Courtesy photos.
VENTURA — With handmade ceramic bowls and homemade soup in hand, 5th graders at Ventura Charter School raised $1,190 for local farmworker families on February 6th, capping a semester spent studying the very community they were raising money for. More than 100 guests attended the third annual Empty Bowl Fundraiser, where students served homemade soup in handcrafted ceramic bowls that guests purchased to take home, raising funds for the cause. They also hosted an art gallery of human rights posters and spoke directly with guests about why the work mattered. All proceeds were donated to Friends of Field Workers and House Farm Workers Now, two organizations supporting the Ventura County farmworker community.
The fundraiser was the culminating event of Stories of Human Rights, a semester-long expedition built around the novel Esperanza Rising and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Students spent the fall studying the real struggles of farmworker families, the same families living in their community, through the lens of fiction, history, and human rights law. They researched activists, wrote literary essays, created printmaking projects, and designed human rights posters. The ceramic bowls came last, made by hand over the weeks leading up to the fundraiser.
“This expedition challenged our students to think beyond the classroom,” said Susan Melican, 5th grade teacher at Ventura Charter School. “Watching them connect Esperanza’s story to the real lives of farmworkers in our own community, and then take action, was something truly special.”
For many of the students, the connections between the novel and their own community shaped how they approached the fundraiser and the work leading up to it.
“What makes this expedition so powerful is that students are not just learning about human rights in the abstract,” said Annaliisa Garcia, 5th grade teacher at Ventura Charter School. “They are connecting those ideas to people in their own backyard, and choosing to do something about it.”
The expedition is part of Ventura Charter School’s EL Education approach, which combines rigorous academic work with character development and real-world community engagement, challenging students to take leadership roles in their schools and communities and apply what they learn to problems that matter.
To learn more about Ventura Charter School and its EL Education model, visit venturacharterschool.org
Ventura Charter School – Starting as Open Classroom in the 1970’s, Ventura Charter School of Global Arts & Education launched in 2006 as a tuition-free public charter school within the Ventura County Office of Education. The school currently serves over 400 K-8th grade students on its campus located within the larger DATA middle school property. Ventura Charter School is an expeditionary learning school in partnership with EL Education. It is guided by 10 founding principles and its mission to, “engage every student in meaningful and supportive learning experiences to grow resilient, educated, and socially intelligent human beings.”
