“We made them realize that we’re here and that we want peace.”
—Gabriella Contreras

Lunchtime at Gabriella Contreras’s elementary school was sometimes really scary. Riots broke out just across the street at Tucson High School. Police would block off the street, stopping traffic, and lock down the school until the fighting was under control. One day, while 9-year-old Gabriella and her classmates ate their sandwiches, they witnessed something even more incredible across the street.

Dressed in black, holding body-sized bulletproof shields, a S.W.A.T. (Special Weapons and Tactics) team jumped out of a truck and formed a line, pressing in toward the fighting high school students. One officer shouted through a bullhorn, urging the students to stop. Some teenagers, trying to hide from the officers, scrambled over the fence and sprinted through the elementary school grounds.

Most elementary school kids ran inside in fear, but Gabriella and her friends remained glued to the gate, watching across the street. “I wish somebody would do something to stop this,” one of Gabriella’s friends said.
“Why don’t we do something?” Gabriella replied.

So they asked their third-grade teacher if she had any poster board. With crayons and markers, they colored large signs: “Stop the Violence!” and “Make Hugs Not Drugs!”

Gabriella and her friends marched with signs that day and the next. The fighting continued, at first. But the elementary school kids felt better because they had taken some action. Every day, for the rest of the year, the kids marched back and forth along the gate facing the high school, holding up their signs so the students could see.
Cars driving by honked their encouragement. The high school students peered across the street, watching the daily protests. And slowly, the rioting stopped.

“We shined a light on what they were doing,” Gabriella says. “The high schoolers realized that there are these little kids, these little eyes watching. They see what you’re doing, they hear a little bit of what you’re saying, they see how you dress, how you act. We made them realize that we’re here and that we want peace.”

Inner Peace
The next year, even though the fighting quieted down, Gabriella wanted to show everybody that violence is preventable. Kids just need other ways to express how they feel and to be heard. “You can have peace in your own mental environment,” Gabriella says, “maybe not the environment around you, but peace inside you. One way to get that is volunteering and helping others, learning more about the community, learning more about yourself.”

So she invited her classmates to meet every Monday at lunchtime to talk about how they could prevent violence and strengthen their community. The first meeting was in the principal’s office. But it was too small for the 50 kids who showed up. So they moved to the library. But they couldn’t work in total silence. So they asked the fourth-grade teacher if they could use his room.

Gabriella dubbed the group Club BADDD. She had heard of SADD—Students Against Drunk Drivers—and MADD—Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. So she settled on BADDD, for Be Alert Don’t Do Drugs. “I thought it was so awesome,” says Gabriella. “Even now, students will go around saying: ‘Yeah, I’m a BADDD student!’”
Kids wanted Club BADDD to be totally kid run, so they decided that everyone would sign in. The first kid to sign in would open the meeting, the next would read the agenda, and the third would close the meeting.

In Club BADDD, troublemakers became leaders. “Students in the classroom who can’t sit still or always have to talk first or talk with other students are usually labeled troublemakers,” says Gabriella. “They join the club and at first they think they are going to be treated in the same way, where they can’t talk, can’t share their ideas.” If they arrive early, they can open the meeting, read the agenda, or close the meeting. “All of a sudden they are in charge and students are listening to them,” Gabriella says. “They are learning to use their leadership skills in a positive way.”

Club BADD meetings always start with their motto: “Even as youth we can make a difference in our home, neighborhood, school, and community.”

“I thought about water dropping in a lake and how it makes a ripple,” Gabriella says. “How you can start at home and make a difference there and then you can make a difference in your school and you’ll end up making a difference in your community.”

Marching for Peace
The first ripple they attempted was an annual peace march around the elementary school to kick off the school year.
“You’ll never get the whole school,” adults told them. “You’ll never make it happen every year.” That made Gabriella steaming mad. “We can do this!” she protested. Her mom told her not to argue with adults, just to show them that kids can make it happen.

But Club BADDD members got discouraged, too. Gabriella told them, “We have to go through with it and show them that we can.”

So the kids met with the principal and convinced him that it was the right way to start the school year. With the principal on their side, the whole school marched. “It’s not an everyday occurrence to see fifth graders and kindergarteners and eighth graders and teachers and police and community members marching around a school,” Gabriella says. “People didn’t believe that such young students could do something so powerful and make that much of an impact.”

Every year Club BADDD runs an anti-drug art gallery. Kids draw pictures about how they would say no to drugs or how they would stop violence. One child drew a girl in pigtails being offered drugs, shaking her finger toward them. On the other half of the page, the girl jumped rope with her friends. Underneath, the child wrote: “I’d rather be jumping rope than doing drugs!”

Club members painted over graffiti in the neighborhood. They raised money from bake sales to buy a bike for a student with cerebral palsy and to help a girl get a heart transplant. They cleaned up school grounds and repainted benches and trash cans. They wrote Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving cards for elderly people and delivered them in person. “We built bridges instead of doing what we see in the news all the time—kids tearing bridges down,” she says. “Kids learned that they can do simple things and have a big impact.”

Kid Power
Scholastic magazine ran a short article on Club BADDD. “All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I got bundles of mail asking about Club BADDD,” Gabriella says. Kids from New York, Alaska, California, and Florida wanted to know how to start a club in their school.

Gabriella didn’t know how to respond. “I needed money to make a packet with brochures and a video to show kids how to do it, so it would be easy for them.” Then one day at the library, she saw a flier with the word MONEY in big letters. A group called Pro-Neighborhood offered grants—money to support special projects—to community members. She called them and they invited her to a meeting to learn how to apply for a grant.

The room was full of adults. Gabriella, now 11 years old, was the only kid to show up. At one point, the speaker asked how much money people wanted. “I said I wanted the full amount, $2,500,” Gabriella says. “I remember a lady laughing, saying: ‘Goodness! A child is asking for that much money?! She wouldn’t even know what to do with all that!’”
Gabriella told her: “Yes, I would know, because I already have an idea of what the packet would look like and how to do the video.” All the adults became quiet and just stared at her.

“My mom would have stood up for me but she was out of town,” says Gabriella. “And my dad figured it was a kid-oriented thing, so he just dropped me off and picked me up an hour later.” Gabriella didn’t let the adults get to her. She filled out the grant application and won the full $2,500.

Club members prepared a packet of information on how to start a club, how to run a meeting, how to handle money. The school video club helped them make a film showing a Club BADDD meeting, some of the events, and Gabriella talking about the club.

The kids were excited for the first viewing of the video. What a disappointment. The picture was shaky, the color was off, and the sound was muffled. “We got so quiet,” Gabriella says. “We were happy we’d made a video, but we knew we should do it again.” And they did.

The video wasn’t the toughest challenge Club BADDD faced. Over the years, kids couldn’t understand why anyone would join a club instead of playing during lunch. “Why don’t you just try it,” club members said. Once kids joined, they stayed. In fact over the years, more than 200 kids have been involved in Club BADDD.

“On TV, you don’t see younger students making an impact,” says Gabriella. “You see adults volunteering or you see violence and drugs and negativity, so kids don’t think they can make a difference. Then, once they are in it, they realize that it’s not just a facade that all these members are putting on—it’s the truth. They really are making a difference. It empowers them.”

What you can do
Organize a peace march at your school
Search for inner peace
Talk with friends about how to promote peace