Jupiter High School (JHS) and Dreyfoos School of the Arts students Estella Laverick and Sarah Kranz have been working together since April 10 as co-creators on their passion project, Voices Beyond Violence. 

The project is intended to come out late-July and will be a mixed-media journal, intended to showcase and represent individual voices and perspectives affected by violence. 

“It’s going to be an interactive journal that we’re making online. It’s going to be mixed media, pictures, videos, audio clips and transcriptions with their interviews. We also want to have an article section too,” Estella Laverick, junior, said. 

The two are interviewing those who have been affected by war such as the Israel-Palestine War and the Ukrainian war to showcase their voices. Each page in the journal is intended to reflect each person and their story. 

They intend to raise awareness on how war is affecting individual people as opposed to large generalized populations. 

“We wanted to make sure that it wasn’t about the politics, it was about the people involved,” Sarah Kranz, junior, said.

Kranz and Laverick are sourcing all the stories for the journal through first-hand accounts. They are mainly utilizing networking and social media to get in contact with people.

“We know a lot of people in our community, I’m very involved in my Jewish community so there’s a lot of contacts through there. Social media also helps, you really have to email and put yourself out there as well,” Kranz said. 

Laverick included two google forms, created as another way to communicate with people who could be featured in the journal. 

One form is used to ask the name and contact information of people for the possibility of an interview, and the second directly asks all the questions that an interview would.  

“This is so they wouldn’t have to do an interview if they didn’t want to and so it’s open to more people,” Laverick said. 

The actual questions themselves are to get an accurate picture of the experience the interviewees have had. 

“What we’re doing is we’re compiling interviews that we’re taking through phone call or through our google form and we’re asking them to describe how their life has been affected by that ongoing war that they’re involved in,” Laverick said. 

Kranz and Laverick have both gotten more educated in the topics their journal discusses and touch with their own culture.

“I’m personally Ukrainian and Jewish, and then Sarah is also Jewish so we just have a passion for this topic in general,” Laverick said.

Projects like these not only raise awareness on important topics to the public but also allow the project creators to go through a very unique experience and meet a variety of people. 

“It’s given me a really cool opportunity to meet people from different cultures and get more educated. I’ve never been really in touch with my culture and my family and this also offers an opportunity for me to get more educated about the war and also just ongoing wars that my families are both affected by,” Laverick said.

Voices Beyond Violence is different from other resources that educate on war-related topics. It’s led by students who take initiative to discuss these topics which will bring attention to real people’s individual stories.