Youth teach youth!

Taylah teaches us about how advertising effects our choices.

        Hey I'm Taylah! This was my second year working on the farm and my second year being a crew leader. As something I really grew to love, it was awesome being able to show people who'd previously never experienced working on a farm how it works. Working with my co-crew leader, Amelia was one of the funnest parts. We really balanced one another out. Since we had the youngest and biggest crew, they were sometimes hard to keep on task but we always brought them back together. By the end of the summer, seven very different people found common ground in farming. 

        This year, I took on more of a leadership role and presented in front of all members of the Youth Farm Project. The past two years, I've realized the tremendous connection between advertising and the decisions that people make in their daily lives. I realized through observations and a little bit of research that advertising could be the key to stopping global climate change and creating a different attitude towards how we treat the earth.

        I asked if I could share my findings with the rest of the farm and I got the okay to do it. I began with a trivia-like game, where I had the farmers "Complete the Jingle." For example, I'd sing "'Cause Oscar Meyer has a way..." and often excitedly someone would yell "With B-O-L-O-G-N-A." I asked ten of these questions and answers were instantaneous. After I asked questions about things that surround us daily. Since we are in the finger lakes region, I asked "How many finger lakes are there?" I found that answers were much less quick. People were stumbling over their answers and guessing. It was astonishing that people could quickly recall the jingle to bologna that they don't even eat, but they don't know how many lakes there are like Cayuga within less than one hundred miles of them.

        After this, I went on to tell them statistics, just to reinforce the point that advertisement really rules the world. It was magical, giving definitions to the things that all of us had been exposed to since we were born. I could see people's eyes widen in disbelief when I told them tactics that advertisers use. I was giving them just a little bit of media literacy and that went a very long way. After my presentation, I could see in the discussions that we had that everyone was beginning to connect the dots. It was wonderful to pass on knowledge about something like advertising because many don't know how powerful it really is.

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