SAYS Mission: Sacramento Area Youth Speaks
(SAYS) is a program within the UC Davis School of Education CRESS
Center that engages, educates, and empowers students, poet-mentor
educators, and teachers in a collaborative, innovative
partnership both within and beyond the walls of school.
Excerpt from “Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (And the World
Listens)”
One day in high school, while on a field trip to Sac State for an
African-American student leadership conference [Dre-T] stumbled
upon a Sacramento Area Youth Speaks workshop. He was immediately
hooked.
As the group of teens shouted their poems from every corner of
the room in a guerilla poetry spectacle called Griots (which are
an ancient West African tradition that S.A.Y.S has adopted)
Tillman was captivated. “I’d always been hungry for knowledge,”
he explained, “S.A.Y.S had the food for the thought I was
starving for and they knew I was hungry.”
In January of 2010, SAYS initiated a six-week poet-mentor
training program focused on Effective Pedagogy and Artistic
Development. SAYS recruited 15 poet-mentors from UC Davis
and the larger Sacramento Capital Region. These 15
poet-mentors represented a diverse cross-section of individuals
from various economic, social, and educational backgrounds.
Each of the poet-mentors shared a passion for poetry and a deep
commitment to teaching disadvantaged youth. Through the
recruitment process we created a diverse and dynamic team.
However, after reviewing the initial
