From content applications to online assessments to parent engagement tools, there is an ever-growing trove of technology resources being pushed and pulled into classrooms. The overwhelming surface narrative has been that the more exposure to technology, the better prepared students are to thrive in the 21st century. There is, perhaps, a fatal flaw in that narrative. Experts across the field will attest that there are layers of complexity to consider. As Rupa Chandra Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Sown to Grow, details in her Edutopia Op-ed, “All [tech] products aren’t necessarily good for all students.” Simply supplying technology resources void of consideration of students’ individual needs isn’t the answer.
Technology is not one size fits all. Educators still have to do the work of educators, and understand what different sets of students need to engage with content and materials in a way that produces successful learning outcomes. Gupta offers practical advice, including “Follow your gut educator sense. If you’re worried that a tool is going to help some students at the expense of others, brainstorm differentiated scaffolds you can use to support students. If that’s not enough, consider other tools in the same space.” She also recommends piloting applications with a diverse set of students and paying attention to differences in how students are use, enjoy, and experience results from a product before full implementation.
Read the full article here.
 

Community Activism Law Alliance (CALA)

Interview with Lam Nguyen Ho, Community Activism Law Alliance (CALA) Founder & Executive Director

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Organization Mission: CALA unites lawyers and activists in a collaborative pursuit for justice by leveraging legal services to benefit the most marginalized communities and individuals, empowering them to achieve social, economic, and political justice.
Population Served: Low-Income communities who are ineligible for, or struggle to access, legal aid: particularly undocumented immigrants, laborers, sex workers, and grassroots activists.
Founding Year: 2014
Organization Website: www.calachicago.org

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INTERVIEW

Please provide a brief overview of the organization’s work.
CALA stands in contrast to most legal assistance organizations, which have consolidated into centralized offices downtown, away from the communities they serve. Instead, collaboration is at the core of CALA and its vision to change legal aid. The premise is straightforward: lawyers need to be embedded with the activists, organizers, and changemakers pushing for structural-level reform in society because this will advance the cause of social justice more quickly and effectively. CALA’s strategy is to design and test a new model of community lawyering based on the principles of community-location, community-operation and community-direction, and then spread the model widely until it becomes the new normal.
At a fundamental level, the CALA model is a shift from a transactional relationship that tends to be more reactive and focused on individual crises to a transformative partnership model that is proactive and pushes for systems change. Plus by uniting lawyers with activists, CALA leverages the combined resources of each to operate more cost-effectively while achieving greater impact than what lawyers or activists working alone could achieve.
In a few sentences, please describe the problem you are working to solve and your approach to solving this problem.
For families living in poverty, access to legal aid can be critical to basic survival (from avoiding homelessness, escaping violence, and fighting deportation), but the current legal aid system struggles to help “clients” combat injustice: its transactional, hierarchical structure does not empower. CALA is seeking to change that system: to transform legal services from a transactional process between lawyer and “client” to a transformative partnership between lawyer and community members that will change both the lawyer and the member, and ultimately the community. Through 19 “community activism-law programs,” which are community-located, community-operated, and community-directed, CALA works with the most disadvantaged communities by uniting lawyers and activists in a pursuit for social change, simultaneously addressing the justice gap, operating more cost-effectively, and creating greater impact than what lawyers or activists working alone could achieve. Our vision is to change legal aid by redistributing the power of the legal process to communities for which justice is inaccessible. Through this process, we shift power away from lawyers, and the government that restricts access to justice, and put it in the hands of low-income communities: to empower their members to lead their own fights for justice and social change.
How and why did you first start working for this organization?
I am the founder of the organization, which was inspired by my time working as a community lawyer on the west side of Chicago, operating 10 community-based clinics providing free legal services to youth and their families. I experienced firsthand the challenges of community lawyering and our current legal aid system, and was inspired to innovatively confront these challenges through the creation of CALA.
What current trends are you seeing in your field of work?
More lawyers are recognizing that the legal system is often an ineffective tool for social change. Lawyers who are committed to systemic change cannot work only within the law.
What do you think will change most about your work over the next 5 years?
We hope for our work, and our model, will operate on a national level, as we seek to create an alternative legal aid system in the US: not controlled by the government and lawyers, but by people and their communities.
What are the three most important skills you value in your staff members? Why?
Humility, empathy, and patience. Working at CALA often means unlearning many lessons we’re taught in law school; the most important one being that lawyers should be in charge. Our model requires lawyers who are willing to be transformed: to learn from and be changed by the communities and community members with which they work.
How has technology influenced your field and/or the way your organization works?
We rely heavily on technology since all of our legal work is done in our partner communities—often in the evenings and weekends, when community members are available. We have 18 different programs across Chicago, and one in Lake County. That means our attorneys need to be able to access information efficiently wherever we go.
What are some key achievements your organization has accomplished over the last year and how were you able to attain this success?
As an organization, we’ve seen significant growth. In the past year, we’ve launched three community activism-law programs for neighborhoods on the westside of Chicago, immigrants and refugees on the northside of Chicago, and domestic workers to protect their rights under the new Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. That means we now have 19 total programs that serve over 4000 people annually. But the victories that are most important to us are the moments of transformation: an undocumented victim of domestic violence speaking to almost a hundred people about her survival, and urging them to join her fight; working with grassroots activists to stop a deportation already under way and could not be stopped using the law—convincing ICE to land a plane in Texas and return a father to his family; and sex workers “coming out of the shadows” at a demonstration, declaring and claiming their human rights and their worker rights.
Have there been any recent obstacles? If so, how were you and your staff able to overcome them?
Recent decisions by the government have ravaged our communities: ripping families apart, causing widespread fear, and forcing workers to work in harmful conditions. We have victims of violence and persecution too afraid to apply for remedies to which they are rightfully entitled; young children (under 13 years old), whose parents are in the US, facing separate deportation actions; and severely-ill legal permanent residents afraid to get medical help because they are too afraid of potential immigration consequences. We’re working with our community partner organizations to provide as much accurate information and address community fears as possible. We have also had conversations with our partners to help them make adjustments to our programs to respond to the changing needs of their communities.
What’s next for your organization? What are you looking forward to?
We’re taking our community-activism-lawyering model national to change our country’s approach to legal aid, but we’re doing it in a way that is true to our grassroots, community-driven values. In the words of a mentor, “we are not trying to become the [queen] of the mountain, we’re trying to change the mountain.”
What do you wish others knew about the organization or the populations you serve?
The majority of the community members with which we work are either ineligible for, or struggle to access, assistance from other legal aid organizations: including undocumented immigrants, day laborers, sex workers, and activists.

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Selected Media Mentions:
 
Chicago News “Community Activism Law Alliance Fighting Deportations”
Daily Northwestern “Some students who protested ICE representative undergoing University’s conduct process, lawyer says”
NBC News 5 video “No Decision on Deportation of Man Told to Appear Before ICE With Plane Ticket to Mexico”
Chicago Tonight, WTTW “Demand Fuels Creation of Immigrant Hotline, Crisis Planning Workshops”
ABC 7 Chicago “Arlington Heights library cancels immigrant rights workshop amid threats, hate calls”

Chicago Tonight, WTTW “Cook County Sheriff: ICE Agents Shouldn’t Identify as Police”

CNN “Dreamers prepare for fight against Trump”
Features on Lam Nguyen Ho:
Harvard Law Today Lam Nguyen Ho named 2017 Gary Bellow Award Winner
The Harvard Law Record “The HLS 300 Project: Inspiring Careers” 
takepart “Seven People Take kindness to the Next Level”

Harvard Law Today “Top seeds: Harvard Law School entrepreneurs launch new ventures of service”

 
 

The News Literacy Project

Interview with The News Literacy Project‘s Founder & CEO, Alan C. Miller.

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Organization Mission: The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan national education nonprofit, empowers educators to provide students with the skills they need to become smart, active consumers of news and other information and engaged, informed participants in civic life.

Population Served: Our primary audience is educators and students in middle school and high school. Our new website, www.newslit.org, also provides tools and resources for the general public.

Founding Year: 2008

Organization Website: http://www.newslit.org 

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Interview

Please provide a brief overview of the organization’s work. 
NLP’s programs enable educators to give middle school and high school students the skills they need to know how to sort fact from fiction in the digital age. Students are taught how to discern verified and unbiased information from misinformation, hoaxes, opinion and spin — whether using search engines to find information about specific topics, browsing social media feeds, watching videos on YouTube or reading a news article or blog post.
Students are also encouraged to share and produce information that is accurate, fair and responsible and that empowers their voices. This is vital, because in an age of unparalleled access, in which unprecedented amounts and types of information can be shared more widely and easily than ever before, anyone can be a publisher — and everyone must be an editor.
In a few sentences, please describe the problem you are working to solve and your approach to solving this problem.
Trust in journalism is at record lows. Increasingly trapped in filter bubbles, we often rely on the news not to inform us, but to confirm what we believe. The nation is mired in an at-times surreal debate about the very nature of facts, and whether demonstrable truths still matter. Meanwhile, in the months before the 2016 presidential election, a Russian disinformation campaign reached more than 126 million Americans through Facebook posts — and millions more through Facebook ads and other social media platforms.
All this is eroding the informational underpinnings of our democracy. As New York Times columnist Timothy Egan noted, “Too many Americans are ill equipped to perform the basic functions of citizenship.”
News literacy is one response to this rising tide of confusion, polarization and distrust. It is a proven way to give today’s students — and, increasingly, the general public — the tools to know what news and information to trust, share and act on and to become informed, engaged participants in civic life. It has the potential to increase individual responsibility to become part of the solution to the rising tide of misinformation, rather than part of the problem.
How and why did you first start working for this organization?
In 2006, I was invited to my daughter’s sixth-grade class to talk about what I did as an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau and why such work was important. The responses I received led me to think about the impact that many journalists could have if they shared their expertise and experience with the nation’s students.
At my 30th reunion at Wesleyan University just a few weeks later, I had the opportunity to discuss my thoughts with another Wesleyan alum, Alberto Ibargüen, the head of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation — the largest funder of journalism education projects in the U.S. He introduced me to his vice president for journalism, and after several calls over the next 18 months, as I completed my last four-part investigative project for the Los Angeles Times, Knight was ready to give me a founding grant — and the News Literacy Project was launched.
What current trends are you seeing in your field of work? 
There’s a much greater awareness of news literacy — and the importance of being news-literate — than there was when I started NLP in 2008. The acknowledgement that Russian-sponsored misinformation and disinformation had spread, like a particularly nasty virus, across our social media platforms was certainly a wake-up call to many, as was the entrance into the daily lexicon of terms like “alternative facts” and “fake news.” We consider our programs to be the antidote to such infections, and we expect that demand will only grow.
What do you think will change most about your work over the next 5 years?
We are in midst of dramatic internal growth to meet enormous demand for our services and opportunity for our organization. We expect recognition of the need for news literacy education to continue to grow. We anticipate having exponentially greater reach in impact over the next five years.
What are the three most important skills you focus on developing in the population you serve? Why?

1. The ability to discern and create credible information because this is a survival skill in the digital age.
2. The ability to recognize the importance of the First Amendment and a free press in a democracy because this is essential to their survival.
3. The ability to push back when encountering misinformation because everyone needs to stand up for facts in an age of rampant conspiracy theories, hoaxes and viral rumors.

What are the three most important skills you value in your staff members? Why?

1. Creativity, because our prime focus is creating resources for educators and students.
2. The ability to communicate clearly and effectively, orally and in writing, because we need to do so routinely, both internally and externally.
3. The ability to work collaboratively, collegially and virtually because of the nature of our organization.

How has technology influenced your field and/or the way your organization works?
The influence of technology on the field of news literacy is nearly as profound as the influence of technology on the fields of journalism and media. We think a vital part of teaching today’s students about news literacy is teaching them how to understand and navigate today’s information landscape. This involves everything from how to understand the role and impact of social media and smartphones to perceiving clever new forms of advertising to utilizing tools and skills to identify and fight back against misinformation.
NLP was founded as a program that partnered with individual classroom teachers to design and deliver news literacy units in classrooms in three cities. After demonstrating the impact of our curriculum, we started exploring e-learning and eventually transitioned into creating a teacher-friendly e-learning hub with lessons for students: the Checkology^® virtual classroom. NLP has also made extensive use of videoconferencing to bring students and journalists together for lessons and engaging conversations about the opportunities and challenges of today’s information ecosystem. In addition, we offer an online professional development series, Teaching News Literacy, twice a year (the next series starts Aug. 28).
What are some key achievements your organization has accomplished over the last year and how were you able to attain this success?
Our Checkology virtual classroom continues to expand its reach. From its launch in May 2016 through the end of the 2017-18 school year, more than 13,600 educators — with a self-reported potential reach of more than 2 million students — registered to use the platform. During the 2017-18 school year we saw a 79% increase in the number of teachers who registered for Checkology Premium student licenses, which unlock a variety of features, and a 178% increase in the number of licenses used. We’re in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, three U.S. territories and 93 other countries. In August 2018, for the 2018-19 school year, we’re releasing a revised and updated version of the platform, which we’re calling Checkology 2.0.
In May 2018, we unveiled a new website at www.newslit.org. It features a more immersive experience for all visitors — educators, students and members of the public — and offers resources and tools that everyone can use to improve their news literacy skills.
Educators are raving about NewsLitCamp^® — a one-day professional development event that brings teachers and librarians from middle schools and high schools into a local newsroom for conversations and workshops with journalists from that news outlet. Participants come away with a better idea of the standards of quality journalism and a deeper understanding of the newsgathering process, along with tools and resources to take back to the classroom. Following our successful pilot of this program at the Chicago Sun-Times in April 2017, we held five NewsLitCamps during the 2017-18 school year — two in Washington (with The Washington Post and NPR), another in the Chicago area (with the Daily Herald), and one each in New York City (with Time) and Miami (with The Miami Herald). We’re planning at least five NewsLitCamps (including another in Chicago) for the remainder of 2018.
In the Chicago area, we are working closely with the Chicago Public Schools Participate Civics Program and a group of CPS educators to create a professional learning community that will focus on exploring and documenting how educators in grades 6-12 can most effectively incorporate and embed news literacy instruction into existing curricula across content areas. This is a project that we should be able to replicate across the country. We are also working with Illinois Civics to provide professional development training, news literacy curriculum and resources, and pathways to help students empower their voices and use news literacy tools to take informed civic action.
Have there been any recent obstacles? If so, how were you and your staff able to overcome them?
An unexpected challenge — but one that was most welcome — was the growth spurt in our Checkology platform during the last school year. Though our staff is small, it is nimble, and I was proud of how everyone stepped up. In addition, we were able to hire a third person for our education team, which eased some of the pressure and allowed us to also focus on creating new lessons, and revising old ones, for the release of Checkology 2.0.
On a more serious note, we were invited to participate in a session at the United Nations to celebrate World Press Freedom Day in May, and we planned to use that opportunity to preview our new Checkology lesson on press freedoms around the world. The organizers of the session attempted to censor one of our videos to remove a reference to restrictions on the press in Turkey; when we refused to accept this, and refused their subsequent request that we not show any of our videos, the organizers ended up “postponing” the session. We are proud to have taken a stand for press freedom.
What’s next for your organization? What are you looking forward to? 
We are in the midst of dramatic budgetary and staff growth to meet the rising demand for our services amid the growing recognition of the urgent need for news literacy education. We are also in the process of crafting an ambitious four-year strategic framework that will chart our path forward to build a national community of practitioners to facilitate systemic change. We look forward to raising NLP’s profile and extending our mission in the years ahead.
What do you wish others knew about the organization or the populations you serve?
We would like others to know that NLP is a national leader in the effort to give the next generation the tools to combat misinformation and become informed participants in a democracy. We would welcome any opportunity to share with them how transformative and empowering our Checkology virtual classroom can be for students.

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Selected Media Mentions 
Profiles of NLP Founder Alan C. Miller

• Bethesda magazine, July-August 2017 issue
• Wesleyan Magazine, June 15, 2010.

Videos

• February 2018: NLP’s 10-year anniversary video.
• January 2018: A Quartz video about aNew York City school where students are learning to discern fact from fiction using NLP’s Checkology^® virtual classroom went viral on social media.
• October 2017: “How Students Learned to Tell Fact From Falsehoods”: a video in which three Virginia high school students share what they learned from NLP at an NLP reception in Washington, D.C.

News Reports About NLP

• July 2018: The Rotarian — the monthly magazine of Rotary International, with a circulation of more than 400,000 — reported on a sixth-grade teacher in Chicago who uses our Checkology virtual classroom to teach news literacy skills.
• June 19, 2018: NLP’s Peter Adams, senior vice president of education, was interviewed by Courthouse News Service about a recent Pew Research Center report examining the difficulty people have in determining what is a factual statement and what is opinion.
• May 11, 2018: NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller told listeners of the Pew Charitable Trusts podcast After the Fact that news literacy is a “survival skill.”
• April 23-27, 2018: NLP’s director of partnerships, Damaso Reyes, took our message to the United Kingdom, where he addressed more than 300 students in hands-on lessons that left the teens “enthused and inspired.” The stops in Newcastle, Birmingham and Belfast were sponsored by the U.S. Embassy and Shout Out UK, an independent youth news and media platform.
• April 18, 2018: Voice of America, which broadcasts to millions of people worldwide, reported on a Virginia high school where the students, using the Checkology platform, are being pushed to think critically about what they’re reading, watching and hearing.
• April 3, 2018: Public radio’s Marketplace looked at the changing social media landscape and talked with Miller about what today’s teens need to know.
• March 27, 2018: The Washington Post’s education blog, The Answer Sheet, featured an interview with Miller in which he discussed “the need to restore a fact-based middle ground to the national conversation.”
• Feb 7, 2018: News Center Maine, the NBC affiliate in Portland, Maine, tested the virtual classroom on parents of teens to see if they could separate fact from fiction.
• Jan. 12, 2018: A column in The Boston Globe contending that young people are leading the charge in the fight against “fake news” and featuring two educators who have registered to use NLP’s Checkology^®virtual classroom.
• Jan. 3, 2018: Quartz visited an eighth-grade classroom at George Jackson Academy in New York City to see Checkology in action (also a video).
• Nov. 6, 2017: Kim Lisagor Bisheff of MediaShift, a website exploring the intersection of media and technology, discussed the importance of teaching students to become responsible news consumers and cited NLP as a great resource for separating good journalism from bad.
• June 7, 2017: Wired reported on a Pennsylvania classroom that uses the Checkology virtual classroom.
• Jan. 23, 2017: NPR’s The 1A interviewed Miller, CNN’s Brian Stelter and The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan about “fake news” and what can be done about it.
• Dec. 22, 2016: NPR’s All Things Considered visited “The Classroom Where Fake News Fails.” (This report led to a 350 percent increase in registrations for the virtual classroom in the two weeks after it was broadcast.)
• Sept. 11, 2016: Margaret Sullivan, media columnist at The Washington Post, featured NLP in a column about the importance of — and need for — news literacy skills.
• April 23, 2013: The Chronicle of Philanthropy (PDF download) looked at the ways that nimble nonprofits, including NLP, managed to grow despite the recession that began in 2008 — the year NLP was founded.

TheDream.US

Interview with TheDream.US‘ Program Director of Advocacy, Development, and Communications, Gabriela Pacheco.

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Organization Mission: Thousands of immigrant youth want nothing more than to get a college education. At TheDream.US, we work with a community of partners to provide that opportunity.

Population Served: Immigrant Youth

Founding Year: 2014

Organization Website:  www.thedream.us

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Interview

Please provide a brief overview of the organization’s work. 
TheDream.US is the nation’s largest college access and success program for immigrant youth, representing close to 4,000 current and former Scholars. By collaborating with partner universities and community colleges, TheDream.US provides scholarships to immigrant students who currently hold or are eligible for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Temporary Protected Status (TPS). We have two programs, the National and Opportunity Scholarships. The National Scholarships provides scholarships for up to $33,000 and the Opportunity Scholarship of up to $80,000 for bachelor’s degree programs.
In a few sentences, please describe the problem you are working to solve and your approach to solving this problem.
Our Scholars are immigrant youth who came to this country at a young age.  For many, it’s the only country they’ve ever known. Over 800,000 immigrant youth now have DACA or TPS status which gives them the right to remain in the United States and to work legally.  But even with these immigration protections DREAMers have no path to citizenship, access to Pell Grants, federal education loans, or access to federal work study. Many face paying out-of-state tuition even in their home states.
While DREAMers are highly motivated students who bring a sense of responsibility and accountability to their college educations – only 5 -10% can afford it. Working with our 75+ Partner Colleges, we provide scholarships to highly-motivated DREAMers with DACA/TPS to help them pay for their college education.
How and why did you first start working for this organization?
As a DREAMer myself I knew first-hand the struggle of trying to get an education when the state you live in didn’t recognize your contributions or talents. After being able to successfully find private funding to help pay for my education, I wanted to make sure others like me had the same opportunities to obtain a college education. I worked with the co-founders and team of this organization to help start it, shape it, and promote it within the immigrant community.
What current trends are you seeing in your field of work? 
We recently surveyed over 1,400 Scholars and the survey results provided a unique picture of TheDream.US’s Scholars high levels of uncertainty and anxiety that they are facing in the current immigration climate, particularly with the forthcoming end of DACA and TPS. Thankfully, more institutions of higher learning are stepping up and opening their doors to undocumented immigrant students. They are also finding ways to provide them with institutional aid, mental and physical health resources, and legal screenings.
What do you think will change most about your work over the next 5 years?
If the issue of DACA is not resolved we may see a loss of talent through youth being deported, or self-determining to leave the country and take their talents and skills to other nations like Canada, European countries, and for some even their birth countries.
What are the three most important skills you focus on developing in the population you serve? Why?
We provide scholarships to highly-motivated DREAMers to help them pay for their college education. Our hope is that these Scholars become life-long learners and active members in their community. We require our Scholars to give back and continue to be involved in our program as alumni and community members. We strive to create an environment of community—we send cohorts of no less than 7 Scholars to each institution to provide them with a sense of community.
What are the three most important skills you value in your staff members? Why?
Our team is small but mighty! We are always up for any challenge and in the current immigration environment what our team is best at is adapting to the times and the needs of our Scholars. We have a continuous growth mind set–where we see opportunity to partner with an organization that can help us expand our goal, we go for it. Lastly, everyone in the team is deeply passionate about these students. While we may not understand all the immigration laws or the policies surrounding this issue, TheDream.US recognizes the humanity and dignity of all students. We believe that no matter where you are from, if you want to go to college, you should have access to an education.
How has technology influenced your field and/or the way your organization works?
Our team depends deeply on technology. First, it requires a robust scholarship management platform to both manage our application process and support our over 4,000 Scholars. We are a data driven organization and rely upon a data management platform to track the persistence, graduation, and academic performance of our Scholars. This data enables us to make program changes as needed. We rely on social media, text messaging, webinars, and email to communicate and connect with our Scholars, Partner Colleges, Supporters, and Donors. We use social media and traditional medial to promote our scholarship and advocate for tuition and aid equity for DREAMers. Finally, we have a virtual team that is based in D.C., San Jose, Seattle, and Miami. Technology enables us to stay connected with each other and remain nimble and efficient.
What are some key achievements your organization has accomplished over the last year and how were you able to attain this success?
As of 2018, TheDream.US committed to providing over $103 million in scholarships, with over $41 million in scholarships distributed. We’ve raised just over $190,000,000 in funds that are 100% dedicated to funding scholarships to DREAMers. With a 94% first year persistence rate, The Dream.US is diligently working toward building a nationwide movement of Scholars – imbuing Scholars with a new sense of hope and a mission to help and support their families, communities, and nation.
What’s next for your organization? What are you looking forward to?
We are looking forward to continuing to support our Scholars, open our next round in November 2018, raise more funds, and help use our voice to change the nation’s narrative about the importance of immigrants – and specifically DREAMers – to our nation. We look forward to the day the United States Congress puts us out of business and passes a law that allows immigrant youth to get access to federal financial aid, loans, and work study.
What do you wish others knew about the organization or the populations you serve?
TheDream.US’s prioritization of education is particularly important in the current immigration climate, where students are on the verge of losing key immigration protections. We partner with institutions, organizations, philanthropies, and businesses who share our values, respect our Scholars, and support DREAMers in their drive to get an education. DREAMers and their contributions are an important part of our nation’s social and economic wellbeing. The efforts to help DREAMers access and succeed in college is improving the ways colleges and universities approach all students’ academic and social needs. Americans from all walks of life want to see common sense at work in our national policies. In that way, the work of TheDream.US is purely practical: we have these amazing resources—talents, skills, future contributions—all waiting to be developed in young DREAMers, and we have a workforce that needs their energy as more Americans retire and leave jobs unfilled. DACA was an example of a policy that freed our DREAMers potential. And we need more such policies, not fewer. We’re saying, “Let’s be resourceful and creative. Let’s find ways to put these two things together.” That’s what our organization does: we help the US solve a pressing problem by developing the untapped energy and skills of some of its young people.

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Press

1. Time: “These Dreamers’ Future in America Is in Doubt. But They’re Headed to College Anyway” (May, 2018).
2. Diverse: “New Scholarship Fund at School Devotes $20M To DACA Students” (March, 2018).
3. The Student Loan Report: “More Dreamers Hope to Attend College in the U.S.” (March, 2018).

Latinitas

Interview with Latinitas‘s Marketing & Development Director, Victoria Garza.

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Organization Mission: To empower all girls to innovate using media and technology.

Population Served: Predominantly young Latinas ages 9-18 in Austin and El Paso, although we have held workshops and conferences throughout the state of Texas

Founding Year: 2002

Organization Website: www.latinitasmagazine.org

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Interview

Please provide a brief overview of the organization’s work. 
Latinitas’ mission is to empower all girls to innovate using media and technology. We have been doing this since 2001 through afterschool clubs in Title 1 schools, workshops in public libraries and public housing, and weekend conferences held at technology companies, colleges, and other locations. We also have an online magazine for young Latinas written and curated by Latinas.
Latinitas is reaching girls others aren’t and succeeding where others haven’t. 93% of Latinitas alumni are graduating high school and 81% attend college in light of having the highest drop out rates. 100% of our girls enrolled in Latinitas’ afterschool clubs are living at or below the poverty level and 36% are English learners; yet, we are graduating 50% more STEM majors than the national average for girls and 33% of Latinitas program grads are exploring digital media or communications. Our alumni are turning up at our local news stations, on film crews, and at technology companies such as Bumble – which has a headquarters here in Austin, Texas – combining their love of female empowerment, digital media, and technology.
In a few sentences, please describe the problem you are working to solve and your approach to solving this problem.
At a time when many parents are wondering what age to give their child a smartphone or tablet, we are still dealing with issues of internet access for many of the families we serve. We see the digital divide widening with the wealth gap, essentially leaving the poor – many of them minorities ­– behind in an increasingly digital world.
How and why did you first start working for this organization?
I first got involved with Latinitas back in 2004, first as a volunteer and then as a board member. I strongly believed in the mission of Latinitas and I wished an organization such as this had existed when I was a kid. Since gaining experience working in both the media and technology industries and witnessing first-hand the lack of diversity in both, it made me even more passionate about the organization’s work and when I was offered a position with the organization in 2015, I jumped at the opportunity.
What do you think will change most about your work over the next 5 years?
We are currently headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a pilot chapter in El Paso, Texas. Over the next few years we are planning on expanding our programs, starting with other Texas cities. As a matter of fact, we have partnered with the Boys and Girls Club of McAllen to bring our signature Game Chica conference to South Texas as a first step. So in the future, I see my work focusing more on meeting new partners and looking for new corporate sponsors in the cities we are looking to expand to.
What are the three most important skills you focus on developing in the population you serve? Why?

1. Focus on media literacy training to engage population served with current representation in magazines, TV, and movies of Latinx population, women of color, and Latinas, specifically, in order to understand their valuable position as game changers as well as identify why and how that representation exists and adapt ways they can take action to combat misrepresentation and stereotypes as future media industry leaders.
2. Focus on technology training to engage population with the latest equipment and platforms to increase their interest in STEM-related careers and further their knowledge of applications that can be used across a spectrum of topics including filmmaking, computer science, health and wellness, fashion design, social justice, etc. with the goal of steering their interests towards the technology industry.
3. Focus on having population served acknowledge and embrace their identity, gender, and culture to evolve personally and professionally with the goal of bringing their unique perspective to the media and technology industries as a means to diversify innovation.

What are the three most important skills you value in your staff members? Why?
Passion, curiosity, and a good work ethic. Passion is important because I find people who care, are enthusiastic about their job and will go the extra mile. Curiosity because I believe that helps drive innovation. People who ask a lot of questions tend to find better ways of doing things and can help identify new opportunities. Lastly, a good work ethic is important because even if they have the passion and the curiosity, what good are they if they aren’t there when you need them or don’t do what you need them to?
How has technology influenced your field and/or the way your organization works?
As technology changes, so does our program curriculum. We want to help the girls we serve stay up-to-date with the latest technology as part of their digital education. We want them to be aware of everything out there and the jobs they can get in these changing fields.
What are some key achievements your organization has accomplished over the last year and how were you able to attain this success?

• We were the beneficiary of a fully stocked computer lab from General Motors and the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).
• We were 1 of just 5 recipients of Mozilla foundation funds.
• We were just 1 of 2 recipients of Google’s Community Leaders program that matches college students and Google professionals with a community project at a nonprofit.
• We were 1 of 28 recipients worldwide of Google’s RISE award.
• We reached out 15th year and celebrated with a Quinceañera, hosting our city and state’s officials, school district leaders, and honored champions.
• We had our first-ever Game Chica Conference where 60 girls mostly of Latinx decent learned how to code a video game and met with mentors from the industry.
• We held our Startup Chica entrepreneurial conference for girls at Austin’s premier startup incubator, Capital Factory.
• We started a mentor program to connect program alumni in college with women in working in the media and tech industries.
• We increased parent outreach in the form of their own workshops in financial literacy, using technology to learn English and app design, and entrepreneurial learning, as well as improved organizing parents through our Facebook platform.
• We invested and moved to new larger office space.

What’s next for your organization? What are you looking forward to?
We are working to expand our programs beyond Austin and El Paso, Texas, starting with a weekend Game Chica Conference in South Texas this summer in partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of McAllen.
 

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Press

1. Community Impact Newspaper: “Male leaders pledge support to Austin nonprofit Latinitas in wake of #MeToo movement” (June 2018).
2. The Austin Chronicle: “Documentary uses virtual reality to explore east Austin gentrification” (May 2018).
3. My Statesman: “Latinitas celebrates 15 years of media, tech training for girls, teens” (May 2017).
4. KXAN: “Innovators Talk Tech for Minority Youth at SXSW” (March 2018).
5. Venture Beat: “Mozilla awards final grants from its $1.2 million Community Gigabit Fund” (April 2018).
6. Telemundo Austin: “Organizan fiesta “Chica Power” estilo kermés a beneficio de la organización Latinitas” (June 2018).
7. Univision Austin: “El alcalde de Austin y líderes locales se unen para empoderar a jóvenes del grupo Latinitas” (June 2018).

By: June Ahn, Associate Professor, University of California, Irvine
 
I’m continuously in awe at the creative and innovative ways that young people use technology to make sense of, and have agency over, their lives. Give a child a good video game, and they can imagine far-away worlds, quickly learn new skills, and explain new concepts to you with gusto. Encourage teenagers with a passion for social justice and social media at their fingertips, and they can foment civic action. Provide access to a computer, 3-D printer, and a community of other makers, and young people will design and engineer amazing new solutions to real-world problems. Scholars in my research fields – such as the learning sciences and digital media for learning – have done a tremendous job documenting the rich ways that learning happens in our everyday engagement with technology. For a place to start exploring this domain, I’m always inspired by my colleagues in the Connected Learning Lab and Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (full disclosure, I am a collaborator in these projects).
Policymakers, researchers, and educators are also worried about an uncertain economic and social future. For example, income inequality is rising and the gap between who wins and loses in our economic system grows larger each day. New technological developments, such as artificial intelligence and automation, mean that the nature of work and the supply of jobs will evolve drastically in the future. We just don’t know exactly how and who will be left out (although we have lots of conjectures). Check out this report for some ways that researchers and institutions such as the National Science Foundation are thinking about these issues.
Put these two ideas together and people (myself included at times) often make broad claims such as “Every child should learn to code!” or “Every kid needs to become a maker!” if they’re going to be economically competitive in the future. Interrogate any of these ideas more deeply, and the arguments fall apart quickly because it is unclear (for example) whether sitting every child in a computer programming class, by itself, would really equip them to thrive in the social and economic futures they will experience. On the other hand, we see everyday that learning with technology can unlock incredibly rich and powerful experiences for young people. How do we bridge this gap in our understanding and more systematically develop rich pathways of learning with technology for young people? To search for some answers, we went to some of the most innovative educators we know in out-of-school (OST) programs that integrate digital media deeply into their teaching and learning.
For the past year, I have led the Susan Crown Exchange (SCE) Digital Learning Challenge with an amazing team including Dr. Rafi Santo (Project Director, Research Scientist), Dr. Anthony Pellicone (Research Scientist), and Juan Pablo Sarmiento (Graduate Student, Documentary Filmmaker). In partnership with SCE, we regularly convene a small cadre of 8 OST organizations that share best practices with each other. These partners include AS220, Beam Center, Digital Harbor Foundation, DreamYard, Free Spirit Media, The Knowledge House, West Michigan Center for Arts + Technology, and YouMedia.
We also convene face-to-face meetings where we workshop new ideas in OST learning. Our research team has interviewed the staff and teachers in our partner organizations, asking them about their pedagogy, their missions, visions, and how they develop programs and partnerships to sustain their organizations. We’ve also made site visits to each partner, gathering footage and observations of their daily work, innovative programs, staff development, and community initiatives.
What have we learned so far? We’re documenting how our OST partners provide diverse learning experiences for young people who want to create with technology; whether it’s creating artistic expression and journalistic media or engineering software and physical products. But the most powerful lesson for me, has been in developing a deeper appreciation for how OST programs can provide apprenticeship experiences that onramp youth into new fields. OST programs can be nimble, in the face of a changing world, to directly apprentice young people into evolving fields in ways that other institutions are constrained from doing.
We look forward to sharing case studies and the best practices that our partners are showing us, in the near future via reports and web-based resources. We hope that these best practices will help other OST programs develop their pedagogical practices, choose technology, understand how to foster a multitude of skills for youth that range from technical to social and dispositional skills, and create better partnerships with their local networks to support their youth.
As we delve deeper into digital learning programs and compare across them, we are also realizing that our OST partners – together as a collective – provide experiences for youth that prepare them to have more agency over their futures. For example in Chicago IL, young people with a shared interest in gaming, come together and create podcasts that they release to the public. Not only are these youth developing technical skills in media production and communication, but also learning key skills in utilizing the Internet to promote, share, and communicate their ideas. They are collaborating, following through on their passions, and thinking as entrepreneurs.
In Providence RI, young artists of color use their skills across the arts (e.g. digital arts, music production, performance art etc.) to unveil an end-of-year performance based on afrofuturism. What’s happening here? This performance is not your run-of-the-mill school play. These youth – many coming from low-income and marginalized communities – are deepening their practice as artists (where digital tools are increasingly a core part of artistic practice), interrogating the oppression and obstacles they face in their everyday lives, learning to mobilize their local community, and designing the futures that they want to create for a more equitable world.
In the Bronx NY, youth are geeking out, learning to code, developing software, and creating web applications. But, because their OST program has developed partnerships with other non-profit organizations, loc
al universities and community colleges, and employers in the city, these youth have opportunities to level-up their skills in different settings, earn credentials to demonstrate their growing expertise to the world, and apply their skills directly in client-based work that give them direct pathways to work.
All of these examples, and the many more we will share from this project, are case studies of unique ways to structure and deliver digital learning experiences to young people. Also important to note, is how any given configuration in a program, prepares young people for different potential futures: entrepreneurial, artistic, personally fulfilling, community enriching, and sometimes with economic potential and social impact. Any one program does not do it all. So, a vital question that I am pondering, going forward, is how do we leverage the expertise of our educators to systematically provide a range of experiences for a young person, as they seek out their vocation in life?
Finally, our partners have taught me the profound importance of being “place-based” and deeply rooted in their local communities. Why is this feature important? Often, when we talk about preparing young people for the future, the automatic assumption is that we need to teach them content knowledge and technical skills. There is no doubt that knowledge and skills are vital in the learning process. However, what happens when young people are learning these skills with peers who are similar to them, face similar challenges in society, and see adult mentors and teachers who deeply understand where they are coming from? All of a sudden, learning these skills becomes relevant to a person, a part of their social and personal identity, and an endeavor that one can imagine doing for a long time and even enjoying.
What happens further when I am learning skills (such as coding etc.), but then applying them to community projects that uplift your neighborhood? Now the skills and dispositions I am developing can be used in ways that matter to the world. Now I can have an impact! And when I work with others, we can amplify our impact. We have a purpose and a mission. Now imagine, that young people are having all of these experiences, but they can also receive recognition for their work. Perhaps their portfolios help them to the next step of their personal pathways, such as getting into college. Perhaps OST programs partner with employers to provide paid-internship experiences or client-based work. Now the skills young people are learning, the dispositions they are developing, the mission and purpose they are cultivating, can also be economically viable through work experience.
This picture of learning experiences goes much deeper than merely learning “skills” and gaining

 knowledge. As I’ve reflected on these examples from our OST partners, I was reminded of the concept of “ikigai”, or the striving to find one’s deepest vocation or reason for being. The popular notion of the concept suggests that one needs to develop a combination of facets in one’s life: being good at something, finding love in it, making a social impact and doing good in the world, and being able to support oneself economically (at least). This deeper notion of learning to be, seems abundantly present in how our OST partners try to reach young people. In the coming months, I’m most excited to share the stories and case studies from our partners, revealing how their best practices promote this deeper notion of learning and prepare young people for a diverse array of possible futures.
 
 
(Feature image provided by Digital Harbor Foundation in Baltimore, MD.) 

Re-Imagining Migration

Interview with Re-Imagining Migration‘s Director, Adam Strom.

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Organization Mission: To ensure that all young people grow up understanding migration as a fundamental characteristic of the human condition, in order to develop the knowledge, empathy and mindsets that sustain inclusive and welcoming communities.

Population Served: Educators in and out of formal school settings.

Founding Year: 2017

Organization Website: www.reimaginingmigration.org 

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Interview

Please provide a brief overview of the organization’s work. 
We live in an era of mass migration.  Young people – whether they are part of an arriving or receiving culture – strive to form their identities as learners, community members and change-makers in the context of this global phenomenon. We are catalyzing a community of educational leaders and social organizations around making migration a part of their curriculum and culture (in both formal and informal learning settings) so that all students can feel supported in their social, emotional, academic, and civic growth.
In a few sentences, please describe the problem you are working to solve and your approach to solving this problem.

In the U.S., 26% of children under the age of 18 and 33% of young adults between the ages of 18 and 32, have an immigrant parent. These children come into school eager to learn and finding ways to facilitate their successful inclusion into our societies is both a demographic and a democratic imperative. Despite the rapid growth in the number of children and youth from immigrant families and the difficult circumstances they face, most adults that serve them are ill-prepared to address their needs.  At the same time, xenophobia, myths, and prejudices about migrants and migration have a profoundly negative effect on civil conversation and hinder the ability immigrant origin children and youth to thrive and meet their full potential. Moreover, inside and outside of classrooms, misunderstandings about newcomers are often used to sew division, undermining social and economic prospects for us all.
Given the rapid growth in the number of children and youth from immigrant families and the difficult circumstances they face, neither ignoring the situation nor addressing it with ad hoc solutions is an option. We offer educators a new perspective on migration, recognizing it as one of our most basic human experiences and we are developing a promising practices network of networks to bring this work to schools, informal educational settings, and social change organizations.  In the end, we believe the best way to ensure our shared prosperity is an approach to education that fosters the academic, social, and emotional needs of immigrant-origin and their peers.
How and why did you first start working for this organization?
The how and the why is a great question. I am sure that each of my co-founders, Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco would answer that question in a slightly different manner. Below is my answer.
I believe that migration is our shared story as humans. It is my families story, my great grandparents were immigrants on both sides of my parents family. My wife’s mother is an immigrant from Ecuador. As an educator, I’ve inspired by the immigrant-origin students I’ve had the honor of working with.
At the same time, backlash and skepticism against newcomers is predictable. This is a real problem for a number of reasons. On a human level, young people are shaped by the environments in which they live. My partners have studied the impact of prejudice on immigrant youth, they take it in with the air they breathe and it impacts how they see themselves and how they believe they are perceived by others. That, of course, impacts their academic, social, and economic prospects. I’ve also seen how anti-immigrant attitudes impact non-immigrants, some of them act out an the prejudice in the air, others witness their friends being targeted. A new study out of UCLA confirms that the polarized political environment is hindering the social and emotional lives and academic performance of youth across the spectrum. Political scientists will tell you how bad this is for democracy, and economists have demonstrated the positive impacts of immigration again and again.
Migration is our past, present, and future and we need to do a better job as a society understanding this. At the same time, it is clear that to do that, we need to do a better job preparing the adults who work with immigrant-origin youth and their peers, to serve the increasingly diverse communities that they serve.
When Carola and Marcelo approached me to help them take the amazing research they have catalyzed and help bring it to educators in the US and around the world, I had to join them. I’ve been inspired by their work for years. It is clear that in this current moment, right now, we need to reach as many adults who serve youth as possible with professional learning and evidence based practices that they can bring to their work.
What current trends are you seeing in your field of work?
For too often, there has been a disconnect between people who work on issues of immigration and those that work with young people. We need to bridge that gap. Immigrant-origin youth are in schools, in after school programs, attending religious institutions, visiting museums, enrolled in music, dance, and sports programs. We cannot afford to treat them as other. They are us.
I believe people are beginning to understand that. At the same time, most of the educational focus on immigration has been on language issues. We need to think about the whole child and the entire educational ecosystem. To do that, we are trying to break down the boundaries between formal and informal education, between historians and social scientists, between anthropologists and psychologists. What I have seen, is that once people understand what we are up to, they are quite excited by the work.
At the same time, we live in a challenging funding cycle. The link between immigration and education is a difficult approach than many philanthropists are used to. In the current climate many people are focusing on acute solutions to immigration, we believe that is important but we must invest in the future and to scale that work, we need to educate the educators as fast as we can.
What do you think will change most about your work over the next 5 years?
I am very eager to see the work that we are seeding in our network grow. This summer, we are gathering an amazing group of organizations and educators, with the goal of developing a wide range of pilot projects.  Think of each of them as evidence action labs that we can study, refine and mine for best practices that can be broadly applied and disseminated.
It is my hope that as the organization grows, we develop an even more reciprocal relationship between those that we serve and the staff. I am eager to learn and grow with the network of networks that we are developing.
It is my hope, that we will help to build a field and that thinking about immigration and immigrant-origin youth becomes less of an afterthought and more of a priority. If that happens, much of our work will be focused on translating research into action and sharing an evidence-based framework that will be widely adapted and adopted. That will move us from always been as the center of the work, to a truly networked approach.
What are the three most important skills you focus on developing in the population you serve? Why?
1) Helping people develop the skills to inquire about stories of migration, to do that they will need to learn some of the histories and patterns of migration and recognize how their own perspectives shaped they way they think and act in relation to issues migration. 2) Give educators the skills to reflect on evaluate their own approaches to education about migration and working with immigrant-origin youth and their peers and 3) Providing educators to the skills to take action and apply best practices in the work that they do.
What are the three most important skills you value in your staff members? Why?
1) We all need to be able to learn and recognize our own biases, 2) the skills to be able to work with people with different points of views and a variety of cultural and political perspectives, and 3) I wish I could just list a range of SEL skills here. Seriously, beyond the technical skills we all need to do our work, are the SEL skills that are necessary to work at a mission driven organization with passionate people.
How has technology influenced your field and/or the way your organization works?
It is all about our ability to share information with others and with members of our team. We are a lean organization that relies on the web and social media. That impacts how we develop content and share our stories. I say that with an awareness that both the web and social media have not always proven to be positive environments for serious discussions that challenge biases. I’ve been part of a MacArthur funded network exploring youth political participation in the digital age, and while I see a lot to be inspired by, it is clear that there is a lot that is toxic in the digital space.
On a positive note, I work out of Boston and my colleagues work out of LA (and we all travel too much). Without the access and tools of technology, I don’t know how we would ever be able to work together.
What are some key achievements your organization has accomplished over the last year and how were you able to attain this success?
I am so proud of what we have accomplished in less than a year of work. We’ve developed three major educational resources. Last month we completed a culturally responsive guide for understanding immigrant-origin youth for the New York Department of Education, this winter we produced Immigration and Integration: Jewish Immigrants Letters from the Bintel Brief. It is a great project. We use letters that are full of the dilemmas Jewish immigrants to the US faced at the turn 20^th century to provide a window into the past and a mirror for reflecting on issues of migration and acculturation today. We also produced Moving Stories, a migration story telling app. It is free on google play and the apple store. Moving Stories provides a platform to capture stories of migration, whether in this generation and the past. Each of these projects are tools that we are sharing with our network to see how they are able to adapt and shame them in their work.
That said, the most important thing we have done to date, is to plan for our August gathering of fellows and network partners for this summer at UCLA. The proof of our success will be in the work that we have inspired and the number of youth our partners reach.
Have there been any recent obstacles? If so, how were you and your staff able to overcome them?
While you might expect obstacles, we see need, that said, we’ve just begun our work. We could possibly hit obstacles if we are not able to raise the funds in a timely basis.
What’s next for your organization? What are you looking forward to?
I am really looking forward to the August gathering I mentioned earlier. We are planning so many exciting and innovative pilot projects that I cannot wait to see the network come together.
What do you wish others knew about the organization or the populations you serve?
I’ve spoken too much about our work, let me tell you about the immigrants and immigrant-youth. Despite the political rhetoric, immigrants today are integrating as fast or faster than in the past. Of course, that success is put at risk by xenophobia. That said, over the long run, immigration is a good news story. It is what we have done as humans for at least 170,000 years, and it is what we will do in the future. We just need to do a better job creating welcoming communities that understand migration and the strengths and challenges faced by immigrant-origin youth so we can all reach our potential.
 
 

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Press

1. EDWeek: “Immigrant Students Are Internalizing Stereotypes. Educators Can Help” (Sept. 2017).
2. Kappanonline.org: “A lesson in civility: The negativity immigrant students hear” (Dec. 2017).
3. Jewish Philnathropy: “Their Story is Our Story: Re-Imagining Migration” (March 2018).
4. Brookline Hub: “Re-Imagining Migration: Making A Difference Through Education” (Feb. 2018).
5. Not in Our Town: “A Conversation With Adam Strom About Language and Immigration” (Feb. 2018).

Four years ago we launched our work in social and emotional learning (SEL), seeking to better understand how some of the very best out-of-school time programs work to equip youth with social and emotional skills essential to lifelong success.
We began knowing that to thrive in the 21st century is, more and more, shaped by a skillset beyond academic achievement. Experts across fields and sectors agree that social and emotional skills were critical ingredients for success. We also learned that, demonstrated by countless studies, these skills can be taught and learned. Too many youth weren’t accessing nurturing environments and real-world learning experiences they needed to develop social and emotional skills—especially disadvantaged youth. What was less known was specifically how to support the development of these skills in adolescents.
Our first initiative, the SEL Challenge, set out to uncover promising practices for building social and emotional skills in vulnerable youth, and to decode and systemize these practices in a way that could be applied in any youth-serving program, with the ultimate goal of taking these practices to scale in thousands of OST settings. We shared our findings widely in the Preparing Youth to Thrive suite of resources.
Over the last few years there has been a growing body of evidence that supports the value of incorporating SEL into all learning environments, and we have seen innovative work to this end nationwide.
Most recently, our attention has been focused on realistically assessing the challenges in bringing social and emotional learning into common practice. We have partnered with the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality, YMCA of the USA (Y-USA), Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, After-School All-Stars, Character Lab, CASEL, The Aspen Institute, Wyman and others to explore how youth-serving organizations are effectively remixing and embedding SEL practices, curricula and evaluation tools into their strategy and culture.
We are continually asked how – how to select SEL practices, curriculum, measures, and, maybe most importantly, how to build a culture and approach that integrates training, assessment, and support for staff to improve SEL practices and outcomes.
We worked in partnership with top practitioners and researchers to help answer some of these questions, and are excited to announce the launch of a series of case studies that explore how youth-serving organizations are integrating SEL into strategy and programming. By sharing what we’ve learned, we hope to stimulate new conversations on the importance of SEL and to help organizations identify and scale the most effective approaches for youth.
This first case study from the Y-USA highlights the development and launch of the Character Development Learning Institute (CDLI), the Y-USA’s collaborative, program-agnostic, and deliberate process of verifying, adapting, scaling, and sharing best practices that advance youth character development.
Early next fall we will share case studies from the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality, School’s Out Washington (Seattle), Sprockets (St. Paul), After-School All-Stars (Los Angeles), Beyond the Bell (Milwaukee) and Wyman that explore how each organization has integrated SEL into their organizations.
We have also learned that there is a need for more tools that specifically deepen our understanding of the development of two skills in particular: empathy and emotion management.  What are the best practices for building these two skills? We have partnered with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence to create a set of resources that will be released this fall providing research and practices related to these specific domains.
We will continue to share what we learn from our partners and the field and welcome new ideas, comments and feedback. We are grateful to all our partners, and even more grateful that this issue is rapidly becoming a topic of popular conversation.