Students Follow-Up on Their Cause Fair Proposals
A school club. An educational program. A social media awareness campaign. At Cause Fair, an annual AJA event held in late March or early April, eleventh grade students propose solutions to a range of social issues that they have identified. After months of researching their cause, they commit to make a difference in a speech before the AJA high school community. For most, however, these promises go unfulfilled.
According to English teacher Mr. Dave Byron, students are not expected to follow through with their Cause Fair solution proposals, which explains why the majority of AJA high schoolers do not. “I don’t have [the] leverage or expectation that people carry out the plans that they come up with,” Mr. Byron said. “As a teacher, I feel like the assignment is done… Some people might be motivated to follow up… and other people are ready to [move on].”
Though most juniors have chosen to table or lay off their ideas and solutions after Cause Fair, a handful do fulfill their plans each year. For them, Cause Fair often takes on personal significance not just as a research project but as a way to serve their communities and address issues that matter to them long term.
Senior Elisha Feit Mann, who researched mental health challenges facing kids with chronic illness, is one example. He organized a poetry and art competition for children in hospitals and paired the winners with mentors in the field. More than just offering them something to look forward to, Elisha said that the opportunity for honing creative skills gives kids “an identity that is beyond their illness.”
Elisha, who suffered from an illness himself in middle school, found a creative outlet in making art. “I was able to say how something ought to look, what techniques I wanted to use, what mood I wanted to get,” he said. “At a time of my life where so much was out of my control, it felt very impactful to have a space where I was in control.” He chose this topic to not only share his story but to discuss an issue that he thought needed more attention.
Yael Mainzer, another senior who completed the Cause Fair last year, chose a personally relevant topic too. Planning to pursue a career in science, Yael noticed a lack of women in STEM careers and landed on this as her Cause Fair topic. She later formed the Young Women in STEM Club at AJA as an ambassador and chapter head of the larger Women in STEM organization, just as she planned to do in her solution proposal. The club has since helped plan a Women in STEM event and career fair for the Atlanta community hosted annually at AJA.
Despite the club’s early success, Yael wished it could have done more. She acknowledged its slowed momentum due to the stresses of senior year.
Not waiting for their motivation to dwindle, a few current juniors have implemented their solutions already, some even before the day of Cause Fair itself. Junior Eliana Linsider has been cooking soup for seniors in her community since the Covid-19 pandemic, far in advance of her cause fair about post-pandemic support for senior citizens. “I started doing it just as a way for me to give back to my community,” she said. “When Cause Fair came, I thought it would be a good topic because I can actually do some research on it and see the benefits behind it.” She hopes to widen her soup-service network and continue to alleviate pandemic isolation after Cause Fair.
Junior Eliana Linsider has been cooking soup for seniors in her community since the Covid-19 pandemic, far in advance of her cause fair about post-pandemic support for senior citizens.
In addition to long-term projects, some Cause Fair solutions are as simple as one-time events. Junior Danit Kutner organized and ran a blood drive at AJA on April 15 to address the shortage of blood donations that she discussed during her Cause Fair speech. Danit said that “sitting through Cause Fairs of other years” and hearing people say “‘I’m gonna make a club,’ ‘I’m gonna do this’… you never see them follow through.” For her, following up was a no-brainer. Although the blood shortage is a nationwide problem, Danit said it’s one with opportunity for local impact. “[The blood drive is] encouraging people in AJA who weren’t going to go out to a random blood drive or donation center to donate,” she said. “I think it’s fulfilling.”
Finding doable solutions for broad-based issues is not always easy. Senior Asher Lytton said that although he came up with a solution proposal on his topic of American bail reform on a political and societal level, finding a local solution was harder. In the end, he proposed raising money to help individual people, but he never fundraised, although he did make some personal contributions. “I picked a thing where there’s no way I could solve the problem,” he said. “I feel like I learned a lot from the project, but… I chose to spend my time doing other things that I thought were more important than the solutions I proposed.”
Several years ago, the school gave small stipends to the top three Cause Fair winners to donate to their cause, something that would have benefited Asher’s financially-related solution as a past Cause Fair winner. Nevertheless, Mr. Byron said that this tradition stopped because, with the general exhaustion that students feel after Cause Fair, “it was difficult even to get students to follow up on that level.”
Since then, no incentives exist for students to follow up with their plans. Although Mr. Byron said that he would love for students to bring their proposals to life, he realizes that “it’s beyond the scope of the project.” For now, Mr. Byron leaves the choice of extending the Cause Fair project beyond the gradebook up to his students.
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