"The reason we are starting in the Bayview is because we want to take a closer look at communities that have been left out of the economic boom and are now being pushed out of their homes" said Nancy Otto, Director of the Howard A. Friedman First Amendment Education Project. "We want to take a closer look at the role of corporations in our society and what youth can do to encourage corporate responsibility."

The students will also travel to East Palo Alto and meet with youth about what impact Silicon Valley has had on them. In Silicon Valley, the students will tour environmental toxic waste sites and learn about the workers' conditions in the computer plants. They will meet with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and unions. From the Silicon Valley they will travel to Salinas where they will meet with farmworkers and management. The tour will end in Los Angeles where they will exercise their First Amendment rights at the Democratic National Convention, where the ACLU has fought a court challenge to win the rights of demonstrators to protest. On the last day of the tour, they will visit the Chowchilla Prison, the world's largest prison for women, and talk with prisoners and officials about the joint venture which contracts with corporations to use prison labor.

The participants come from high schools all over Northern California including Davis, Sonoma, Vallejo, Stockton, Fresno, Castro Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area. On return, students will be asked to speak in classrooms throughout Northern California and will publish a report documenting the trip with their writings, poetry, artwork and photographs.

This will be the fifth trip the ACLU has organized for youth, earlier journeys focused on immigration, the juvenile justice system, tribal sovereignty, and homelessness.