On Wednesday, Sept. 23rd, senior Graham Murphy held his first meeting of the Struggle Party, a youth activist club intended to improve the community. He based it off of two ideas. One is that the world won’t become a better place unless people make themselves a part of the struggle to improve it. The other is that for these struggles to be solved, society needs to be exposed to them.
These struggles Murphy and his Struggle Party are fighting against include homelessness, racism and other social and environmental issues.
“[These are some of the] difficult issues that people don’t like to talk about,” Murphy said. “There are people on the ground experiencing those struggles, and if those aren’t heard, then we’ll never have the opportunity to make them better.”
The Struggle Party, which generally has about fourteen people at its meetings, meets every Wednesday after school in the library. Anyone and everyone is welcome and encouraged to join. The meetings are held in order to plan the actual events, or service projects, that fight against struggles around the community. These take place on weekends, so that the maximum amount of people can join.
The Struggle Party’s first project is a city-wide clean-up, in which members pick up any trash found in the different areas visited in order to improve the environment. They also try to talk with the people living in the area, if they happen to run into them while cleaning, whether they’re homeless, affluent or anywhere in between. Their ultimate goal is to be able to interview these people on video and create a documentary about their struggles, though they are still looking for a videographer.
“If anyone is interested in helping make people’s struggles heard, and making a piece of art, then this is a great place for that,” Murphy said. “I just want to emphasize how good of an opportunity this is to film something important for people to see.”
Read more about the Struggle Party in the fourth print issue of The Harbinger on Oct. 19th
Murphy leads the meeting of the Struggle Party on Wednesday, Sept. 30th.