Unity Day Guide

This week on PACERTalks About Bullying, we are excited to dive deeper into our new resource, the Unity Day Guide! This colorful and comprehensive 20-page guide has all the important things to know when planning your Unity Day efforts.

Transcript

>> Hey, everyone, welcome back to Pacer Talks About Bullying. I'm Bailey. We're glad you're here.

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Unity Day is just around the corner. Here at Pacer, we are so excited for the day and to see how you are celebrating Unity Day in your schools and communities. We have our orange ready, as you can see, but in today's episode, we wanted to share our resource that we just put out this year to help you with all of your Unity Day efforts. This is our new Unity Day Guide which has everything you need to know about celebrating Unity Day in your school, business, or community.

In today's episode, we're going to dive into this guide and share a little bit more about what's inside. So with that being said, let's get into the episode. The Unity Day Guide is a completely free resource to provide ideas and inspiration on how to celebrate Unity Day in your school, community, or business. When you open up the guide, the very first section that you'll see is the basics. These are some of the most frequently asked questions that we get about Unity Day.

For example, some of the questions are: When is Unity Day held, which is the third or fourth Wednesday of October, this year being on October 23rd, which you can see from the posters behind me, and why the color orange, which the answer is, is that the color is commonly associated with the season, but it's also associated with safety and visibility. Once you get through the basics or the frequently asked questions, the next section that it'll get into is some considerations to think about as you get started. This has some questions that you should chat about with other members that you're planning Unity Day with, such as what does success look like, or what scale do we want to get involved with. These are just some great initial questions to think about before you start planning some actual activities.

Next up is activation ideas. So we have activation ideas broken down for elementary school students, middle and high school students, community-wide activation ideas, and ways to activate on social media. One of my personal favorite activations in here is Every Step You Take. So how the activity works is you cut out footprints and then have students write on them one step they'll take to help create a world without bullying. These are some examples from an event that we did and some of the things people wrote were: I will go to kids sitting alone and say hi, I will smile and say good morning to others even if I don't know them, I am going to do class projects with those I would typically not invite to my group, and I will be more mindful of the people around me. So this is a great activity to really get kids and teens thinking about the role that we all play in bullying prevention.

After the activation section, the next part that you will come upon is communications and outreach. So this has a ton of tips on how you can get the word out about how your school or community is celebrating Unity Day. It has some ideas on how to write to decision-makers in your community, some key talking points for sharing with students or other members in your community about Unity Day, and then some ideas on how to reach out to local media to get some attention about all the great work that you're doing.

The next section will be templates. This is one of my personal favorite sections because it has some great templates that you can use with parents or other community members to share what you're doing. So there is a parent letter in here, a school or district letter, there are some really amazing morning announcements that you can use throughout the whole week to get your students excited about Unity Day, sample social media posts that you can share, and even a sample Unity Day Proclamation to share with your mayor or governor.

After templates, you will find some promotional resources. So we have a link on here to a ton of digital assets that you can use for the Share Orange part of Unity Day. They include Facebook banners, Instagram posts, activities for students, tons of free assets that you can share in your virtual world on Unity Day.

Next up, you will find the Success Story section. So we highlighted two different schools that had great Unity Day efforts to share what Unity Day means to them and how they planned Unity Day within their school or their district. So we featured a school from California and then a district from Maryland, and they shared a little bit more about what the process was like for them and what tips that they would have for you in planning Unity Day in your school or community.

One of my favorite parts is the school district from Maryland. Their tech department actually made all of the backgrounds in their whole district orange on Unity Day and it was a complete surprise for all the staff. So just some great ideas and inspiration that you might want to take into your own school. And the very last section is Unity Day Highlights.

So Unity Day was first started in 2011, so we have some great highlights that have happened throughout the years across the country around Unity Day. And that wraps up the Unity Day Guide. So again, lots of great ideas to get you started on Unity Day in your school or community. But again, be creative. That's my personal favorite part of Unity Day, is seeing how schools tailor these ideas to really fit what's best for their students or their community.

On that note, that wraps up this week's episode of Pacer Talks About Bullying. We'll see you right back here next week, and remember, together we can create a world without bullying. See ya.

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