Here are summaries of some of the workshops I attended today:

Organizing Across Communities: Age & Youth in Action by the Gray Panthers of Metropolitan Washington

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending the Facing Race Conference hosted by  the Applied Research Center in Oakland, California.

September has been a busy time for young conservative leaders across American campuses. More onslaughts onto the freedoms of college students have been launched in hopes to turn more campuses in a pivotal election year more conservative. Several YP4 bloggers are documenting the damage:

I was having dinner at a Japanese restaurant with one of my friends last night who suggested we order an Alaska roll in honor of the GOP's VP candidate, Governor Palin. I expressed my disappointment and frustration with Palin's dismissal of the responsibilities that come with being a community organizer.

As the semester has come to a close, I decided to treat myself to a (cheap) deep tissue massage-- a college degree seems to equate more with debt than financial security, so I had to be wise in my search. I began my online search for "cheap massage in San Francisco" and came across links to sex parlors and sex trafficking in San Francisco.

I'm all too familiar with the continued prevalence of prostitution in the Bay Area. I was taught not to judge or be over critical of prostitutes since I knew women who were single mothers, struggling to pay the bills while the fathers of their children were incarcerated. I sometimes find myself trying to speak up for these women: do you really think these women enjoy selling their bodies?

Before Furgie switched gears and began singing about her "humps" and being "Clumsy," I had a deep appreciation for the Black Eyed Peas. A couple of years ago, BEP came out with the song, "Where is the Love?" One of the lines that struck me most was, "Overseas we try to stop terrorism, but we still got terrorists livin' here in the USA."

Jeremy Bearer-Friend, a YP4 Leadership Academy fellow currently with Justice Now, just posted to Feministing:

Prisons are bad for everyone--not just for the people in cages within them, not just for the children who have lost their parents to them, or the social programs who have their budgets cut because of them.

Prisons distract us from the root causes of violence and ultimately exacerbate the deeply entrenched challenges of racism, sexism and transphobia facing our communities.

 An entry by Allie Funk, cross-posted from http://www.GirlHeadQuarters.org

 *I feel the need to place a warning of sorts here, as the topic of this post involves a series of ads which are rather graphic and disturbing.*

Heather Mac Donald wrote a remarkably ignorant column in the LA Times on Sunday titled "What campus rape crisis?", in which she decides to project her own warped version of reality in order to deny the experiences of so many of our female peers who have experience sexual assault.

Few things excite me more than high school activism. And, thanks to the Britney’s little sister and the critically acclaimed film Juno, few things excite the mainstream media as much as teenage pregnancy. But, since Jamie Lynn is hardly your typical teen and (spoiler alert?) Juno conveniently ends after the birth scene, what happens to the other one million teens in the United States that get pregnant every year?