palestinian american youth civic engagement
creating the world you want to see
Palestinian American Youth Civic Engagement brings together Palestinian and American university students through a shared curriculum to inspire productive, effective, and positive civic engagement. All participating students studied at their respective universities for a semester before coming to Drake University for a six-week fellowship workshop where the students worked together to produce podcasts focusing on civic engagement among young-adult activists. These stories can be heard at their website paycestories.org or on iTunes.
As part of the Stevens Initiative grant, which funded the PAYCE project, I was selected to create a documentary showcasing the powerful exchange between students from the United States and Palestine. Over the course of the project, I traveled with the student fellows through Des Moines as they dove into political activism, witnessing firsthand their passion and curiosity. I conducted interviews with key students and organizers from multiple universities, exploring how sharing stories and perspectives across cultures was reshaping their understanding of activism. Once the students returned to their universities, they carried this momentum forward, producing podcasts that captured the activism unfolding in their own communities.
I collaborated with a videographer from Palestine to capture footage of the cities surrounding Al-Quds University and An-Najah National University, along with interviews of the same students involved in the PAYCE project. To ensure the documentary was accessible to a broader audience, I worked closely with the Stevens Initiative team to transcribe the film into Arabic, allowing me to add captions for non-English speakers.