Human Rights Campaigning

How do you endure through the hardest parts of life and how do you accomplish your mission? These are just some of the questions that we tackled during this unit of our Humanities class, Endurance. Throughout this unit, we studied many famous endurers, including David Blaine and Ana Dekker. For most of my life, I have known that I want to be an activist, someone who can tackle year-long missions and accomplish large strides for human rights. This course will be integral to my journey and my career. For this Action Project, our goal was to endure through a mission for 12 hours. We had to plan out our goals for each hour, and include contingencies in case anything went wrong. I decided to focus on my future career as a Civil Rights Lawyer and spend my 12 hours training with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), advocating for policy change, and raising money for worthy causes. Through my work with the HRC, I spent much of my time contacting representatives about the Equality Act. H.R. 5 and S. 788, the Equality Act would give protection to everyone in the LGBT community, who currently have no specific protection federally. This law would make it illegal across the whole country to discriminate based on gender identity, sex, sexual orientation or romantic orientation in business, education, housing, insurance, healthcare, and much more. Though this project was a large investment in terms of energy, work and time, I truly appreciate getting the chance to complete it. I feel much more prepared for college and beyond, and I made so many worthwhile connections. I would like to thank GGS and ACL for helping me set up and sell for the bake sale, SH for her help, Tammy Duckworth, Dick Durbin, and Mike Quigley for their support of the LGBT community, and HT for her assistance in the video uploading. I hope you enjoy!

Human Rights Campaign Logo with Words (2016) Human Rights Campaign.

Human Rights Campaigning by MDS from GCE Lab School on Vimeo.

The music in the video is courtesy of Sing King Karaoke (April 16, 2017).