Our Impact - Testimonials

Interviews and photographs by Mary Jo Shen

Pinchang Huang, 17, grade 12 Flushing International High School born in China.

Working with World Savvy, I learned more about people and issues we face right now like immigration. World Savvy is very important to the issue of immigration – it has showed me diversity and so many views of the world. It’s very important to have these views because everyone is different and has their own difficulties. It’s important to learn why people do the things they do, the way they do them. I made a lot of friends from different countries. Even if we have a different culture, sometimes we have conflicts but I feel like we learn from each other. I am an immigrant and now I am more open to talking. We can connect through this program and we can communicate. We can solve problems together.

World Savvy has an art program and art exposition that is so great! People use art to talk to other people and have a conversation. My art is about my personal experience. I love the writing I did in World Savvy because it is another way to express my feelings and talk about everything. Recently we were planning a public art project to bring people’s attention to issues and send a message to them to help change the world.

Diana Diaz, age 17 grade 12 born in Columbia, attends Flushing International High School.

During the World Savvy festival, we curate our own exhibit. We did a video. It was really nice to see people actually looking at your art work and giving you great feedback – it was like, oh my God – yeah, I’m an artist, my art is being exhibited! Art is attractive to the public. It makes a statement that young people are trying to reach out - they are using art work to express themselves, they are creative, that they are here and speaking their minds. On opening night, for our exhibit besides showing the video that some of our classmates made of animation... we made a trip of the 7 train which is also known as the International Train because there are so many languages spoken there... we took pictures, made some stops, got out to eat – Columbian food or Chinese food. We took pictures, some of us wrote. I wrote a poem and read it in front of the audience. I was really nervous but everyone was clapping and celebrating me. There was video, poetry, art, multimedia, sculpture – it was innovative and something that brought attention, showing that art is limitless. Art is very important because many people – they arrived in this country yesterday – they go to school – they know no English – art is a way to bear that difference of being new, of not knowing anything here. And then you get to realize – oh that kid that never spoke – oh my God, look at him – he’s so talented. Now he has an identity.

Through World Savvy, I’ve learned there are people who are on the same path as me trying to solve the intolerance, trying to get the community of immigrants together to do something about their status or the way that society treats them/us.

Everything I do in my art is to raise curiosity and questions - what is this? Art is all about expressing your thoughts and ideas. I think it is very important to join art to send that message of identity and who we are and trying to show the people the positive thing about immigrants and their identity. World Savvy is giving us the opportunity to do this and to give feed back because a lot of things have been said about immigrants and immigrants do not have a lot of opportunities to respond. It’s really great that there is an organization - World Savvy - actually doing this and I really liked having the young people come in and do projects with art which is I think, a universal language and really fun to do.

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