Acadia Grantham decided to take action against bullying in her IWitness Video Challenge entry, “Silence,” which won second place in the 2017 national contest.

The IWitness Video Challenge asks students to submit short videos to show how they were inspired by testimony to make positive choices and create value in their community. The contest is open to middle and high school students across the United States and Canada (except Quebec). 

Acadia, a 10th grader at the School of Biotechnology, Health and Public Administration at Olympic High School in North Carolina, was assigned to complete the Challenge in her English class as part of her class’s Holocaust and genocide unit.

After watching testimony clips in IWitness for inspiration for her community service project, Acadia landed on a clip from the testimony of Holocaust survivor Kurt Messerschmidt. Messerschmidt tells a powerful story about helping a Jewish shop owner who was forced to pick up glass from his vandalized shop window as a crowd of bystanders watched but did nothing. Their silence, he says, “was what did the harm.”

Acadia applied the concept of “silence” to a topic that affects her and fellow young people every day: bullying.

“The topic of bullying hit very close to home so speaking up about it is important to me,” Acadia said.

She noted that while 90 percent of students express a willingness to intervene when they witness someone being bullied, less than 20 percent actually speak up. So, she wanted to find a way to give bullied students a voice.

She posted a call to action on her Instagram account, asking people to send their own stories about being bullied, and also to share something about themselves that makes them proud. She received responses from people all over the world and posted them in her school hallways for all to see.

Acadia said seeing her classmates’ reactions to her video was the most rewarding part of participating in the IWitness Video Challenge because it showed that their perspectives on bullying had changed.

The IWitness Video Challenge gave her the freedom to choose a topic that was important to her and have a positive impact, Acadia said.

“It showed me that I was capable of making a difference,” she said.

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