by J. Brooks Terry
Staff Writer
Last July, City Council president Lad Daniels stressed the importance of Jacksonville’s cultural diversity and a related campaign known as The Faces of Jacksonville.
This summer, Daniels plans to take that campaign out of City Hall and apply it to a two-week youth program designed for sixth grade students throughout Jacksonville.
Daniels organized a meeting at City Hall this week where the plan for the summer camp program, The Faces of Jacksonville Village, was fine tuned, and eligible students and peer leaders were reviewed and confirmed.
“Faces is actually based on an international program that my wife and I have been involved in for many years called the Children’s International Summer Villages,” said Daniels. “What they do is focus on bringing together youth from 12 different nations and celebrating their diversities.
“It’s a wonderful program and I thought, ‘if it can work internationally, it could probably work on a local level, too.’ ”
Daniels’ wife Carol is helping organize the program with the CISV and another nonprofit group, the National Conference for Community and Justice.
“We hope with this program we can represent the true Jacksonville,” said Carol Daniels. “And a lot of thought has gone into picking the organizations we want to help us on this so we can achieve that. We have everyone from the Boys and Girls Scouts, to the Lutheran Social Services helping us find students and organize delegations so we can mix our many cultures.”
Carol Daniels said the program would not focus exclusively on ethnic diversity, but also on the diversity that exists between children in Duval County.
“It will have an international flavor but we also want to incorporate students from the Northside, the beaches and the Westside because in a lot of cases these children would never come into contact with each other,” said Carol Daniels.
Budgeted at approximately $25,000, Lad Daniels said the program will not request financial assistance from the City.
“No, we’d only like to use private sources to fund this,” he said. “We feel like, if this is going to benefit the community, then the community should be willing to support it so it can happen.”
Early fund raising efforts have raised $10,000 and the Daniels and Sadie Blanton, Faces co-director, said the difference would be raised long before the June 2 start date.
“We’re very excited about this program because it can show youth in Jacksonville that we are actually alike more than we are different,” said Blanton. “But at the same time we are still able to celebrate the differences that do exist.”