Jasmine is an inspiring, soft spoken eleven-year-old full of ideas on making a difference in her school and community. She likes drawing, designing clothes, reading tarot cards, and eating pozole or enchiladas. One of Jasmine’s favorite tv shows is Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Her favorite character in the show protects the people they care about; Jasmine hopes to do the same.
She is involved with BPNC’s in-school program, Student Voice Committee, and she took part in a demonstration for a “Treatment Not Trauma” rally that called for a non-police response model to mental health crises and pushed to reopen all the mental health clinics closed by former mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013.
My mom came in a bus and my dad I think came on a train. My mom came here at a young age and they met here. We still have a lot of family who live down there, but we can never go to see them.
It’s pretty bad because if I want to travel somewhere else, they need to come with me. But how are they going to be able to go? Or how are they even going to be able to get back? They don’t have the papers for that. I do. And they risk just being here, and in Mexico both. That’s another thing that’s both bad for them and for me.
Every day in school, I feel like something is missing. It’s like the administration doesn’t even want to listen to the students; they just shut us down without hearing us out. We have no student council, so they can just do whatever they want even if it’s not what’s best for us.
Right now, we have uniforms that we wear but I know me and my friends don’t like them. The uniforms don’t let us express ourselves and the principal doesn’t care. The problem of the uniforms is just one of the things that I’m working on with Student Voice Committee.
I like being in Student Voice Committee because it makes me feel like I can actually make changes in my school that benefit me. I really struggle sometimes because we as young people are the next generation and when all the people who are in charge right now die, we’ll be the ones left to create the futures we want for ourselves.
Even though we’ll be the ones who will eventually be in charge of things one day, it’s like they don’t even care about us and that’s what really hurts. It’s not just in my school either, but I can feel it in my community too. It’s like, with a slice of bread, if you take off a little piece, it’s not really important. You can just throw it away and you still have the “whole” bread. I feel like that little piece.
Working for my community makes me feel like I have the power to change things and to get the changes that we deserve. Because right now we’re going to worse, not to better.