On Tuesday, December 16th, students in Morgan’s Social Justice and Model UN Clubs, traveled to New York City to tour the United Nations building. Students took a train at 6:45 AM from Clinton to New Haven, then continued on to New York. Students then walked from Grand Central to the UN building for the tour. After the tour, they got food and went to Rockefeller center to see the Christmas tree.
The trip, which happens every 3-4 years, is aimed for students to get ideas about how to make our school more inclusive. Brooke Mazzarella, who is advisor to the Social Justice club, hoped the experience might inspire club members, giving them more ways to be inclusive in our school. Mazzarella said, “the social justice club tries to find ways to make sure that everything at Morgan is inclusive and there’s equity among all students, and their goal [the United Nations] is kind of the same thing – with countries on a worldwide scale.”
The Social Justice club works every other Friday before school to make Morgan as inclusive as possible but cannot come up with endless ideas and needs inspiration. “We thought it would be fun to take them there to talk about the different initiatives that the UN works with and kind of see how, on a much bigger scale, they try to promote those same things in the real world,” said Mazzarella.
Members of the Social Justice club gained inspiration to make Morgan more inclusive with this trip. Students saw art of human rights by Otavio Roth on the wall of the hallway entering the general assembly. Mazzarella said, there’s artwork of all the individual human rights, and there’s some talk about the kids seeing if we could make [a similar thing] at Morgan – [focusing on] what that makes you a Morgan husky.” Mazzarella hopes to use ideas from the UN and apply it to the Social Justice club’s work.
Another proposal inspired by the trip is an upcoming conference that the club will present at. They will present an activity they have planned for advisory that they hope will spread inclusivity in the school. “We are going to a conference, and we are going to present about things that we are doing at our school,” said club president, Anadally Lopez.
Three years ago the same field trip sparked inspiration that found its way to Morgan. Senior Anadaly Lopez, president of the Social Justice Club, then, took inspiration from a tree with all the countries’ flags found in the lobby of the UN, and wanted to make something similar at Morgan. She loved the idea of this. Lopez originally wanted the installation to be almost the same as the original, but quickly ran into problems.
Unfortunately, Lopez was not able to make the tree for Morgan because of complications adding another piece of furniture. But she did not give up. “We realized that smaller is okay because people from our school will still feel more included,” said Lopez.
This year, the social justice club was able to get flags hanging above the learning commons to represent students and where they are from. “It [the flags] can still have an impact on people. It will still make our school more diverse no matter what,” said Lopez.
Brooke Mazzarella is proud of the clubs achievements and the work that will be done in the future, highlighting Lopez’s success with the flags, “she wrote a proposal and talked with Ms. Hagness, and we actually now have all the country flags hanging in the window of the learning commons.”
