Sophomore Matthew Kaplan was recently named a CNN hero for starting the nonprofit Be ONE Project, which provides anti-bullying workshops for middle school students. The Chronicle spoke with Kaplan about his inspiration for creating the workshops and how to address bullying at Duke.
The Chronicle: What motivated you to start the Be ONE project?
Matthew Kaplan: My brother Josh. We're 19 months apart, so I was really close to Josh growing up. I went to a middle school that was super inclusive. It was a very small school and kind of like a family. But then they doubled the size of the school and increased the number of students there, so when my brother Josh entered the school, the culture really shifted. I saw kids that were sitting alone during lunch, and soon it wasn't the same welcoming community that I knew before. It was then when Josh started to get really mean text messages and emails from his classmates.
I wanted someone to do something about it, and I realized that it wasn't just about Josh's experiences, but also that other kids were experiencing similar things. So I knew that I had to take an approach that wasn't just focused on helping my brother but helping all kids like him.
TC: Why does your team focus on middle school students?
MK: I found that there are a lot of anti-bullying programs out there, and most of them work with high-schoolers. The work that they do is incredible and necessary, but what I’ve found is that by high school, it's already too late. The behavior of bullying has already become a habit. You have to intervene a lot earlier, because now in middle school, people are getting access to cellphones and social media so much earlier. What's crazy to me is that today we hand kids as young as 10 to 12 years old more powerful technology than we used to land on the moon. And we never ask these kids, how are you gonna use these tools? So that's what the program does, when these kids get their hands on these tools, we really try to get them think about how they want to use these tools.
TC: So the project focuses a lot on the use of technology. How does the Be ONE project tackle the problems of bullying?
MK: ONE Day is our flagship program. While we understand that kids in middle school are digital citizens, we love working with them in person. A large part of the work that we do is going into middle schools and working with groups of kids anywhere from 50 to 100 kids at a time. It's a four-hour program of games, activities and discussions, all centered around creating a community. A lot of times, anti-bullying programs emphasize how children should not ‘become bullies,' but we don't believe that bullies are bad kids. Bullying is just bad behavior. So the program tries to tackle bullying by building communities where bullying is not tolerated.
The definition of bullying has really shifted over the last few decades. For the older generation, I have this image in mind of people getting shoved up against lockers and being asked for their lunch monies. While that happens sometimes, what's worse is when kids are not even at school in the first place but receive horrible messages from their classmates. The whole landscape of bullying is shifting, and we need to be able to keep up with what's happening.
There is a problem we have in addressing bullying. If I were to go into a classroom of kids and ask how many of them have experienced bullying, hands would fly up in the air, because so many people have experienced bullying. But if I were to ask the same kids how many of them bully other kids, no one would raise their hands. But how is that possible that there are so many kids who have been bullied but so few bullies? I really think it's because kids don't see themselves as bullies. There's not only stigma around being bullied, but also around being a bully. We call bullies bad people all the time, but in reality we shouldn’t. These are 10 to 15 year olds. They're not bad kids, they are just doing bad behavior and that behavior can totally change.
TC: Besides ONE Day, are there any other ways in which Be ONE tackles the problem of bullying?
MK: We have a three-tier program. First, we have ONE Day, which is the actual in-person program we do with the middle schoolers. Second, we love to engage with people online, so we have social media campaigns and platforms, and we're currently in the process of creating more campaigns online. Third, we have community outreach programs. We recognize that while the program is free to all middle schools, it's hard for us to get to all the middle schools. So in the past, we've worked with Boys & Girls Clubs, local libraries. We’ve hosted screenings of the anti-bullying film "Bully." We have community resource fairs where we partner with Team Lifeline, a suicide hotline, so every kid who participates in our program gets the contact information for the hotline. So we connect kids with resources.
TC: Do you think bullying is a problem at Duke? If so, how would you suggest to change such a culture?
MK: I think that it is. I don't think that we call it bullying, and that's part of the problem, is that we don't see some of the intolerance and divisiveness that sometimes happens at Duke. We just don't call it bullying, but it's really just an upgraded, more mature form of middle school bullying. If we were to have addressed some of these issues of people not being open-minded and inclusive at an earlier stage, we probably wouldn’t have seen this happening. The fact that Duke's campus is still not an inclusive and safe space for all of us students, I think, is ridiculous. It's dangerous and problematic, and I think that we need to remind ourselves that bullying still exists here, so we actually need to take concrete steps to fostering acceptance.
We're all on different schedules, we come from such different backgrounds and we don't always have the physical space needed for that community. A lot of times, I find that people find their community and just stick with it. It's then rare that we allow opportunities to venture outside of the group that we've already created for ourselves.
But I think programs like Common Ground and the Duke Authenticity Project, which I’m running next week, do great work in bringing different types of people together. And from the stories that I've heard about Common Ground, I get the sense that the trust in a community they get to build is exactly the work that I do in middle schools with Be ONE. It's a little less intense because middle schoolers have different issues, but it's the same idea—bringing people together, creating a community, having a safe space for vulnerability and then making sure that there's empathy and mutual respect for everyone in that community. So while we're making progress, we just have to continue to invest in creating different programs to bring people together.
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