How did the event Our Power: Making Space for What’s Possible engage participants in themes connected to the Courage Museum?
Lauren Trout, Senior Program Associate, WestEd:
WestEd and our design of the educational programming for the Courage Museum is really trying to bring in as much educator and youth voice and perspective as much as possible. One of the ways that we have done that is through posting what we call engagement events. And a particular engagement event that we did back in June is called “Our Power: Making Space for What’s Possible.” And inside of this event, it was, for us, designed to prototype some of the ideas and design that we’re building inside of the educational programming. And externally, it was a space where we invited 20 students and educators from Mt. Eden High School in Hayward Unified School District to come to the future site of the Courage Museum, with the goals really of like building and deepening community and exploring this idea of power and storytelling as entry points for envisioning and creating a world without violence.
We wanted to have young people at the front as experts. We wanted to give them as well as educators a lot of movement and agency and spaciousness. And we really wanted to center their existing relationships as the grounding points to explore some difficult topics, and particularly what it means to have transactional power versus transformational power. And where young people and educators could situate themselves inside of that conversation in a philosophical way and in a really grounded way at their school site, in their classrooms. And so, during this event, we had this community come, we started the day with them with different activities where they could experience and begin the day together. And then we had them separate into concurrent sessions where young people were engaged in space together and educators were engaging in space together. And then they reconvened to kind of collaborate on what was surfacing inside of these ideas for them to talk about what are the conditions of courage and what sustains this idea of courage inside of, you know, long-term activism and change work. So it was a pretty special day.