all right well hello museum families and welcome to rbcm at home kids a playdate through screens across british columbia and the world the previous sessions and there are about 30 of them are recorded and you can find them on our royal bc museum youtube page my name is chris o'connor and i'm a learning program developer at the royal bc museum the museum and my home is on the territory of the quangan speaking people the songhees and esquimalt nations here in victoria on vancouver island i'm an un
invited guest on this territory and grateful to live learn and raise a family on this land so one of my jobs here at the museum is that i run the kids and families and schools program programs so when it's not a pandemic i'm around a lot of kids and it's my favorite part of working here some of the most insightful caring thoughtful and action-oriented ideas have come from kids not adults sorry adults i am constantly inspired by the passion and creativity of kids of all ages here at the museum wa
nting to do good for each other and for their community and books can be really helpful for kids to learn about issues and also learn about creating action around issues so i wanted to invite on an author who creates books that does exactly this um so really happy to have robin stevenson here today but before i introduce robin i want to go back to last week and just share what we did last week so i'll pull that up we have a new system here around showing power points so just want to make sure th
at it can be seen uh can it be seen can you give your present review yeah okay great so rb theme at home kids last week so this week and last week um we always loved having authors on so we had another author last week and a photographer isabelle gronk um and we learned all about sea otters and how and how adorable they are i think i already knew that but then i like even more so last week uh learning all about sea otters and did a little story time around sea otters and and her new book so um u
sually we make some art but where we didn't last week um and this week we might do something like that but um you could always share your ideas with me directly at c-o-c-o-n-n-o-r royal bc museum.bc.ca or through our social media channels at royal bc museum or hashtag rbcm kids continue exploring after these sessions with our learning portal there's lots of great content um to explore um that's connected to the museum and some of the ideas of the museum so learning portal you could just google t
hat or rbcm at rbcm.ca lp and then next week we're joined by the pacific opera victoria make some noise so it's going to be like a music lesson um so we'll be doing some singing maybe a little bit of dancing those two too so that's uh with our friends from pacific opera uh next week i'm gonna stop sharing my screen and so in this uh format if you haven't joined us before in this format uh you can see me your host and our special guest today that's robin and um but we can't see you but we can hea
r from you if you use the chat um on zoom or the comment section on facebook live so please ask questions as we go go along if you want to practice like using your fingers right now maybe right into the chat or the comment section the book that you're currently reading or that you just finished reading um if you if you feel like you'd like to to share that all right so let's meet our special guest today so robin stevenson is an award-winning author of more than 25 books for kids and teens her bo
oks have been translated into a number of languages published in more than 10 countries and has won or been nominated for numerous awards including most recently the sheila a igoth children's literature prize for her book my body my choice some of her books include pride the celebration and the struggle kid activists true tales of childhood from champions of change and ghost journey a refugee story the royal bc musing gift shop is selling some of robin's books right now thanks to orca book publi
sher so you can come down and buy a book from us here at the museum we'd love to see you um or from your local bookstore um so without further ado welcome robin we're so glad glad that you're here i'm so happy to be here i've missed opportunities over the last little while to get out and talk to groups of kids in schools so the opportunity to do this now online um is a treat so thank you for having me here so your typical school year wouldn't involve you were saying earlier that would involve go
ing to different communities and visiting lots of different schools and classrooms exactly yes yeah and generally like grade four to eight but yeah mostly upper elementary and middle school yeah exactly have you ever gotten a note from a kid saying that they've you've inspired them to write or that they've like from what you they've read of you or or heard you when you came to visit that inspired them yeah absolutely i love hearing from young writers and i get lots of questions from young writer
s wanting um to share what they're doing or to ask for writing advice or you know what happens if you sort of get stuck in the middle or do you ever get stuck in the middle of a book you're working on and always is the answer yes every single time yes right but yeah i love hearing from readers whether it's questions about my books or about their own writing um it's definitely one of the things that i didn't know about being an author and one of the sort of unexpected bonuses of children yeah rig
ht and i imagine for educators as well it's really great to have uh your books to help support maybe the teaching that they're doing within the classroom as just to extend some of the ideas that they're they're maybe already working with yeah absolutely it's uh i think you know books are such a great resource really whatever topic you're learning about and so um to be able to you know make those connections um between you know your own experience and the classroom and what you're reading and you
know stories from history or stories from around the world i think it's just so many um books are such great jumping off points for so many conversations and for so much learning great well i i have lots of questions but i know that you're um you'll you'll show us some some images uh to begin with and then a good portion of the session will be hearing about some of your your books yeah story time so and i i'm curious of how you began as a writer but i know that's one of the first images that lo
oks like it's here with you as a kid so yes i think you'll talk about that yeah so shall i go ahead and screen share all right so these are my books i've written i think 29 books for kids and teens and they range from books for really young kids like pride colors which is a board book for for babies and toddlers right up through picture books early chapter books middle grade novels non-fiction and fiction and books for teenagers as well so i write for a bunch of different age groups and and diff
erent types of books and the ones that i'm going to talk about a little bit today are pride the celebration and the struggle kid activists which is a non-fiction book about the childhood stories of a number of different activists and people who work for change in the world and ghosts journey which is the one with the cat on the cover down in the bottom corner and those three all kind of connect to the topic of human rights um lgbtq plus rights refugee issues activism and how we make change when
there's a topic that we really care about you know what kinds of things can we do to make a difference i'm going to start by talking a little bit and i noticed the book on the top right hand corner pride puppy is going to be coming out but is not out yet yeah so pride puppy comes out in the spring of 2021 um as does when you get the chance which is down beside ghost's journey at the bottom with the pink cover with the car on it that one's a novel for teenagers that i wrote with my friend tom rya
n um which is really fun if if any of you listening have tried writing with a friend i highly recommend co-writing i've done two novels now where i've worked with a friend and we take turns to write a chapter and it's a really fun way to write so i definitely encourage people to try that out and then kid innovators which is down beside kid activists that one also comes out in the spring and that's childhood stories of inventors and entrepreneurs and it was a lot of fun to research and write so t
he next slide here um why is that not working oh we practiced this and everything oh there we go okay so people often ask how i got started as a writer and really the answer is by reading a lot i was a real bookworm as a kid i just read all the time i used to read a book while i was walking to school and then i would sit in class with a book under my desk reading a novel when we were supposed to be doing math or science or whatever i just pretty much wanted to read all the time and we moved arou
nd a lot i was born in england and we moved to a bunch of different places in england and to northern bc into japan and back to england and to ontario and to australia so i changed schools a lot and i was often the the new kid and i was a pretty shy kid anyway so books were a really big important part of my life i love that picture up in the top corner because it looks like i started writing when i was really really young but in fact i think i'm probably just um vandalizing a magazine or somethi
ng so i i didn't how it always starts yeah exactly yeah i didn't start writing seriously until i was in my 30s um after my son was born and i was on parental leave and it was something i'd always wanted to do so i just started keeping a notebook under his stroller and i would walk around victoria and whenever he fell asleep i would just sit down wherever we were and i would write in this notebook and it just started kind of growing into a story and i thought you know maybe this could be a childr
en's book and by the time my son was three my first book came out and he's 16 now and i just have never stopped writing so um it was an unexpected career change but one that i'm very very happy about but i think really you know i didn't study writing i really learned to write by reading so robin when you were that age on the beach there what do you if you can remember back to one book that you particularly loved yeah um i love harriet the spy harry i was one of my favorites i loved a wrinkle in
time as well um and i loved lucy wood montgomery's book so she wrote anne of green gables but she also wrote another series called emily of new moon and i really love those books and they're actually about a girl who wants to be a writer um and those who are really important but i also you know i read fantasy science fiction i read books about horses i read lots of books that were set in boarding schools in england i i really pretty much devoured every book i could get my hands on so my book pri
de the celebration and the struggle came out in march and it's the second edition of a book an earlier book that i wrote um expanded so it's quite a lot longer it's got a lot of new stories and information in it um and some wonderful photographs and i wanted to show you some images from the book but it's about pride day and it's also about pride as a concept so pride as both a celebration for the lgbtq plus community and also as um the ongoing struggle the ongoing fight for equal rights for peop
le who are gay lesbian bisexual transgender um queer to spirit and when i talk about this book with people one of the ways i like to begin is by talking about how pride itself began because it's a really interesting history and it's a history that a lot of people aren't aware of and if you go to a pride celebration or if you've seen pictures of a pride celebration it really kind of looks like a big party right people are dressed up there's music there's balloons people are having a good time but
it is not just a celebration it is also a protest and it actually began with a riot and i'm just going to tell you a little bit about that story of how it began actually robin just before you begin um you used lots of letters yes and do you do you mind just in case just in case anyone is hears those letters and not sure what those letters mean yeah yeah absolutely so yeah i talked about the lgbtq plus community and what that stands for is lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer community les
bian meaning women who are primarily attracted to other women or girls who like other girls bisexual meaning people who are attracted to people of more than one gender um a meaning uh men who are attracted to other men boys who like other boys also we sometimes use gay as like a big umbrella term like we'll talk about gay history or the gay community kind of including everybody but it can also use bu specifically to talk about gay men um transgender which is again a big umbrella term that includ
es people who might have a non-binary identity who don't feel that they're either male or female or people who were when they were born thought to be male but as they get older so you know actually i don't really feel like a boy i've always felt like a girl um and so they may transition from one gender to another and then queer q is again another big umbrella term that kind of tries to include everybody um it's a word that i like and i do identify as queer myself some people don't like it and so
i think the important thing is you know if you have a friend who's part of the community just to use the words that they're comfortable with and they feel like you're a good fit for them because you know when we're talking about gender identity and how people feel about their own gender or who people fall in love with and want to be with you know those are really personal things so it's just important to use language that the person themselves feels comfortable with and that feels like a good f
it for them and recognizing that language is always changing and evolving as well so yeah and then two spirit and two-spirit yes meaning um is in a term that some indigenous people who are part of the community use and it's interesting because actually a lot of indigenous languages had their own more specific terms to refer to people in their community who fell outside sort of traditional gender gender roles and some of those terms have been lost but there's also some really interesting work bei
ng done to try to reclaim some of those older words as well but um but two-spirit is one that is used by many indigenous people in the community thank you yeah thank you for for um for asking so back in the 1950s 1960s life in canada and the us for people who were gay or lesbian or bi or transgender was really difficult and sometimes when i visit school they'll ask kids you know what do you what do you guys know about what what it was like back then what do you think it was like back then and th
ey'll often say you know it was probably really hard and people probably couldn't really tell anybody um or they'll say you know you back then you couldn't get married and that's true that's all true but what people often don't know is that it was actually illegal so people could actually be arrested um and it made it very difficult for people to to be out and it made it difficult for people to find each other and form community and so the places where people could get together and meet were rea
lly important and new york city had quite a large gay community back in the 1960s but there was actually a local bylaw a law which said it was illegal for restaurants or bars to serve customers who were gay so that made it hard for people to get together and there were a few places where people could meet gay bars that operated despite the law and one of those was a bar called the stonewall inn which was in greenwich village in new york city and there was a place where people could get together
for a drink where two men could dance together where a woman could hold hands with her girlfriend and and be safe but it wasn't all that safe because every so often the police would show up and harass people and arrest people and take them away in police cars and back then if you were arrested for being in a gay bar your name could be published in the newspaper your family might find out and might reject you you could lose your job your landlord could kick you out of your apartment there was no
protection from discrimination so it was a really scary time for a lot of people and i think the fact that people did find each other and did go to places like the stonewallin really speaks to how much we need community and how important community is so one night in 1969 june 1969 the police showed up at the stonewall inn and started arresting customers but that night something happened that was a little bit different customers started to fight back against the police they started shouting at th
em throwing things telling them to to leave the people alone and a crowd began gathering outside and as word began spreading in the city that the customers down at the stonewall inn were standing up to the police and fighting back more people came down and joined in and a full-on riot broke out now some people were arrested some people were hurt but the rioting went on until three o'clock in the morning and the next night and a third night riots broke out again and during that time people starte
d to to see some energy and some momentum and and realize that okay people are fighting back now and they started to form new organizations like the gay liberation front and the gay activist alliance to talk about how can we come together and how can we work for change and how can we fight for our rights and about a month after the riots they organized the first big protest for gay rights and a year after the riots they organized what they called christopher street gay liberation day christopher
street was the name of the street where the stonewall inn was and they held a march through the streets of new york city and this is the event that historians will point to and say this was the first pride parade and this is why our pride parades now are at the end of june most often in recognition of the importance of this date um so that's a photo from that from 1970 from that very first um pride march and since then pride parades have happened every year um gradually spreading across the str
eet states north america europe and around the world and these days we're seeing many more small communities start to have pride days as well so people don't have to travel to big cities to take part in a pride celebration so we've come a really long way in 50 years last summer my kid and i went to new york city and went to st stonewall um and because it was the 50th anniversary it was all like um there is uh it looked really great and it just it felt really powerful just to stand in front of th
is really important uh institution i am so jealous chris i've never actually been and i so want to go i would actually have been going in june um but of course the pandemic canceled a travel plan so i have yet to actually see it in person but yeah there's a monument right across there right across the street with some statues of some of the people um who who were there that at the stonewall riots and it's been declared a sort of historical site so it's a protected site now because it is such an
important historical place oh that's really neat that you got to see it so one of the groups that was a really big part of that fight for change 50 years ago and today as well were young people so those organizations like the gay liberation front and the gay activists alliance many of the people who joined those organizations were students people in their teens in their early 20s and we're still seeing that today that many young people are on the front lines of all social justice movements right
not just um lgbtq plus rights but if we look at something like environmental issues and we see people like um autumn palche or greta turnberg who are still in their teens you know who are such powerful voices for change um so young people are a a powerful force and also the black lives matter movement there's uh really driven by by youth voices to you yes absolutely yeah one of the young people that i wrote about in my pride book was true wilson and one of the highlights of writing this book fo
r me was getting to speak to so many young people about the about their activism about the work they were doing to make change now true this is true with her family in this picture and she's the girl right behind her dad's head wearing the um white and pink and blue lipstick in the colors of the trans pride flag and in this photo her family are grand marshals at vancouver's pride parade now true um is a girl who challenged her school system so when true was about nine she socially transitioned a
nd began she was she was assigned male when she was born her family thought she was a boy as she got older she she was very clear that she didn't feel like a boy and that she felt like a girl and wanted to live as a girl and her parents were very supportive but when they went to her school to let the school know that true would be using a girl's name and using she her pronouns and wanting to wear the girl's uniform the school wasn't supportive and so true and her family lodged a human rights com
plaint and the work that they did and their activism led to a new policy in the vancouver separate school system so that hopefully children who come along after her who transition who are transgender um and are attending those schools will be more supported um and that there will be more understanding and support for them and true is a very powerful young activist she wants to be a filmmaker someday you can find her tedxtalk on youtube where she tells her own story and and talks about living her
truth and that that's where she gets her her power from and she's a very um articulate and inspiring speaker and i look forward to seeing what she's going to do over the next few years as with many of the young activists who are in this this pride book another of the young people whose stories included in my project is zoe zoe is a teenager from illinois and zoe got involved with her high school's gsa now gsa is a gender and sexuality alliance or a gay straight alliance and these are school clu
bs that work to make their um school environment safer and more inclusive and and more supportive for students who are gay lesbian bisexual transgender to spirit and zoe says i would say if a student is considering joining or starting a gsa just go for it i think all schools should have a gsa because it's important for everyone to have a place to go for support and friendship and more and more schools are starting gsas they have a long history that goes right back to the early 1970s a group of s
tudents of color at george washington high started a club in their high school way back in the early 70s that was the first high school based group working for change and now many middle schools have these clubs as well some elementary schools have these clubs and they're making a really big difference in many communities um and taking on all kinds of issues i'm going to tell you a couple more gsa stories this is a group of teens from inuvik and they started aegea they had to have a gsa in their
school aurora gsa and they started their community's first pride celebration there hadn't been a pride parade in their community and they thought that there should be and so they talked to other people in their community teachers the doctors and nurses at the hospital got lots of support from the community and organized a pride parade and as you can see they are dressed rather more warmly than people at toronto pride or pride in new york in in june and in fact they had so much snow right before
their pride parade that they had to walk an extra long route because the snow hadn't been cleared on the route that they had originally planned to walk they didn't know how many people would show up but when they got back to the high school at the end of their march they were really happy to see that the high school gym was packed with people um they had a barbecue they gave away t-shirts and they're hoping to make this an annual event and here's one of the teachers who supported them or an adu
lt in the community who supported them and i wanted to to mention the role of allies that throughout the history for lgbtq plus rights and really for any social justice movement allies also play an important role and by ally i mean somebody who supports that movement and supports that cause and works for change even though they're not part of the community most directly affected by it so for example you know my friends who are men and boys it's can i expect them to stand up for gender equality a
nd to stand up for for women's rights as somebody who's white i think that i have a responsibility to fight racism and to try to work towards ending systemic racism so there's lots of ways where we can take actions as an ally and one of the cool things about gsas is that they are gender and sexuality alliances that they they welcome all students so many of the students who join gsa's aren't part of the lgbtq plus community themselves but they just think that everyone should have equal rights and
they want their school to be safe and inclusive and they want to support people who are coming out um and want to work for for equality and for social justice so allies have always played a really important role as well this is a group of kids from the sunshine coast when i visited their school uh a year a year two years ago i guess now to talk about my pride book um met with this great grade five six students and they had lots of great questions lots of energy a couple months later i got an em
ail from them letting me know that after my talk they had gone to speak to their principal because they wanted to paint a rainbow crosswalk at their school and they spoke with the school superintendent they spoke with the parent advisory council and got permission to paint a rainbow crosswalk they actually worked with the high school in the community as well who held a bake sale to raise money to buy paint to support them and they painted this fabulous rainbow crosswalk and they talked about you
know wanting everybody who arrived at their school to know that it was a safe welcoming place that stood up for for equality and for social justice so i thought that was an amazing story and i was so impressed that these kids pulled it off and i am looking forward to someday getting to go back to the sunshine coast so i can see it in person the last part of the pride book and part that's really important to me is about what pride looks like in different countries around the world and this is a
photo from the first pride celebration in uganda back in 2012 there are many countries in the world where people who are part of the lgbtq plus community face discrimination persecution violence and in fact there's more than 70 countries in the world where being gay is a crime and lgbt people are really not safe and some of those people end up having to flee their countries so a refugee may be somebody who's fled war or violence but people can also become a refugee because their human rights are
n't aren't um recognized or respected in the country they live in and so for somebody who's is gay or lesbian or transgender living in a country where their identity is criminalized um they may be very unsafe and this map you can see that many so the darker red and orange colors are countries where same-sex relationships are criminalized so you can see that many countries in africa and in the middle east in particular um are really very unsafe for people who are lgbtq plus and i wanted to tell y
ou a couple of stories about some refugees who i know who who fled their countries for that reason so this is a friend of mine um see girl abson in the middle of the picture here in the blue tank top um sea girl fled her country of uganda when she was still in her teens and went to kenya as a refugee as a refugee because as a transgender person she was so unsafe she spent a year and a half in a refugee camp called kakuma which is one of the world's largest refugee camps it actually has a couple
of hundred thousand people so it's huge um and it's it's a hard place for everyone to live but for refugees in the lgbtq plus community it's particularly dangerous and unsafe um secretary libeson and a number of other people organized a pride parade in the refugee camp and it was the first pride parade to be held in a refugee camp anywhere in the world so this is a photo from that pride parade and i will actually just say that oh sorry um sea girl is now living in canada um she's now 21 she was
19 at this time she's now 21 and she's now living here um and working really hard to support lgbtq people who are still refugees so she's doing a lot of fundraising a lot of activism to try to change people's hearts and minds and to encourage people to be more accepting and also to raise money to send to people in kokuma refugee camp um her sort of chosen family many of whom are still there to buy food to buy mattresses um to pay for medical bills and to do all kinds of um taking all kinds of sm
all actions to try to make their lives better while they're waiting and hoping to be resettled in safer countries two other refugees who i wrote about in the pride book are ekka and rayner ekka and reina are a gay couple from indonesia and they came to canada um and claimed refugee status in canada um and and like like seagull liberals have gone on to do a lot of activism themselves working with groups like rainbow railroad and rainbow refugee to to raise awareness to raise money to support lgbt
q refugees in fact they recently appeared on drag race canada in a special episode with the rainbow railroad which helps people around the world who are unsafe because of their sexual orientation and trying to find safety now reiner and ekka when they realized that they were becoming unsafe in indonesia that they needed to flee their country and come to canada they had to leave behind you know their friends their jobs almost everything but the one thing that they couldn't bear to leave behind wa
s their cat ghost ghost was a kitten that they had rescued rainer had seen a picture on facebook if this abandoned kitten that was stuck in a chicken coop across town and and he actually went two hours across the city to find this kitten and bring it home and um gave it a bath and it turned out to be a bright white kitten and they didn't want to leave it behind so when they came to canada they found a way to bring their cat with them and we decided to work together on this book ghost's journey a
refugee story which tells the story of their um life in indonesia becoming unsafe in indonesia their decision to try to come to canada and starting a new life in canada and it tells the story from ghosts point of view um so although i wrote about rayner and ekka in my pride book and then told that their story for this book i had to interview them again to say so when this was happening what was your cat doing so so when you had to move apartments how did your cat feel about it so that we could
put together this story um about their cat and the artwork in the story is actually all based on raynor's photographs um he's a wonderful photographer so these are actually all photos of the real the real ghost who now lives in toronto and just turned seven last week and i'm just going to read you the first few pages of this book just to give you a little sense of it ghost lived in a small apartment on the beautiful island of java with her two dads when raynor played video games ghosts snuggled
by the headphones and purred when ekka cooked goulai ghosts stood on her back legs and begged for a taste when friends came over ghost played with everyone when strangers came to the door rainer and ekka turned off the lights and pretended no one was home ghost wanted to help she fetched some toys to play with she snuggled close and licked their tears people don't like us ghost rain or whispered just because ekka and i love each other over and over they had to move ghost did not like moving she
hid behind the curtains and on top of bookshelves where she felt safe if any of you guys have cats you know how they like to do that she hid beneath the bed inside a paper bag over and over rainer said sorry ghost it isn't safe for us here so i'm going to stop there i'm not going to read you the whole book but it does have a happy ending and it's a book that we wrote because we wanted to raise awareness um and also to raise money so any money that that book makes in sales in in royalties is what
the authors authors um money from making from selling books is called any royalties that that book earns go to support lgbtq plus refugees um so we're hoping it can raise both awareness and also um to raise some funds so the last book i wanted so the question robin just in terms of where that where someone could buy those books yes um so ghost's journey um you could order it from your local independent bookstore you can also order it directly from the publisher the publisher is rebel mountain p
ress and if you go to my website it's just robinstevenson.com and find the page for ghosts journey there should be links there for where you can purchase it but i will tell you if you purchase it directly from rebel mountain press um they are also trying to um give some of the proceeds from the book to lgbtq plus refugees with organizations like rhema railroad and rainbow refugee so buying directly from the publisher does mean more money goes to refugees so i do encourage people to do that but a
lso it's great to support your local independent bookstores so you know you really can't go wrong yeah great thank you we have just a couple minutes robin yeah so i just wanted to mention this book as well so kid activists um it's a collection of pieces about 16 different activists from martin luther king jr to nelson mandela um to autumn palche i'm an indigenous teen who's a water protector um and it talks about it's different than most biographies because it talks about their childhoods so you
know i thought i knew a lot about martin luther king jr for example but i knew about his adult life and his activism i didn't know what he was like as a little kid so it was really interesting to learn about these people's childhoods and who the important role models in their lives were and some of the influences that that perhaps helped them grow up to become such important activists and for kids listening i wanted to also send the message that you don't have to wait until you're an adult to b
ecome an activist so some of the people that i included in this book became activists while they were still children themselves um so i just wanted to encourage kids to think about you know what are the issues that you really care about in the world you know is it is it racial justice is it the environment is it climate change um is it animal animal rights you know is it homelessness like what are the things that that you're really passionate about and how can you find other people who share tho
se passions and how can you make a difference and there's so many different ways of making change i think sometimes when people think about activists they think about protests and protests are important but so is letter writing so is creating art um for me writing is is is how i do my activism right it's how i can reach people and try to encourage people to think about um social justice and and and making change so think about you know what are the things that you like to do and and how can you
use those things to make a difference in the world and chris had a great idea about um that if if people wanted for example to make a poster or to write a letter that you thought perhaps they might be interested in sending to you correct yeah if you if you reflect on this like what is an activist how do people make change and especially what do you care about and how how can you um [Music] whether it's that making a poster or writing a letter what what is it that makes how how can you express th
at that care um and then and then send it to us and we'll we'll share next week um some of the some of the ways that people are expressing their the ways that they're they feel passionate about um things in their life and then and i'm thinking robin just showing the the kids jumping up on in on the sunshine coast and the gsas just the the importance of finding community through that uh that activism and and doing doing that kind of work together um lifts people's spirits but it also realizes you
know people realize that you're not alone and absolutely there's you know i actually when i was writing the kid activists book one of the people who i found really inspiring was was autumn pelican because she was so young you know she began um her work as an activist in her community when she was only eight you know she was speaking to the united nations last year when greta toomberg was there autumn was as well and i actually ended the book with her words um because she really does want other
young people to join her and she said anybody could do this work if we all come together we can hopefully make a big change and i think that piece about coming together is really important because when you know some of these problems are really big and if you're just sort of looking at them it can feel really overwhelming but when you actually find other people who are passionate about those same things and start talking to those people and realizing that you know many many many people um are wo
rking on these issues and wanting to make change and when you can be many and you can be organized um you know you do have a lot more power and once you start taking action that in itself i think can make you feel more hopeful and can make these problems feel more solvable and reading about the history whether it's lgbtq rights and the pride book or you know civil rights um and some of the stories from the kid activists book and seeing how far we actually have come how much change people have ma
de you know yes there's big problems now that people need to work on but there's been really big problems in the past and people have fought for um civil rights for the right for women to vote you know all of these things changed because people fought for them and um often young people were a big big part of that okay um i was gonna say that's a great place to end and we we can end there um i also was thinking one thing just in uh in terms of um [Music] something that happened last night because
my kid is a trans youth uh 15 year old trans youth and and they came they like came out of their room jumping up and down because they were um watching a film or a tv series where there was a trans character and but played by trans actor and and a really like cool person too so um that so that kind of representation and being able to see your story in a positive and like um a fulsome light is just is really powerful so the the right being the writer and putting stories forward especially in col
laboration with with others i think is um is really important so um i just i'm sure that there's lots of of your readers that have felt that same kind of like yay like finally like my story is is being is being told yeah and i would encourage them all to write their stories as well we need more of those stories and we need them and their voices need to be heard so um yeah if you're out there and you're thinking about writing totally so i'll end with one note just from um from facebook michelle u
h writes grateful for this fabulous guest from our community and the fantastic influence she has through books talks supports for refugees and even her street side library so so on that note thank you so much robin thank you thank you so great to have you here it was a real pleasure thanks for having me so we just stopped the face
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