The Story of We All Belong

We All Belong started as a project by Joni DeRouchie, who was a student of Mt Hood Community College’s Integrated Media program in winter 2011/12. When it came time for the students to embark on a project for a non-profit group for their practicum class, Joni approached ABI, where she’d been a part-time staff member for a couple of years, and asked them if they’d like to be the subject of a short documentary. Executive Director Angela Jarvis-Holland jumped at the opportunity to promote awareness of the new Kindergarten Inclusion Cohort, and agreed to allow Joni and her team, made up of fellow students Emily Morris and Matt McKague, access to a Cohort session. The documentary was filmed over 2 days, and included interview segments with ABI board members and other parents and advocates. Most special were the interviews with parents enrolled in the Cohort program, who graciously opened up and shared their dreams and fears about their children for the camera.
Joni was most interested in the matter of school segregation, and engaged parents in discussions of what it means to segregate children, why it still occurs, and the lifelong damage it can do to a child when they are not permitted to be a member of their own community.
The video was quickly edited in preparation for the 2012 All Born (In) Conference, where it was screened at the end of the conference for a few hundred parents and educators. The reaction from the ABI attendees, and others who saw the video at private screenings, indicated that what had started out as a humble class project had turned into something more meaningful than anyone anticipated.
Joni worked for a few more months on re-edits. Photos from Jodi Collins’ photo awareness campaigns were added, and Jonas Hinckley from LNS Captioning generously donated his time providing subtitles. The end result was a polished and professional video completed almost entirely with pro-bono work contributed by talented parents and community members who wanted to get the message out that there are solutions and ways to bring an end to school segregation.
Further donations and contributions enabled ABI to purchase the materials they needed to duplicate the video and create artwork to accompany it. We All Belong was a labor of love that took nearly 8 months to complete, and truly shows how much a grass roots, parent-driven group can accomplish.