文化、种族和公平中心

成绩单我们刚刚在布朗克斯第九区完成了第三个全天的专业发展系列。我们没有一个计划来告诉人们他们需要学习什么。我们是平等的合作伙伴，我们有机会获得信息，这些信息来自与我们合作的人，并向他们学习，所以我们收集了与我们合作的学校和社区相关的数据和信息。我们结合了一个基于社区的设计过程，允许所有的参与者一起看数据，并找出他们的挑战是什么，增长的领域是什么，但也带来了许多关于文化，种族的问题和基于研究的信息，公平让我们有一整天的经历来挑战人们，促使他们反思自己的经历，也开始帮助他们看待和思考我们如何生活以及孩子和家庭如何在一个种族化的环境中生活。种族和文化每天都影响着我们的生活。CCRE帮助我理解了种族偏见，文化偏见是如何影响年幼的孩子的，尤其是在学校里。但是CCRE教会了我作为一个父母从一个基于力量的角度来处理它所需要的这些技能。我不仅被磨练成显性偏见，现在我对个人领域和职业领域内的隐性偏见也变得非常敏感。所以我现在要做的就是把更多的注意力放在那些隐含的情况上，尽可能地提高我的声音。 It made me look at other people and maybe not always my perspective and not always having one voice and that there's so many stories not just one story working together to make sure our children succeed in life with different types of families. That's what we have to acknowledge, respect and celebrate. My son and the staff member of the school that you have, that bond between all of us, the personal ways it helped me to communicate more with parents, be more open and able to understand what they're going through. I have taken on this challenge of bringing this work to everyone that I see and I will never not have parents not involved in the process of learning. Again, that personal reflection that people do is something that's not very common for folks but then we push past the tears or we include them in and think about what that means for our learning and then also what that means for professional practice; so for teachers and leaders they're thinking about what they're doing that's supporting children and families and for the family members they're thinking about their own experiences in school, their own hopes and dreams for their children, and how they can start to become more of a leader in that school space. When you are that person who says to myself, okay maybe you know, I don't need to say much, because they might not take me seriously. The CCRE team member showed me that yes, we want to hear from you, yes, we want to listen to what you have to say. It is important what you have to say and that is what kept me going forward. I can go to them and say I want to apply for a job for a family worker, and because they boost me, now I have so much confidence talking in public, I have so much confidence talking, speaking my mind and changed my life in so many ways. I'm like leading an initiative that's happening in my school right now about social injustices and this kind of all started because I’ve been attending all these meetings and I just said I got to put it into action. It's just been like a big awakening for me. This experience inspired me to look within myself, what can I do, how can I empower my school community. Not only am I more cognizant as an administrator, how I purchase certain materials for my centers for my schools and what materials I promote, but I’m also much more cognizant of the resources that I purchase that my children interact with to make sure that they are inclusive and representative of my population. The system is really big and the systems are really flawed and children are not always getting what they need but we try to remind people that the system is actually you. The system is us. Systems are made up of people and so when individual people make positive change to grow and develop and to shift what they're doing, institutions change and those systems change and we're really proud of the fact that, through our collaboration, with many different communities we've been able to see people take the learning and the community-building and actually put it into concrete goals and action steps. So, we see our work changing the lives of teachers, parents, schools, and systems we have.