Change in the United States. And thus, Generation for Change-US was born.
While we realize that we do not face the same problems in our communities as our Cape Town counterparts we also recognize that there is still much to be done in our own. Over the course of our four days with Generation for Change in South Africa, we discovered a general pattern of our communities having what they lacked and visa versa. Our communities harbor youth organizations, regulated crime rates, community centers, and etc, while their community had beautiful communal ties, a great sense of social responsibility, and strong interpersonal relationships.

Given the prevalence and near necessity of technology in our American lifestyles, we have allowed ourselves to settle for less than we are capable of and thus fail to discover the passions hidden within us.
Therefore, we created a mission statement for our own Generation for Change:

“Inspiring our generation to discover passion through self-expression and utilize it to promote positive change in the community. By expanding from local involvement to national and global awareness, we lift the hopes of others for this generation to stand as one.”

Our G4C is meant to unite the youth within individual communities and to educate them about larger, global issues in order to create greater unity within the nation and even the world.
You think it’s a large dream? Well, we agree with you. The changes in our society, that may seem negative, can be turned around into beneficial ones. For example, many technological advancements (such as the internet and mobile text messaging) may have stripped us of our face-to-face communication; yet they have also provided us with means of influence. Take the simple fact that you are reading this right now on a website that high schoolers created. We have the power to create positive change no matter how small it may seem.