Celebrating 20 Years
UE2020! Student & Alumni Racial Justice Series - Call for Proposals
We invite anyone interested in leading a 60-minute interactive online session/workshop based on your passions and expertise (i.e, art-making as healing and participatory method, discussion of youth organizing during #BLM uprisings, scholar-activism on-the-ground during Covid, or anything you might dream up related to racial justice and your own work in the world) to send us a short proposal. Just write a short paragraph or two—no more than 250-300 words—and submit here via this UE2020! googleform with the focusing question/topic of your session, no later than October 15. Also click all the dates you are available. During this online session you might share the impact of your Urban Ed experiences on your current work, your questions and commitments, and also participate in a discussion focusing on your topic of choice that will be co-moderated by a current student and an alum. If you are an alum, you might connect your then, now and why. If you are a current student, you might share your now, hopes and why. This is a low-stakes “proposal” – most important is that you want to share your voice and work and to talk about it all with others who came before and after you. If we receive more proposals than scheduled sessions, we will either add sessions or will group folx with similar commitments and questions together into a session with a focused topic.
Reconnecting
Current Urban Ed students are thrilled to invite YOU to UE2020! Come celebrate UE2020 TogetherApart The Celebration (both academic and social!) of our Urban Ed program’s 20th anniversary. This series of events will allow us to gather together as thinkers, doers, activists, scholars, educators, learners, friends and colleagues. FIRST, turn up with a kickoff online Zoom DJ-ed dance party on Friday, November 13 at 7pm EST! NEXT, hour-long online sessions led by Urban Ed students and alumni will then begin in November and will be held the third Tuesday of each month, all EST time:
- 11/17 from 3-4pm
- 12/15 from 7-8pm
- 1/19 from 3-4pm
- 2/16 from 7-8pm
- 3/16 from 3-4pm
- 4/20 from 7-8pm
- 5/18 from 3-4pm
Each Zoom workshop space will empower us to focus and build our justice-centered organizing, teaching, and learning. If you are interested in offering a session (low-stakes proposals!), more details are available here. FINALLY, on our website, we will document and celebrate this year-long anniversary series with a collection of presentations, art and testimonials.
With hope for joy and justice, always,
The UE2020! Planning Committee
Recommitting
As the core of UE2020! we intend to recommit Urban Ed to its founding racial equity and justice mission, and to reconnect with each other across time and space. As we each navigate and strive to change the visible and invisible systems built upon centuries of colonization and racial capitalism, we need to organize with each other. During this global pandemic, harm continues to be enacted by ideologies and structures of white supremacy, evidenced in everyday racial violence and the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on Black and Brown communities. But the Black Lives Matter movement and rebellion bring hope. In our unjust world, we must collectively engage our radical imaginations and walk through this portal, as powerfully envisioned by Arundhati Roy. We must strengthen our individual and collective work with every child, teacher, family and community, and make education more humane, more liberatory, and more just. This includes internally examining our own Urban Ed program and recommitting our scholarly and schools-based activism for racial and economic justice.
Giving
Alumni, we especially hope you will make a donation of ANY size to Urban Ed, now celebrating UE2020! in our 20th year and hopefully in the years beyond, too! We know that other (much older programs) at the GC raise their own annual funds to allocate as they decide. With a starting goal of $5000 this fall, Urban Ed is establishing a Racial Equity & Justice Student Fund that will allow a student-of-color-run committee to disperse mini-grants to Urban Ed students of color doing justice research and work for conferences, travel costs, living expenses, research, or other needs. Evoking NPR and PBS (but without the telethon!)...if you make a $20+ donation, we will send you a fabulous tote in either navy or black, your choice. And if you contribute $40+ (yes, that’s $20x2 in 2020) we will send you a unique mug or a tote, your choice. Every dollar you contribute will go directly into the creation of this new Racial Equity and Justice Student Fund. (Please be sure to type “Racial Justice Student Fund” in the “Leave a comment” box. And, if you’d like to contribute the cost of postage, please add $4 to your gift.) Thank you!!
