A Collaboration of Hope
As a mom, I often question what the world will have to offer in the future for not only my child, but children worldwide. Teach For All, a global network of organizations that are committed to providing a pathway to education and opportunity for their countries’ most vulnerable children, gives me hope. Ensuring that all children are educated in a way that will positively impact them and their communities is, for me, a path to changing the world — and attending Teach For All’s Global Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, last month has restored my hope that such change is possible.
I feel very fortunate to be a part of a network that is not only striving for external change, but also doing the hard work of creating the necessary changes within in order to bring to life a reimagined education system for all. This introspection has led to a commitment to ideas like last year’s Global Conference theme, Collective Leadership — a collaboration among all stakeholders involved in supporting great student outcomes, from teachers and administrators to policymakers to parents and social service providers — and this year’s theme of Community at the Center, or the critical importance of working hand in hand with communities toward a shared vision for children. When I first met Wendy Kopp, the CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, she posed what I believed at the time to be an impossible question: “What would it take to change the narrative around equity in education?” I now believe that these two themes are a definitive step towards an answer.
Collective leadership is very powerful in that it gives voice to those who have had a shared experience of the systems that need to change. To give value to the front line lived experience and not solely to the corner office with a view of a problem opens the floodgate of possibilities that are rarely considered. When the number of people who are invested in making real, sustainable change expands, the potential for new ideas grows exponentially.
As someone whose perspective has roots on the front lines of the highest need communities, I’m both excited and moved by this potential. I would not be where I am if it wasn’t for my community that lifted me up and gave me direction when I felt completely and utterly lost in this world. These concepts are especially meaningful for me, and I am excited to be a part of a global community that is discussing them, not only on the surface but in depth.
Conference sessions on Power Structures and Unconscious Bias, for example, explored how these constructs can impede the overall goals of equity in education from the inside out. Each of us will contribute more to the collective impact of our work if we can have open dialogue about these challenges in order to prevent and resolve issues that can slow the road to change we all desire. Another memorable session I attended addressed my lived experience of working in a space where I was expected to align to a workplace style and culture that were very different from my own. I came away feeling better equipped to face these obstacles and with a deeper sense of responsibility about my work as a community organizer.
From the first day I landed in Nepal, I was emotional, and my time there was transformational. I’m grateful for the value that was put on making time to show kindness and connect with people at the Global Conference and in the communities we visited within and around Kathmandu. Collective leadership to me is about building bridges for those who would otherwise be cut off — it provides a road out of a hard place — and I’m glad to be a part of a movement doing just that. A few days after I returned from Kathmandu, I tried to describe the experience to a colleague. “I cried every day,” I told him. He nodded and replied, “Those sound like healing tears to me.”
Keisha Mitchell is a community organizer at Parent Revolution in LA, California, where she coaches parents to use their choice and voices to build power and learn to be parent advocates to ensure they have access in their community to a quality education. Keisha joined Teach For All’s Global Advisory Council in 2017.
