‘Do Remember Me’ Project Teaches Philadelphia’s Youth to Live Beyond Stereotypes

Meet Sannii Crespina-Flores: artist, poet, educator, mother, advocate, filmmaker, and activist for women and youth. She’s also the founder of “Do Remember Me,” a Philadelphia-based program (named after her 2009 film) for youth of color, which recently launched its spring session on March 14.

The project, which runs for ten weeks every season of the year, enables students to advocate for themselves through art projects and engagement with youth abroad through Skype, in hopes of discovering common ground.

“We have youth in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Nigeria and Paris,” said Crespina-Flores. “I put them all together via Skype and video postcards, and I give them a theme and a series of questions to build around.”

At the end of the ten-week cycle, the children in Philadelphia create a short film, PSA, blog, or podcast based on the social issues surrounding the year’s theme. Last year, the theme was identity. This year, it’s power.

The inspiration for Do Remember Me comes directly from Crespina-Flores’ children.

“I had to teach them lessons I didn’t think other parents had to teach their children: how to not make someone feel alarmed by your presence,” she said.

Crespina-Flores found this to be a common thread weaving through the community, and the parents of friends of her children would come to her house and express similar feelings of alienation.

“I wanted the kids to be remembered the way they saw themselves. They weren’t a statistic, they weren’t soldiers,” she said. “They saw themselves as joyful, as dreamers, as activists and artists.”

Crespina-Flores did not just see this as a threat to her own community, but to future generations as well.

“Per the U.N., the largest population on the planet right now is between [ages] 12 and 24,” said Crespina-Flores. “If we don’t get them to start communicating and engaging each other and understand what’s going on in their world, we’re going to have a problem with how this world is managed.”

After lot of research and advocacy, “Do Remember Me” was born.

Crespina-Flores remembers a particular interaction between her Philly students and children in Uganda. A single Skype session helped shatter stereotypical perceptions projected by Americans onto Ugandans, and vice-versa. Crespina-Flores’ students held the common American perception of African children living in poverty — and the Ugandan children perceived all African-Americans as purveyors of hip-hop culture, according to Crespina-Flores.

“That’s not who [the students] talked to. That’s not representative of the whole country,” she said, adding that the cultural divide was bridged by a common passion for one sport. “They found out they all loved basketball.”

Then there was the students’ recent interaction with students in Paris.

“They asked my students about their origins. They kept saying different parts of Philadelphia,” Crespina-Flores said. “The question they were asking was, ‘where are you originally from in Africa?’” Crespina-Flores’ students didn’t know how to answer. They were stumped, she said.

“If you know you’re from Morocco, why are you in Paris?” her students asked. The students in Paris replied, “because our parents moved here for a better life for us.”

“[My students] were surprised because they never thought of looking at their whole lives as being more than just American,” Crespina-Flores said.

The program has helped some former students launch their own businesses, become artists, and “do marvelous things that center around positive energy and lifting up other people,” Crispina-Flores said.

She said two of her students now own and operate their own video production company, Witness Productions, while another student runs a design company, called Hustle Hard, which is starting its own class beginning this summer that teaches young girls how to be empowered through clothing design.

“It’s amazing to witness them realize somebody actually listened and didn’t put them down for saying this is how I really feel,” she said. “That’s a beautiful journey to see.”

Image via Do Remember Me