Darfur Progress Report #1

Progress Report #1: Group #2: Jessica Parkman, Maeve Mallozzi-Kelly, Becky Seward, Brooke Johaningmeyer, Jacques Poirier,Colleen Wethern

Darfur/Genocide

Our topic is on Darfur and genocide in general. We plan on developing our action campaign by looking at pre-existing organizations on genocide/Darfur who are actually putting forth effort to help the cause.  Our group will utilize a lot of internet resources such as video clips, electronic databases, other action campaign websites, and other useful websites like “the convention of genocide”.  We established that we are separating our group into two smaller groups. One group will focus on researching and putting together information on the history of Darfur/genocide while the other group will focus on coming up with resolutions to help stop genocide. The history group with include Jessica, Jacques, and Colleen, and the resolution group will include Brooke, Becky, Maeve, and Jennifer.

We will try to answer the following questions: What is the history of Darfur and genocide in general? What are the origins of genocide? How is genocide still effecting people within different areas of the world such as darfur, rwanda, bosnia, etc.? What efforts have been taken to stop genocide thus far? What can we do now to help  stop genocide? 

            During our meeting, we came up with some ideas that will help us develop an effective campaign. We thought about getting the class involved during our presentation by separating them into a few different countries to make them critically think about the issue at hand.  After we have presented them information on how genocide is affecting people to this day. We want to obtain feedback, from the individuals within the different countries, on whether they agree or disagree with their countries views on genocide. Also we had an idea on focusing our action campaign on one issue so we can narrow in on such a broad topic. Finally, the last ideas we established were about how we could get people to take action on genocide. We came up with protesting for  stronger regulations on what the UN considers to be genocide, and we would like people to think about providing funds to private organizations that will go into countries to help stop genocide.  We have yet to determine whether we will use all of these ideas or not.