For my capstone project, I’ve decided to make letters to the freshman of next year in a welcome way and give them resources to inform them about mental health. I think providing first-year students with access to websites with strategies to get on top of school work and to stay healthy. Health is affected by sleep and food choices like stressing the importance of breakfast. The kind of health which is overlooked by many, especially students. Having somewhat of a jump start to better habits is very important to me. I want to make people feel welcomed and enforce healthy strategies for their health physically and mentally. Originally I wanted to make care packages to inform people about mental health to anyone. Making those care packages though was a lot more time-consuming but especially more expensive. I got the idea from my advisor to switch to making a letter. Inside the letters, I would have QR codes to a website that holds the information! Instead of just having a website I thought receiving custom letters with unique art and stickers in them would be a lot more fun and incentivize to check out the website. After I got the final draft down the actual process of making the letters was thankfully straightforward. I made 22 for Mr. Cunha’s advisory next year. As I got a gift when I came to SLAB I think this would count as bringing things full circle in a way. It came out great.

For my capstone, my partner Jadyn and I decided to do a Talent Show. We were advocating for this talent show to happen because these past couple of years of living in a pandemic have been challenging for many of us all. I’m sure many are still trying to process everything that has occurred along with dealing with grief & loss. We believe that having this talent show will be refreshing, promote positive school spirit, uplift & support one another, and bring many together socially again. We can’t erase the past as we know but we can do our best to move forward and begin to enjoy life again. This is also our last year at SLA so we thought why not leave on a fun positive note and do something that would benefit the school in a positive way. In doing this capstone we ran into some challenges because although covid has gotten better we are still enduring some complications hence having the talent show. Throughout this process, one of our complications was trying to find a date to have our talent show. After the many complications of finding a date because of covid, we decided that doing this talent show we had to change some things around making this talent show an unusual one. So we turned our show into a virtual talent show allowing students to turn in videos of their talent and we turned those videos into one big video.

Hey my name is Ainyah Pace and for my senior project I wanted to create a website where people can come and find information on buying a house. This website is mainly for people who fit into the low-income bracket. I wanted to show that there are many resources that are willing to help them find a safer community. Over the past year I have done research finding programs that help people find homes from giving out loans and better housing programs like the town homes. I also interviewed real estate agents and people in my community asking questions about the process of how to buy a house.

Our project is a sign of many things, including history, sisterhood, black culture, dance, and more. In a mini-course, Salena and I decided to teach black girls dance routines, and we also taught them the history of dance throughout black culture. We also decided to teach the students about the history of dance in short lessons. We have taught two different routines, each with its own style and level of difficulty. We are very proud of our students for being able to learn these routines and show their style and individuality at every rehearsal. I can’t wait to find out what they will do next. They have also come up with a routine on their own, based on the five values we teach them at every rehearsal. We have also had a lot of discussions where we talk about things going on in our community and how they affect our dance lives and lives in general. We are always firm about how we talk about these issues so that our students know they can speak up and use their voices to make a difference in their communities. Change has been brought about in many ways, and dance is one of them. We want our students to feel proud of themselves and care about each other and themselves. As teachers, we have worked hard and made mistakes from time to time, but our students show that the hard work we have done has paid off. We hope that what we taught them has stuck with them.

I create this project in hopes that it could inspire anyone that listens to it to become more active in the activism world and not just follow the trends of society. Want today’s generation and the future generations to know what activism really is and how much it can change society’s opinion on a certain topic. With everything happening in the world today I think we need some real activism that is willing to fight public figures and politicians for the things we need as citizens and as people. My podcast The New Activism will address the many different types of activism and how today’s generation has kinda changed the meaning of activism.