I was sitting in my car on a side road
on Squirrel Hill, having just listened to Luminari founder Hilda Fu talk about
our summer camps in an interview with KDKA radio, when the phone rang.
“I heard about what you are doing for young
people and it brought tears,” the woman said from the other end of the call.
Her name was
Carla, and she had just heard the interview. Mrs. Fu gave an eloquent and
heartfelt description of the camps, and spoke of the philosophy of “everyday
diplomacy” and understanding that shape her worldview and inspired her to start
Luminari.
Carla called to
say she was touched by what she’d heard on the radio. She doesn’t have
children, but she understands that we’re all in this together, and that a
peaceful future rests in the hands of all our young people.
“I think it’s
wonderful that something like this is there for our kids,” Carla said.
I hear a lot of comments like Carla’s.
I’m new to Luminari,
having joined the team as Administrative Coordinator in late April. In that
role, I’m doing some paperwork, some writing, some research and mostly, now,
recruiting students for our four summer camps. It’s been a sharp learning curve
for me. As a college writing professor and producer of documentaries for
WQED-TV, I have spent many years preparing classes, writing and conducting
research. The work with Luminari calls on those skills that I already had, but
has required me to learn some new ones.
Recruiting and helping to register students for the camps is taxing the
memory and detail areas of my brain that had been snoozing since my college
days. If it’s true that learning something new will help fend off cognitive
decline and dementia, then I should be good to go until I’m 104.
I enjoy talking about Luminari and its
camps. I’ve never been a salesperson, but selling the idea and mission of the
camps to the school community has been satisfying. Parents want their teens to
have experiences that open up their worlds. Our camps do that, and then some.
I’m able to speak
with personal experience about the Teen Writer camp. My daughter Grace attended
the camp last year. She’s not crazy about writing, and to be honest, I was
looking for a way to keep her productive and busy during some of the dog days
of summer. My co-worker and producer extraordinaire Gina Catanzarite leads the
camp. I knew Grace would have a good week.
 |
| Teen Writers working on creative writing exercises. |
And she did. She
met students from other schools and from other walks of life. Going in, Grace
had feared this would be like school English class, but she was wrong. Gina had
the students exploring and interacting and conjuring in ways you don’t always get
in English class. One day, Gina gave each student a five-dollar bill and took
them on a walking tour of Oakland, telling them to spend the money in an
interesting way. Grace gave hers to a homeless person and wrote about it.
What 15 year old
doesn’t need that kind of experience? Ever since Grace and her brother were
toddlers, I’ve tried to instill empathy. I don’t know if that can even be
taught. Maybe it will turn out that empathy is a notch on the DNA strand,
innate and cemented like eye color or height. But if it’s teachable, then it’s
our job as parents and teachers to teach it.
Middle school and
high school tend to be closed universes, with each school day beginning and
ending with interactions with the same teachers, the same students, the same
curricula. Large or small, schools present a whirlpool of experience that
reaches only as far as the walls.
Luminari presents
students with a new pool in which to swim, with new faces, new teachers, and
new ideas. I like the pool metaphor, but it’s Mrs. Fu’s to tell. She created
the camps to foster a “ripple effect” among the students. Open one mind and the
waves touch many others.
Her goal with
Luminari is to encourage young people to put themselves into the shoes of other
people, to reach across barriers of race or background or language and find the
common ground we share.
For many high
school students, May is prom time. My Grace was excited to be asked to go this
year. The day before the prom, the shoes she ordered arrived at the door. They
were high and they were pink and let’s just say they weren’t exactly as
comfortable as her bedroom slippers. A bit of complaining ensued.
“First-world
problem,” I told her. “There are people in Nepal right now who are searching for
their next drink of water because an earthquake wiped out their village. Your shoes
are a little bit tight.”
Those are hard
lessons for kids to learn. We can talk to them every day about being grateful
for what they have, about how we all have the same desires and fears; how
reaching across our perceived differences will change the people on both sides.
Talking about it is one thing. Luminari camps put that into practice.
 |
Luminari Founder Hilda Pang Fu (pictured right)
helps an Ambassador Camp teen write in Chinese. |
During her radio
interview, Mrs. Fu talked about the “I Want to be an Ambassador Camp”, which
travels to Washington, D.C. for two days of visits to the State Department, the
embassies and the memorial and monuments.
“If we had true
diplomacy, there wouldn’t be a need for those monuments,” she said. I thought
about that for a while. She’s right. Profound and important as they are, the
Vietnam Memorial, the WW2 Memorial, and the Korean War memorial wouldn’t have
been carved had problems been resolved through diplomacy.
Spaces for the
Ambassador camp are filling up. Equally popular is Camp Delicious—five days in
the kitchen with UPMC nutritionist Leslie Bonci, who shows the campers that 13
or 17 is never too young to learn to cook a really good meal--and that food is
a way to connect with people, too. I’m hoping my work assignment that week
takes me to the kitchen, and that one of our students asks me to sample her
work. Or his.
Having raised
one teenager—my son, a college junior—and still raising my daughter, I know a
thing or two about how these young minds work. Teenagers don’t always know what
they need or would enjoy until we show them the possibilities. Some kids will
gobble all the kale the first time you put it on their plate, and
others—probably most—will need some encouragement. In my house the rule has
been you have to take a few bites of everything. Often, that’s all it took.
Both my kids hated Brussels sprout hash the first time I cooked it, but now
they’ll eat it.
 |
| Camp Delicious! Teens visit Whole Foods Market. |
It’s all about
opening their minds to the possibilities. Try a new food and learn how to cook
it yourself. Try a different approach to writing your story. Get to know someone
you thought could never be your friend. Find out about him. Walk in his shoes;
his probably feel a little tight, too.
I’ve helped
to register a young man and his sister for Ambassador camp. Their family came
here from Iraq, with a brief stopover in Turkey, to escape the war. I haven’t
met them yet, but I am guessing their stories and their worldview will make for
interesting discussions at camp. As a chaperone of the D.C. trip, I will have
the opportunity to get to know the two of them. I’d like to know what they
think of the United States, and Pittsburgh. I hope I’ll get a chance to ask
them.
I suspect we’ll
find we share some common ground. As Carla told me on the phone, we all have to
learn how to get along with each other, make life better for one another.
And that’s why Luminari is here.
***
Luminari is excited to introduce the newest member of our team, Beth Dolinar. In her new role as Luminari Coordinator, Beth will be sharing her unique skills and a wealth of experience to help us better engage the Pittsburgh community while growing our core programs and strengthening our mission of broadening minds.
Beth brings her talents and experience as a writer,
Emmy-award producer, public speaker and deadline driven multi-tasker to our
team. She writes a popular column for the Washington
"Observer-Reporter." She is a contributing producer of documentary
length programming for WQED-TV on a wide range of topics and currently teaches
as an adjunct faculty member at Robert Morris University. Beth has a son and a
daughter. She is an avid yoga devotee, cyclist and reader. Beth says she types
like lightning but reads slowly -- because she likes a really good sentence.
Charis Allen
