DifferenceMakers, Ltd. - Building Community

This kit, Building School Community, with its various components, is a way of using all the diversity (ethnic, social, economic, religious, physical, and emotional) at your school as a tool for creating and building an accepting school climate with a unified community in an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation. It offers a complete, multifaceted student unity campaign to help your student body enjoy the benefits of working together. It is divided into three major components:

Part I: Refocusing Diversity by Celebrating Our Differences
Part II: Sustaining the Program: Family and Climate
Part III: The Effects of Bullying on Your Community

Part I features a school-wide team-building curriculum of activity-based lessons designed to idenitfy and demystify the diversity of the group, an insightful video with discussion questions to jumpstart and lead a dialogue of diversity, and a customizable media presentation that helps blend those seemingly impenetrable cliques into a united force.

Part II offers strategies for sustaining a climate of mutual respect in your school, your community, and in your students' families.

Studies have shown that half of all violence committed by, and to, teens happens on, or adjacent to, a school campus - and violence among adolescents is at an all-time high in the United States. Breaking the cycle of infectious violence requires quick intervention at the core of the problem. Part III addresses the positive effects of a community working together with strong anti-bullying policies.

Each of these components can be used in concert or alone. Review the complete package and decide the most effective way to use them at your school. How ever you use these elements, the results will be measured in a broader understanding of diversity as strength. It will foster a new respect for individual differences and open a discussion of the mosaic of today's culture.

Building Community product brochure (PDF)

Price: $199.00 (includes DVD video, 1 CD-ROM and 76-page manual) plus S/H

For more information and to order, call 800.658.6082.

This program is also available from NASSP and from your local Herff Jones scholastic representative. Find your local Herff Jones scholastic representative.