April 2002

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Report from Porto Alegre -- Young Voices at the World Social Forum

Lincoln Ellis, a native of Spokane, WA, is a junior at the University of Pennsylvania and an intern with the AFSC Peacebuilding Unit in Philadelphia. He attended the World Social Forum as an AFSC delegate. He can be reached for questions at lellis@sas.upenn.edu. For more information about the World Social Forum, www.worldsocialforum.org

The second World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil this Februrary convened nearly 70,000 people from all over the world to build constructive alternatives to the dominant paradigm of corporate globalization, discrimination, and war. The theme "another world is possible" set the tone of the conference. Panels, roundtable discussions, and seminars engaged participants in strategy planning about everything from reparations for slavery to the impact that the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) would have on organic food (making it obsolete in some areas). The WSF balanced the energy, passion, and urgency of some of the most important protests in recent memory with the need to construct and articulate alternatives to the status quo in such a way that large numbers of people know what we stand for as well as what we are against.

I participated in the WSF as one of 24 delegates from the American Friends Service Committee. The AFSC delegation included staff from many different regions, and partners in Turkey and Ecuador. Among the AFSC youth delegates we discussed topics ranging from hip-hop as a form of expression and instrument for social change to the privatization of public schools. While the US was not heavily represented at the WSF (only 400 official delegates), many US organizations sponsored delegates from partner organizations in other countries who would otherwise not been able to afford the trip to Brazil. As this kind of sponsorship becomes more common in the NGO realm, I think we will see more strategizing and collaboration between people in different parts of the global south. A good example of this type of collaboration is the organic rice growing techniques that the a group from Brazil adopted from China. In the same pond, fish and rice can be symbiotic, eliminating the need for fertilizers and additional ponds.

Unprecedented initiatives gained credibility at the World Social Forum. A debt tribunal tried multi-lateral lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The movement for slavery reparations gained momentum as representatives from Africa, the African Diaspora, and their allies met to formulate strategies to reinforce each others' work and compare success stories. While the WSF gained the attention of some major media sources, no major media outside of Porto Alegre seemed to notice that the parallel youth summit was preparing a new generation of youth to take charge of their own futures through collective action. The tenor of the 12,000 strong "Acampamento da Juventude" (youth camp) was set by the decision to name the camp after Carlo Giuliani, the 23-year-old Italian who was killed by Italian police while protesting the meetings of the G8 countries in Genoa last July. The name of the youth camp reflected the urgency of the problems that we as youth are facing. The youth were serious about putting a human face on the suffering of the world, whether it was by honoring Giuliani and other victims of excessive force or by trying to meet youth from around the world who faced challenges ranging from mandatory military service (without the possibility of conscientious objection) to decreased educational opportunities to child prostitution. The seriousness of these issues was not overlooked just because youth danced Capoeira (signature Afro-Brazilian dance) and sang folk songs in Spanish and Portuguese. The youth floated between the youth camp and the Forum. We recognized that some of the issues we confront are particular to youth and some require us to reach out to older activists.

Argentine youth had made a long bus trip to Brazil to participate. The Argentines had just witnessed the inauguration of their fifth President in less than a month and face the burden of an enormous foreign debt that the youth inherited, so it was encouraging to see the young Argentines' initiative within the social forum. On one hand, they met several times in Argentine affinity groups, which signaled to me that they knew the importance of organizing NGOs, student groups, and civil society within Argentina in order to create solidarity, vision, and alternatives to the structural adjustments and cuts in social spending that the IMF has prescribed. On the other hand, the Argentine youth acted in solidarity with delegates and observers from other countries to strategize about specific issues.

Argentine youth made sure that the voices of youth were heard throughout the forum when a line of 50 young people carrying a long sky-blue and white Argentine flag ran through the encampment. Argentines had perhaps transferred the lessons from their own country to the setting of the World Social Forum. They knew that they needed to speak up in order to be heard by the larger conference. While the mainstream media depicted them as rowdy, unorganized, and uncommitted, I found the Argentine youth to be thoughtful and democratic. In one of the meetings that I observed, Argentines discussed their nation's crisis for hours while foreigners outside sold newspapers advocating an armed revolution. While it is possible that some Argentines would also advocate for an armed revolution, to me it is striking that the Argentines at that forum were more concerned with meeting and strengthening civil society and nonviolent solutions. Even more noteworthy was their willingness to participate in other workshops, on everything from Plan Colombia to Palestinian Solidarity.

One of the most important lessons that I learned from the Argentines was that sometimes its okay to be outspoken instead of subtle. The Argentines were very frank in letting people know that they wanted their country's issues to be a focus of the conference, both to help untangle the patterns of economic oppression in Argentina and to teach other countries how to avoid those situations. I, on the other hand, remained inconspicuous throughout the forum, mostly because I didn't want to steal the show as people from the US have a tendency to try to do. Throughout the forum I fielded questions about the American peace movement (which I am working on both from my college campus and with the AFSC) and I realized that I could have organized a seminar or presentation about the movement without taking over the conference. For me it was a learning experience: I learned that speaking up about the progress we are making toward a more peaceful and just world is not so much arrogance and vanity as it is sharing the good news.

During the forum I took a trip to a settlement of the Brazilian Landless Movement (Movimento Sem Terra or MST). Latin America's largest social movement works to redistribute Brazil's land in order to provide plots of land for small farmers. One of the little girls who lived on the settlement gave me a note and asked me to pass it along to my friends in the US Written in Portuguese, it read: "Divide up the land to multiply the bread." I have carried the note with me since then as a reminder of the power that social movements have to teach values of peace and justice to youth.

--Lincoln Ellis

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