What Is it All About?
A way to raise awareness surrounding key statistics related to growth and development in your community by hanging information in a prominent space. Anything that has facts or statistics works with this activity; for example, the number of LGBTQ youth that commit suicide in Canada, the number of Canadian women and/or men who will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, and diversity in your community represented country flags.
This activity can be used to raise awareness of an important topic, highlight a call to action, or celebrate diversity in your community.
Why Do It?
Visual projects can be very impactful to show how prevalent these moments are.
How Do We Do It?
Choose the statistic you want to illustrate using the clothesline activity.
Choose an object to hang from the clothesline that is visually relevant to the statistic you are illustrating (e.g., flags to represent diversity or articles of clothing cut out of construction paper to represent people).
Set up your clothesline somewhere visible in your school and hang objects that illustrate your statistic. For example, you could hang a red shirt every three black shirts. This is to represent the 1 in 3 Canadian women who will be sexually assaulted in their life.
Consider creating signs with the statistic written out and placing them near the clothesline so people understand your message.
What Else Do We Need?
- String and clothes pegs
- Paper and markers
How Do We Get Creative?
Hang your clothesline somewhere outside of your school to spread the messages into your community.
Consider setting up more than one clothesline to illustrate more than one statistic related to a topic. To build on the activity above, you could use a second clothesline to hang every sixth shirt as a red t-shirt, to represent the 1 in 6 Canadian males who will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
Adapted from: The Students Commission of Canada (The Canada We Want Conference), March 2017.