Panel: Us Kids

With Alex King & Kim A. Snyder & Samantha Fuentes
Hosted by Rev. Dr. Aliah MaJon

The film’s director joins youth activists from the film for a raw discussion about the on-going gun crisis in the United States – just days after the four year anniversary of the Parkland school shooting. They share their experiences on coping with pain and trauma, and encourage us to unite across cultural divides to demand a safer future for our kids, our communities, and our world.

Alex King

Youth Activist, Member of Peace Warriors Foundation

Alex King is a youth activist from Chicago, Illinois and a member of the North Lawn College Preparatory High School’s Peace Warriors Foundation, where he graduated in 2018 and has been a leading student voice against gun violence in America's schools and communities. Peace Warriors’ goals has been to interrupt nonsense, to interject love and kindness; they are ambassadors of peace. The members live off the philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, living a non-violent life and teaching Kingian nonviolence. Peace Warriors partnered with March For Our Lives in 2018 to address gun violence reform in Chicago and across the nation. 
 

Kim A. Snyder

Filmmaker, Producer

Kim A. Snyder's most recent feature documentary, Us Kids, premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, followed by SXSW, Sheffield, and Full Frame, where it received the Kathleen Edwards Bryan Human Rights Award and 6 subsequent festival awards. US KIDS is currently in release through Greenwich Entertainment. Prior, she directed the Peabody award-winning documentary Newtown, which premiered in the US Competition at Sundance 2016. Newtown screened at premiere festivals worldwide and was theatrically released followed by a national broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens and Netflix.

Her most recent short, Lessons from a School Shooting: Notes from Dunblane, premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and was awarded Best Documentary Short and the DocDispatch Award (2018 Sheffield DocFest) and a Grierson Award nomination. Lessons… is a Netflix Original streaming in 196 countries. Snyder’s prior works include the feature documentary, Welcome to Shelbyville, nationally broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens in 2011, and over a dozen short documentaries. Kim’s award-winning directorial debut feature documentary, I Remember Me was theatrically distributed by Zeitgeist Films. In 1994, she Associate Produced the Academy Award-winning short film Trevor, which spawned The Trevor Project, a leading national not-for-profit addressing LGBTQ teen suicide.

Samantha Fuentes

Survivor of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting

On February 14, 2018 a gunman wielding an AR-15 entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and fired on students, faculty, and staff. Seventeen people lost their lives and many others were wounded. Samantha Fuentes was amongst the injured in the Parkland tragedy, and while fortunate to be alive, her body and life changed forever. She has bullet shrapnel permanently embedded in her legs and behind her right eye, and currently manages symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). She lost revered friends and faculty members. Despite these tragic events, today, Samantha is resolved and committed to a poignant mission: to make sure that no child or adult is devastated by senseless and preventable gun violence ever again. She is currently a student at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Hosted by Rev. Dr. Aliah MaJon

Master Diversity Trainer, Evolutionary & Social Engineer

Rev. Dr. Aliah K. MaJon, an evolutionary and racial healing champion, is known for her transformational work with those facing future-defining crossroads, major loss, and the disadvantage of a traumatic background. Her methodologies are informed by firsthand experience from growing up in the inner city of Detroit and from losing her only child to suicide.

Dr. Aliah believes that one of the greatest hindrances to the success of disenfranchised populations in the United States is our country’s history of the racial divide. Seeking to change this, she made a commitment to harness her decades of experience addressing bias and inequality as a diversity trainer, educational consultant, United Nations delegate, facilitator of citizen-police dialogues, and the creator of racial healing Brain Trusts.

Dr. Aliah is the founder of the Next 50 Years Project, where she focuses on teaching cultural intelligence to educational leaders, and on pioneering tools that build bridges across human differences. She also proudly holds a trademark for a groundbreaking coaching methodology called SOUL TECHNOLOGY®, in which she introduces people to the “other half of their intelligence” and demystifies what it means to benefit from inner knowing.

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Alex King & Kim A. Snyder & Samantha Fuentes
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