Safe, Seen and Celebrated:
Unleashing the transformative power of social and emotional learning
Excerpts of a Keynote Address by Jennifer Buffett February 2019
Jennifer Buffett, co-president of the NoVo Foundation, addressed the audience during the opening of the “SEL in Action for Districts” conference in San Diego in February 2019, testifying to the importance of SEL (social and emotional learning) and creating school systems and communities where everyone feels safe, seen and celebrated.
The conference convened school administrators and nonprofit leaders on how to best implement SEL practices within supportive, participatory learning environments. Learn more about SEL and NoVo’s commitment to this work by visiting our website.
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Good evening and welcome everyone!
I’d like to begin by fully expressing my deep gratitude for all of you. For your very real experiences and challenges each and every day as you lead by example with love, and as you prioritize SEL for all students in the districts you work in.
As Seal sings in that song:
We’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.
And in a world full of people only some want to fly.
Isn’t that crazy?
After all, what does ‘crazy’ really mean? It’s just an indicator of imagination at work — and its power to complicate and interrogate our current reality.
I think about how many people — girls and women in particular — have been called crazy. And about their isolation and diminishment and lack of anything “out there” that reflected their longings, who they really were, what they had been connected to and knew.
In their lack of choice and options they lost themselves, their intuitive knowing and ultimately their self-worth and resolve.
I know I felt this way growing up and into my adulthood. And in response I went into a mode of trying to figure out: “So what do I have to do to somehow ‘earn’ love, be seen, be relevant, be useful and survive?” Almost from birth, I was deterred from becoming who I might be.
Henna Inman said: “When we limit ourselves by being the person we should be, we limit our aliveness. We may achieve success but not fulfillment because we are not living out all the important truths about ourselves, truths we need to slow down to excavate.”
So one thing we need to do if we feel this way is to find the others and create spaces for others to find us. This is the antidote to being isolated and relegated “crazy.”
This gathering is one small way we remind ourselves of this. To not feel we are crazy for wanting to change a system that often feels set up as a race, a race to some elusive top or bottom. A race that is literally making us forget who and what we are and what it means to be human. And I am really worried about this for present and coming generations.
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So what’s at stake? To put it into perhaps frustratingly unmeasurable but very real terms, I would say: Our aliveness! Children’s aliveness. Human beings’ aliveness! Our future’s aliveness!
“Wake up.
If your eyes are sleeping
then wipe them gently.
You need to be awake for this.
It is a matter of life and death.
Wake up!
If your mind is sleeping
then shake it quickly.
You need to be awake for this.
It is a matter of life and death.
Wake up, I said!
If your heart is sleeping
then beat your chest!
You need to be awake for life!
You need to be awake for love!
It is a matter of living and being alive.”
― Kamand Kojouri
As I was putting together my remarks for this evening, I asked myself the question I have asked myself again and again: “So what is motivating me to support this vision? What is really at the core here for me?”
And then I realized it is actually the title of Tim Shriver’s wonderful book about his life’s experiences as the Chairman of the Special Olympics: Fully Alive: Discovering what matters most. And Tim will close out our gathering on Friday.
I want children and humans on this planet (and myself and those close to me) to be and to feel fully alive while we are alive! Isn’t this ultimately a successful life? And if we feel truly alive and connected, I believe people are capable of anything.
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We all hear too many stories and see too many examples of kids (and teachers) going to school and their aliveness, their humanity, their health, well-being and self expression goes unsupported, diminished, used, abused or destroyed.
One of my earliest “aha” moments when I knew I had to get involved in supporting this work — and there were many as I look back — happened in 2006.
A 5-year-old girl in Florida had an emotional outburst in her kindergarten. She didn’t want to do a math problem one morning — who really wants to do a math problem at 8 in the morning, especially if you are 5! — and the school called the police, had the girl physically restrained, handcuffed and taken to jail.
From then on, I had to find a way to play a role — and this is where you all come into the picture. Somehow making sure that no child is ever taken out of their kindergarten or school in handcuffs, met with such an abysmal, terrifying and medieval response. And that all school administrators and teachers are equipped at every grade level with productive social and emotional skills and systems.
These are teachable moments. Not jailable offenses!
Maybe alive children are threats to those whose aliveness was taken from them by those who lost their aliveness.
So the work we have to do is deep. It isn’t about symptoms or surface; it’s about systems and centuries of history. It’s not about change at the edges, but transformation from the center.
And that will require each of us — from and in our centers — to re-imagine, re-learn, and revolutionize the way we think about education.
Yet what I am also seeing — and you are too I am sure — is a huge positive wave of energy and brilliance in kids finding their unique ways to self expression. Through spoken word, dance, and art, kids are finding new ways and outlets to tell their stories and by expressing what they need, and how they wish to — and actually do learn.
Are we going to shift systems and structures to support them or get in their way?
***
Schools are where community is first imprinted upon us, where we see and feel the society we will enter modeled — and then we are shaped by it, impressed upon by it, maybe asked to join and compete in it depending on its rules and preferences, or be punished, made even more vulnerable and unsafe, labeled, diminished to fail.
Yet what we need are school systems and communities where all people and children feel safe, seen and celebrated and can thrive and remain in their aliveness!
I know you all know that the work we are doing and supporting is not some “nice extra.” It is essential, more than ever, in order for kids to be able to come to school and learn, grow and develop throughout their lives in positive ways.
One of our goals gathering you together in a beautiful sunny place is to create a feeling of well-being, wholeness and harmony — inside of ourselves first, and then harmony between us, and then a strong rooted feeling that you can take back home to your districts and into the emerging community beyond this place and time.
In that spirit, I wanted to share with you just a little bit about my own journey that led us at NoVo to this work, and to all of you here tonight so that you understand me and us as a Foundation a little bit better.
My own pathway into philanthropy began over twenty years ago, supporting community organizations in Milwaukee.
That journey was supercharged in 2006. That was the year our foundation received a gift from Warren Buffett, my husband Peter’s father, which appeared seemingly out of the blue: a very large pledge of assets to give away.
This sum of money was a responsibility with a weight we had never known, but were determined to meet.
Peter and I are not scientists or economists. We live our lives more in the “artist” category. I hardly had two nickels to rub together growing up and have worked since I was 14. My mom was an educator and I heard almost daily stories from her of students’ struggles with poverty, violence, repression and racism. My brothers and my father, I learned later and saw first hand, had all experienced crushing bullying with little or no response from family or schools. Something inside of each of them shut down, feelings of aliveness severely compromised.
My husband Peter and I were — and are still — two people on the planet who, by accident of birth and serendipity, were granted a rare chance to support change on a massive scale.
The most immediate, obvious question we faced was: What are we going to do with this money? Everyone wanted to know. We wanted to know, too.
And that’s when we got some great advice from a friend. He said: “Your philanthropy is going to come out of your biographies — who you both are. So you need to spend time understanding what is living in you both. Your philanthropy will inevitably flow from there.”
We had to look inside ourselves to understand what kind of change we could support — and sustain — on the outside.
This advice became our north star. We had to figure out, not just where funding was needed, but how we viewed humanity and the nature of systems running in the world.
So we traveled a lot. We asked a lot of questions. We listened — and we observed.
We weren’t afraid to say the word consciousness — which is what became clear to us was what really needed to be changed. Simply quoting Einstein, “A problem can’t be solved at the level it was created.”
But the more we traveled, the more we saw the symptoms of the same deep problem: systems built on extraction, domination and exploitation; systems that were tearing apart our common humanity, deepening violence and sowing disconnection and destruction.
And time and again, across small villages and crowded cities, we saw how girls and women bore the brunt of these forces. Their inherent power was devalued and denied by discrimination and by violence — deep-seated violence in all of its forms, whether physical, economic, state or spiritual.
And just as girls and women were devalued, so too were feminine and Indigenous wisdom, life skills and values, like empathy, relationship, reciprocity and emotional connection. Our spiritual and physical connection to Nature was also devalued, has been ignored, commodified and exploited.
The result was not only a set of broken systems, but a deeply broken world. We asked how institutional philanthropy — which is itself a product of these same broken systems — could instead become a resource for transformation.
And soon our work came into even clearer focus. NoVo comes from the Latin: to make anew, refresh, change, alter, invent. We chose this word because it reflects our hope that our foundation can, as our mission statement says: foster a transformation from a world that is increasingly based on domination and exploitation to one of partnership and collaboration. A world based on justice, respect, liberation and co-creation.
Now, change of this scale means we don’t focus on the symptoms of our challenges, but on their root causes.
We believe that is exactly what foundations should do. We can support people and communities who take risks and experiment. We can invest in people and places others have questioned or abandoned. We can create conditions where girls and women have a chance to exercise their full power in healthy relationship with each other and boys and men. We can get a little crazy — and create conditions where others can do the same. And just maybe, we can shift the course we’re on for future generations.
***
Our work — your work — to prioritize social and emotional learning, healthy school communities that respect student-life contexts, relationships, empathy and greater human understanding is fundamental to that future, and to our ability to live together on this planet as healthy and whole people.
Schools are the places where our deepest systems can take hold, or be transformed.
Schools are the places where our histories of racism, sexism, colonialism and exclusion will be reinforced — or revolutionized.
Schools are the place where we — all of us, working together — can build a more just and balanced world. If we have the courage to get a little crazy — and realize that it is in our fierce, full aliveness that we have the answers.
John Taylor Gatto said that, “There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.” The world has been changing, and is changing, at unprecedented rates. We have long entered the Information age, but education has hardly caught up.
I think that educators — all of you as “first responders” — need the space, time and room to feel what is coming and to be able to adjust to what is needed.
You know this. It’s why you are here.
So what does being able to be equipped or compete really mean in this fast-changing world?
Last year, the Chinese business magnate Jack Ma said: “If we do not change the way we teach, 30 years from now we will be in big trouble.”
Robots could replace 800 million jobs by 2030. What we presently teach our kids are things from the past 200 years. And that is knowledge based.
But teachers must stop teaching knowledge. We have to teach what is unique in and to humans so that a machine can never catch up. According to Ma, these are the “skills” that we need to be teaching: Values; independent thinking; team work; care for others; sports; painting; and music.
So, it turns out, that it is the things that make us uniquely and beautifully human that we can no longer afford to stifle — that we need to promote — if our kids are to make it in the 21st century.
We need their curiosity and drives, their ability to feel and support life, to feel and create beauty, to care for one another and to work together. These are the things that no machine can replace, and if we lose these most precious traits and abilities, we will lose our humanity itself.
So let’s widen out into the bigger picture and ponder and peak outside the frame of the reality of our daily lives. Let’s challenge ourselves audaciously. Let’s hold an image in our minds for the 500 years for all 7 billion of us!
As you share dinner tonight or over the next few days, I would like you to consider sharing with someone an ‘aha’ moment. Tell us the story of your own journey to this work, and what led you here tonight.
Share about a child or teacher, or maybe it was you at a younger age as a student — someone who made a deep impression on you.
And in your mind’s eye, bring that child or person here with you into this community. Promise him or her that because of them, you are more committed than ever to changing school communities so that they are places where everyone feels safe, seen and celebrated.
Mark Nepo says, “We work so hard to get somewhere, to realize a dream, to arrive at some destination, that we often forget that though some satisfaction may be waiting at the end of our endurance effort, there is great and irreplaceable aliveness in the steps along the way.”
Wishing all of you a wonderful next few days together! Thank you.
