are again pleased to present notable belmont residents here today we are excited to welcome to students again this year one from china and one from belmont high each will talk about a topic of personal or professional interest and we are very thankful for their time and generosity in being here with us tonight so i think before we began we'd like to thank the town for their generous support of this event our co sponsor we'd like to give a very special thank you to our lead organizer carol trager she's been the lead organizer of this event and former member of the vision twenty one committee and despite being  asked and despite no longer being on the town committee she is enthusiastically agreed to organize this event again this year and just really doing a great job she again took the lead on every facet of it from the speaker selection to marketing and coordinating ability just six of the event and has just done an amazing job so we all give a very big thank you to you carol from all of us on behalf and now for a few housekeeping announcements please look around you and locate the nearest exit in case of an emergency you certainly don't expect one here tonight but just in case please take a few seconds in silence any and all of your devices local media are covering this event and the belmont media center is taping it please no other photography or recording is allowed tonight's program was designed in large part based on your ideas from last year please fill out your evaluation form at the end of the evening and bring it to the back of the auditorium as you leave and now it is my pleasure to introduce jane clayson johnson who will tell us more about this evening's event jane is an award winning journalist widely known for her work at c b s news a b c news and as guest host for the last twelve years on the nationally syndicated n p r program on point jane has traveled the world covering the biggest news of the day as a correspondent at a b c news she reported on many international stories from the nato airstrikes in kosovo and the refugee crisis in macedonia to the fall of the government in jakarta indonesia at c b s she co hosted the early show with bryant gumb and was on the air on nine hundred and eleven subsequently covering the terrorist attacks on the world trade center in new york and the pentagon in washington d c in addition to interviewing world leaders authors thinkers and scientists janice had a front row seat to american culture interviewing stars from hollywood and broadway jane famously interviewed a reluctant martha stewart while she was chopping cabbage just before martha went to prison jane has won numerous journalism awards including an emmy and the prestige of edward r murrow award she is the author of two books she is accompanied here tonight by her husband very much it's nice to have you all here tonight i remember the st time we did this three years ago and it's turned into a nice tradition belmont such a great place to live with so many interesting people have said that we could hold several events like this during the year and not run out of speakers because belmont really is full of of terrific folks and this is a great way to spotlight some of them so thanks for speakers who have prepared a lot for tonight and thanks to all of you for coming let me interview introduce our st speaker leah hagar cohen is the author of five works of nonfiction and five novels her interesting background york where her father was a superintendent lia currently is the barrett professor of creative writing at the college of the holy cross and is co founder of create lab a multi disciplinary course that brings faculty and students together to work on projects that encourage creative thinking and action th novel strangers and cousins will be published in may of this year it's a really grateful to have leah hakan cohen with us come on up  thank you so much for having me i'm delighted to be here and as a as a writer i am accustomed to working in solitude which i love but it also makes me appreciate my other job where i work in community my other job is teaching creative writing at the college of the holy cross here is a kind of iconic picture of the main academic building at holy cross and i show it to you because i think it expresses really well the holy cross identity as an institution with deep roots  in traditionalism holy cross is one hundred and seventy five years old and for most of its history it has comprised white catholic men that has changed in recent decades for most of its history it has also been solidly rooted in a traditional sort of pedagogy and that has begun to change it was nevertheless remarkable to me six years ago when i was invited to be part of the team of faculty coming together to create this new course called create lab and as you can see from the course material it is indeed unlike anything else offered at the college create lab which is designed to bring together professors and students from every discipline  to work on problem solving using creative methodologies often drawing from the r s so sometimes our class looked like this actually this is the team of professors who came together that st year and just to give you a sense of the range of disciplines going from left to right here we are representing music creative writing that's me before i cut my hair theater visual arts theatre again business psychology and medical anthropology so that was our our pilot year team and here is a couple of images of the class so we hold a class in this space called the pit which is kind of a black box theatre and it can be used for in this image students were presenting their different passion  projects here you can see a different use of the same space the pit were all coming together for a class activity sometimes we would move beyond the classroom  here we are again in front of that same iconic fenwick called building we had a drum circle and we were exploring rhythm and space and here we are we created a flash mob and we went through different spaces on campus this is the atrium of this science building and better a better job explaining perhaps what this crazy chorus like is in this next slide it's actually a one and a half minute video that we put together after the st year and so this this maybe will give you more of the sense of the c background on green lab stems from arts transcending borders a new initiative designed to infuse the fine and performing arts into students academic lives and create new so as i mentioned our community at holy cross has changed with the times just like our community here in belmont has changed with the times and particular in the past two years  two or so years we have experienced an increase at holy cross in our community in instances of microaggression macro  aggression violence and incivility a year ago i was asked if i would take the reins in creating the next iteration of create lab which we just ran this past fall and thinking about what was going on in the community i decided that i wanted our theme for the year to be community and this is the postcard that we circulated to spread the word about this year's create lab it's the front and the back and i don't know if you can read the words over there the front of the postcard th hour to framing questions for this semester what ails our community how can we heal and the other way in which i wanted to experiment this year in create lab was with what we did with the lab part of class wanted our class to be a very active lab for studying how does a group of people become a community it was important to me that all of our assumptions of what a learning environment looks like be up for questioning so who is in charge who has the power to set the agenda who determines how we're going to work toward our goals comes into the classroom with a deficit or a lack that needs to be filled so when we came together last fall for this iteration of create lad it was three professors and thirty students and we it was important that everyone in the room be recognized as someone bringing gifts bringing expertise and everyone was bringing deficit some kind of lack of it  the st several weeks of class no matter how much everyone kind of nodded their heads like oh we get that we know what we signed up for translating that intellectual understanding into a kind of visceral experience was hard all of us students and professors alike wanted to replicate what we were used to and we referred often to their frederick douglass quote power seeds nothing without demand again and again week after week we talked about this how the only way to create a nonhierarchical class structure would be it wasn't a matter of the professors handing over authority to students students had to be ready to demand authority and take responsibility about five weeks into the class we were having a kind of difficult out and the professors got up then we left the room and about forty five minutes later the students came out into the hall and got us and they told us what they had decided and they from that moment began to take more agency and to set the agenda for what would happen and from that moment forth we began to feel like more of a true community no coincidence at around that time we were able to divert some of the energy that we'd been spending on racking our brains and exhausting ourselves trying to become a community and we could turn that attention and energy outward into the the larger holy cross community around us and begin to address some of the hurt and the suffering that was going on in our community and to try to figure out how we could contribute toward healing we very often that was so great you like read my mind we very often would have fishbowl discussions in class rather than all thirty three of us trying to speak at the same time we'd put five or six chairs in a circle in the middle of the room and we would generate prompts and students and faculty would take turns sitting in the fishbowl and address the questions raised by these prompts and it was an exercise for the rest of us to engage in really active listening and out of these fishbowl discussions and this community listening volved a letter that we wrote to the president of the college and i'm going to read just an excerpt from the letter we acknowledge that there was a lot of pain going on that we were a campus in turmoil and we offered some suggestions we said that when an active hatred and violence against our community a cause and particularly when cumulative acts of hatred and violence occur week after week we would send a message regarding the gravity of the situation we would halt business as usual we would cancel classes athletics and all extracurricular her day in place of these we would hold teaching vigils community conversations we would in effect pull the emergency brake on the status quo we would in effect say the regular work of our community cannot continue while any member of our community is under attack we would acknowledge that before all other goals writing papers grading tests convening meetings winning games we must attend to the goal of living and growing in community with one another we circulated the letter we got just over a one thousand signatures from students alumni faculty staff and administration two days after submitting the letter to the president the college announced that it was going to cancel all activities for an afternoon and in place was soliciting suggestions for sessions and activities and workshops and teach and to hold instead we create lad sprung into action in the planning stages for this we had less than a week to turn this around we posted this butcher paper in a central spot on campus in an effort to take care that the engage summit as it was going to be called would not be created only from the top down but that it would be cooperative that it would be as much energy coming from the grassroots  it was being coordinated with the help and solidarity and support of the administration so that everyone could have a voice one of the students in our class actually while we were busy taping up that poster whipped out her laptop and created this flyer which she managed to distribute to i think every single person on campus we didn't know because the summit was  friday afternoon whether people would take advantage of the opportunity not to attend but to begin their weekend activities early  people began to respond to the call for suggestions for sessions for the summit and in the end there were almost seventy individual sessions some offered by students alumni many by faculty staff and administration we still didn't know with this kind of response and you know we knew we had a certain critical mass of people who were eager but we didn't know if we'd get enough critical mass that there be good attendance at all these almost seventy sessions we really didn't know until things got underway if people would come as soon as things got underway we could feel it on campus the activity in buzz in the hallways before the st session began we could hear people saying which one are you going to i'm going to go to this one and then the moment the sessions began and quiet no more traffic through the halls in fact  attendance was so great that some sessions had to be moved and you can see here one session that had been scheduled for a lecture hall had so many people who couldn't fit in that the students had to be moved across campus to the to the biggest theater that we had so so that was the engage some it was one afternoon and we all knew that that wasn't the the solution that was the beginning of a kind of work and in create lab we got back together we had one or two classes left before the semester ended and we we had to evaluate ourselves  cross as a grade granting institution and we were still faced with the question of how are we going to handle what's essentially a transactional relationship i as a student produce were so that the professor will give me back a grade the grade you know hopefully that i that i'm aiming for how could we have this transactional relationship be the that involves everybody evaluating everybody and i want to read a short excerpt from the narrative evaluation of the class itself because one of the things we realized was that in a sense we didn't have very much to show for our work we as a class we hadn't this year for the st time in create lead the semester didn't culminate in student power points or performance our or talks our installation or you know any any of the usual products that we had produced in the past so much of our energy had gone into creating the engage summit in fact we didn't have homework assignments and create labs that professors gave this past year and create lad every week we would sit take the last part of class and say ok what's our work what do what do we need to do to get from here to where we want to be next week and who is going to do way and we would divvy up work assignments and so we realized that all our class projects large and small one time and recurring were the result of being assigned or required they were undertaken soley on the basis of real desire real need we believe that this is what all truly engaged work academic or otherwise spring from not for the sake of checking a box obtaining a credential or passing but rather for the sake of the work itself for our own growth as individuals and in order to contribute toward growing our world we didn't have a textbook uncreate lead this year but we did have a text it was this little pamphlet by john vine a called from brokenness to community and we'd come back week after week to study a passage from it and this was one passage that was a favorite and it felt like a needed antidote to the messages that we all of us students and faculty alike  were receiving in most spaces that we went in to you i want to close by sharing with you a quote from a community organizer who we innovated to speak and create lab this fall he's retiring now he spent decades as a community organizer and he said i realize there's nothing i want to do in this world that i can do by myself and coming back to you my own other job as a writer and thinking about how much of my work i do by myself i was inspir by what he said i was really moved by it and it gives me a lovely challenge to think about how going forward if i want to be useful how much of what i do needs to in some way be entering into a relationship and into a community with others so thank you so i just had one question i was as i was thinking about this wonderful create love model of community listening where everybody has a voice i wonder if you could take that and implemented in a community setting can you take it to belmont high school or can you take it to our community in some form where you can utilize it where people are actually you know listening talking in sort of a sort of a micro level so i think potentially yes and i think it requires two things when jean you just said yourself listening which sounds so easy but it's not something that we're necessarily in the practice of doing that and i think for me learning how to incorporate more listening into what i do has required a practice and requires a kind of intention and structure around it and the other think the other thing that i think is required and you know i get back to the frederick douglass quote power concedes nothing without demand  as much as the people who hold power might want to step into more experimental nonhierarchical horizontal interactions with people there is also a need and holy cross we saw it something had to be overcome and it took time and it took a leap of faith before in this case the students were were ready to do really the very frightening thing thank you so much leah our next speaker is amanda fernandez amanda is the c e o and co founder of latino's for education which is the st latino founded and led national organization solely dedicated to creating leadership pathways for emerging latino leaders in education a community builder and activist amanda has blogged for the huffington post latino voices she's been named one of the one hundred most influential hispanics in massachusetts by planeta she currently serves on the massachusetts state board of education and secretary secondary education and the roxbury community college board of trustees she's also on the rise colorado and c s c consulting advisory board so she's quite busy amanda i learned the seasoning prepared much of her talk that she'll give to us for a broader audience for a ted talk so we're really lucky to be able to hear her words that were prepared and will be presented probably at a later date for a much larger group so amanda fernandez thank you so much kennedy was assassinated and it was the day that luis and muddy f haven't then this may cuban exile parents arrived from miami to start a new life with not a penny to their name but high hopes and faith that they could achieve the american dream in that moment of arriving though that dream seemed far out of reach growing up i saw how a bridge to education led my father to reaching the highest levels to become a college professor who taught at a small midwestern university for thirty years on the other hand i saw the language barriers and barriers to education from my high school educated mother limited her possibility she ended up chopping lettuce in dormitory kitchens at that same small university town for thirty years that great juxtaposition that i witnessed in my own home of what an education affor a lack of one can limit a person was an ember to see justice and fairness in the world that was beginning to burn inside of me i wasn't a great student and i didn't graduate from a top school but i had fierce determination and relentless pursuit of a better life that i wanted for myself and i thought that was to go into corporate america i was a white passing let the so i was able to do fairly well but i also experienced and bore witness to how some have bridges to success in the workplace and others have barriers based on gender and skin color that ember of fairness and justice inside my soul grew even hotter experiencing barriers and finally embracing my let the in identity would lead to a career switch to the  nonprofit sector and a focus on education some fifteen years ago it was shocking to me to see the fist to sticks regarding the massive disparities that exist in our nation for children of color in particular for me latino children over the years i've seen for myself children both thriving and languishing in schools across the country from compton to the bronx this along with struggles and sacrifices made by my family my experiences with latino students families and educators rekindled that fire and fanned for me the flames of seeking justice and equity for my latino community so three years ago i started latinos for education we're a national organization that is dedicated to expanding leadership in the education sector it has not been without a struggle but we know nothing worth doing as i started latinos ridge occasion because i believe that let the children and all children should have a bridge to prosperity equitable education i believe that students of color must have role models that look like them in the classroom in our schools leading our schools and leading our systems i never had role models myself and now that i've become a role model to other latino males and other people of color i know how important it is i also believe that together we can build bridges and eliminate barriers that exclude low income students from accessing educational opportunity i believe that your prosperity the prosperity of the commonwealth and the prosperity of our nation will rely on a collective effort to get there but what is stopping us the current discourse in our nation about border walls has had me thinking about undeniable parallels between physical walls that create barriers and metaphorical walls that create barriers for far too many children i was curious about the history of border walls and found that border walls take on many characteristics i'm going to talk about a few of those border walls have existed in the world for a long time as you know they have both protected and divided us what they all have in common is that they keep the so called unwanted out a wall is a permanent fixture that cannot be moved when a physical wall exists it can alter human behavior to the point where those who are used to seeing it adjust their behaviors to adapt to the wall those behaviors include fear and otherness about who is on the opposite side walls can have many layers the idea is to have many layers each can be beat but they slow you down and so that before you can get to the other side there are guards there to pick you up and send you back to the start it is important to recognize that it's not only physical walls that have these characteristics but there are metaphorical walls that have been constructed within societies they are entirely invisible for those who don't have to encounter them they are entirely invisible for those who do not have to encounter them there are close to thirty percent low income children in our state who are affected by these metaphorical walls they exist in these metaphorical walls that exist in accessing education and opportunity primarily for black and latino children despite federal law the fact is that we continue to be segregated in our schools due to boundaries that have been created in our cities and our towns and so much of that has to do with funding a recent study by an organization called ed build reports that predominantly white schools in our nation have twenty three billion more in funding than low income communities that's twenty three billion more in funding we literally created a system that keeps poor kids out right now a debate is looming in our state legislature to help address the issue and create a more funding a more equitable funding system so that low income communities that have been short changed in the past have adequate financial support while we as a state enjoyed steady progress over the last twenty five years to become number one in the nation in educational outcomes something that we've been proud about but digging into the numbers tells an entirely different story massachusetts actually ranks with some of the worst performing states in the country for example an th grade math on the national assessment for educational progress report the nape black and latino students in massachusetts rank in the country th in the country we need to ask ourselves why there are social and economic barriers that keep so many kids out of an opportunity to get a good education that we enjoy here in belmont in towns around us like lexington and concord so why do we fear those on the other side of walls david frei a historian an expert on walls says there are always things to learn and we learn the most by examining the people who built the walls and the fear that led to their construction were those who built the walls fearful peoples or did the building of the wall create fear what is the fear that has been created about black and latino communities let's dig into the narrative about latinos as an example of other ng latinos are fifty six million in america and we make up about twelve percent of the population in massachusetts and will soon be about fifteen percent in urban areas such as boston public schools that they don't make let the males make up forty two percent of the student population right next door in waltham we make up forty percent of the student population we are highlighted often in the media through negative stereotypes or you just don't see us at all and yet we are business leaders we are teachers and we are entrepreneurs our mothers and fathers have the same dreams for our children as my parents did access in a good education is almost always the number one issue emperor already of latino families in the country let the nose have contributed to a record low and high school dropout rates and college enrollment has increased adlie for latinos in the last twenty years did you know that the growth of the city of boston between two million two thousand and ten can all be attributed to the latino population growth we are literally the economic engine that will propel the commonwealth forward but we must be educated like the layered walls there are multiple barriers that exist for black and latino children as early as pre k where a gap in access exists at least twenty percent below that of white children on the other end of the education continuum well we have seen an uptick in the four year college enrollment black and latino students are achieving college completion rates at once again twenty percent less than white and asian students the poor outcomes for latino and black students in the commonwealth leads to the largest wealth gaps in the country when we know that a college degree can bring with it an opportunity thousand dollars more in earnings than that of having a high school diploma the recent scandal on bribes that the super wealthy have made to get their average children into selective schools is  yet another layer of inequity that exists that create barriers in our place in our privileged communities we also do all that we can to ensure our kids get all kinds of enrichment and support i do that for my own children but these are ways we unconsciously can create an uneven playing field it is tragically difficult for a low income child of color to make it or get out of poverty having spent twenty five years working at the intersection of diversity inclusion and leadership and having experienced some of those barriers myself i believe there are things we can do to build bridges so that all children can access a great education join me in building a bridge by deconstructing our views of other we all have a racial and ethnic identity shaped large shaped largely by the interactions we have with others understanding of that identity development process both by looking at ourselves and seeking to understand others might mean we sit in some discomfort but by learning about those who are different than us we begin to build bridges across lines of difference i believe our best is starting the process with our children it takes work and constantly questioning assumptions and we all have our children when they are exposed to difference and talk about issues they are better equipped to operate in a multicultural racially and ethnically diverse world the reality is that by virtue of demographic changes it is actually an essential skill for children to have that should be included in both our homes and our school conversations i would also encourage us as parents educators and community members to ensure every child in our belmont schools regardless of their background is strongly supported we need to see all of the students here as our own children and we and the collective success of all of our students is our collective responsibility secondly i would urge you to become educated about the foundation formula and if you agree with me the belmont teachers union school committee and selectman who are all supporting changes in the formula we ask that you join us and you can help out by contacting sen brownsburg or and representative rogers who will be voting on equitable funding in the coming months together we can build a bridge to educational opportunity for low income black and latino kids and all kids because we know that the success of our city our state and nation depends on increasing educational opportunity for all thank you can i ask you a really practical question you said two things that really struck me you'd like to see every child strongly supported in our schools what does that lead to your mind is that look like and my nd question is how do we teach our children to build these bridges what's a model for a conversation that you'd like to see all of us have with our children tonight or tomorrow or this week about what you're talking about what does support look like for kids in our schools we have to start having honest conversations about race and class in our schools and in our homes because it really is a reality that we all have to face living in our country and we have to prepare our kids to have those skills some things that we do in our home so every year we read letters from a birmingham jail on m l k day and we talk about racism a lot in our home we talk about how how to embrace our identity at home and we talk about being proud of who we are so i see it sort of both ways if if we are we are not white we should be proud of who we are what we bring and have pride in that and in order to build bridges we having privilege in a community like this have a great opportunity to own and to create that ownership within our families and our children to own a collective sense of success in our schools and as we let our kids go into the world community leader who is currently the president of the belmont student council she's held for leadership positions at various times in that council she's an avid reader a poet choreographer and dancer john is also belmont's ambassador to exemplary ethic of service and a values of kindness compassion humility and gratitude and i know that you'll see that in john a burgess as we has neither been positive or overly negative at same time i've had to adapt to certain situations and which i find very beneficial and resourceful for the future which i consider a good aspect and i have had a lot of leadership opportunities as we have already heard also but the two negative aspects are the microaggression and the arrogance that i have faced in seeing other students face no one is a bold enough to be problematic allowed primarily because of the expectations of respect for this here but i've been called many things i've been called a race baiter a race soldier and pretty much you name it i've been called it but all of this behind my back furthering that not bold enough  because of the fact that white students are the majority here there's an unspoken pressure to brief them but the disconnect between us all very strong idea club inclusion diversity equity in around this club is an effort i initiated to help mend this disconnect i created the idea club to provide a sip ace for all students to share their opinions and experiences so we learn how quality of life effects viewpoints and changes our viewpoints formed from our understanding of something other than ourselves in our and in our understanding or lack of there of widens or shrinks that disconnect idea club is our tool to help the process of bridging the divide it is also another source of information and more importantly education i know for sure it would have made a world of difference if this club or something like it existed when i was in lower school now it is my wish and stays in place to help the students who follow me the idea club is a brave and open space for people to share stories opinions and experiences this is designed to be another resource that invalidates ignorance as an exception for being disrespectful or hateful while we talk up the club and announce its meetings prior to their date sadly not many students partake of the info sharing sessions it makes me think of the saying you can lead the horse to water but you can't make them drink the idea club structure is basically a diversity inclusion club meets a social justice or social issues club before and during the creationist additional club i never presumed it to be necessarily easy but i did find it to be in my mind as hard as it actually turned out being i'm going to share with you some of the things that have differed from my original vision the structure of the meeting change we still regularly have two meetings a month but i wanted one of the meetings to have a pretty picture topic pick myself and other advisors based on what the attendees want to learn about and there would be the nd meeting would be more freelance where the attendees can bring what they want to talk about to the club most of the time  we've been we've gotten into the rhythm of having multiple prepared topic meetings but the difference is those prepared topic meetings is more of the educational piece of it whereas the freelance helps foster the community so we can and that disconnect my passion for the club has function waited a lot especially during the whole creation stage where there were little gaps of either miscommunication or no communication at all i was really done and ready to a band did the whole initiative as it is the luckily for me with the support of my grandmother miss hawkins mr dyer and many other teachers i've been urged to continue on and it helps me still continuously realize how important and necessary this is for cherry and originally i wanted a teacher of color as an advisor because you find that in primarily white districts or schools that white children to have the foundation already you are surrounded by people that look like you and most likely some scenarios act like you and you have those people look like you in those authority positions it would be immensely impactful and influential if we had a teacher of color as a do as an advisor so students of color we can realize that we too can get there that someone else that looks like us but is older than us has gone through this cycle of life but to my dismay we're not really seeing through the mission statement yet but i am an optimist as such i'm a realist as well as all it took to get this far was an idea but the purpose of me telling you all this ironically is about having ideas i urge you all when you have an idea share it refine it do edit it would do what you need to do to get it out there because you may presume it to be a small change but a small change makes a big so st of all i just want to say i'm troubled that you know that we in belmont in our schools and other young people treat each other and i know it's an imperfect world and i recognize that these these things happen but i'm sorry that that this is happened to you i wonder if you would give us some ideas of what you think could be better in our lower school experience you said you wish you'd had a club when you were in you know elementary school what do you think should change or could change so that your experience would have been better in the experience of some of the younger kids coming up my might be better i feel as if we should had more talks about our identity whether it is our sexual orientation or racial identity because we do get a lot of support but when you throw a bunch of kids from four different middle schools and you have kids from the medical program and there's going to be obvious differences and we don't address those that's when those differences in people act on those differences yes what's causing all this discomfort all this all these microaggression so if we address that st things st that we all are different and we have these differences and you should take pride in we can take a one step away from acting on these issues did you generally feel supported by teachers donna so i feel like it depends the teacher because teachers are supposed to evidently teach us different teachers have different things going on in our lives and different things and different teaching styles so it depends the teacher really but i don't really feel supported supported by at least a quarter each year and still th grade and of course until th grade and so th grade one of my teachers i felt very supported by his name is mr giles and he was my english teacher but i've always been supported by miss hawkins and mr dire can you tell me a little bit more about project three hundred and fifty one and like minded students who are acting on these things and feel this type of way because i have found that and you don't find many of these students who are mostly immersed in either affleck's academics we're not talking about the people that have trouble with those things and where the trouble comes from at least students these kids are addressing that and the fact that we have a space that's initiative that is supported by a problem and it figures you have  congresswoman i had a presley you have governor charlie baker and you have a profit organizations and jobs like john hancock supporting these kids making these decisions and taking these steps to try to make this world a better place and that just makes me happy do you feel like those kids have had similar experiences as yours i'd say you know for the fact that massachusetts is a predominantly white  and i found a good amount of more than i see in my day to day class of people of color and they're so i mean of course we're all going to have different experiences and different opinions because our opinions are built off experiences and our politics well i plan to go to college after high school and i want to be a poet i want to be a writer that's my dream career and from there yeah and money from that will go to setting up programs for black you programs that can help us even his playing field that can help with equity and programs for black adults especially ones that have been right from one outstanding student to another our next speaker is brianna lu a junior at belmont high school where she's an honor student brianna's passion is fashion she makes some of her own clothes she's active in the performing arts club where she works on costumes most recently she participated in the h s production of two gentlemen of verona and she's looking forward to working on this year's musical production little shop of horrors she's an avid reader b stage got to make sure the media center can see me before i start i would like to think carol trager for all her help and support throughout my speech writing process and how is everyone doing tonight all right so i'm going to start with a question that you can answer in your head what is the st thing you notice when i walked onto the stage other than me moving the block it probably wasn't my killer outfit but instead the fact that i'm asian despite what you might think i'm not your asian stereotype my favorite subjects in school are history and english my dream job is to work in law enforcement i haven't played an instrument since th grade as you probably guessed by now i'm going to share with you my story growing up as an asian american i lived in china and till i was five when i moved to the united states i didn't speak a single word of english two weeks later i was fluent in english and for all the chinese i had spent five years learning i knew that growing up i could choose to embrace my culture conform to the stereotype picked out for me by society or reject my heritage while white washing my eyes i went with the latter that meant being stuck in the middle of two groups never perfectly fitting into one or the other that men being bad at math was weird because i'm asian that if white guys dated me it was only because they wanted a taste of something exotic it meant being asian was something that made me different and it made me stand out when i walk into a room i'm self conscious the st thing people notice about me is the fact that i'm asian to counter my own insecurities i began to diminish my own culture i made fun of people who fit more into the typical asian stereotype i don't myself down to be different from other patients and the most validating thing is it worked the more i rejected of my asian miss the more popular i became more people talk to me and i was regarded as one of the chile and i became more confident because i knew i was more relatable i distance myself from talking about transgressions against my own race because i didn't want to be regarded as easily offended now where does this leave other asian americans where regarded as a model minority in society uses that as justification that asians don't face the same racial issues as other people of often we're stuck in the middle of a pression in privilege we're told by society to reject our heritage die our hair and light in our skin to become white enough to be accepted it's hard to admit that i'm part of the issue i've let myself degrade in my own race justifying it with my need to i've let it stop me from conforming to the sorry i've let it stop me from confronting these racial issues because it was easy i wish i had always had the courage to accept myself living in a society divided by race it doesn't make it easy so yes maybe i'm not the stereotype some expect me to be but that doesn't erase my heritage my parents who are here today are two loving hardworking chinese americans who have taught me almost everything i know they make me dumplings for chinese new year's noodles for my birthday and push me hard to get that perfect s a t s score i have an amazing sister in college i can't drive without drifting and i do actually suck  both i'm both a whole lot chinese and a whole lot american but most importantly i'm learning to be proud of who i am in so excited to see who i've become thank you so much oh i sense a theme here but brianna talk about what you think we can do as a community to help the people feel proud of who they are how how do we build a community a world where people don't feel that they have to hide their their culture their background their you know their identity how do you see it so in building a community i'm not going to give you a step by step guide of how not to be racist or how not to be ignorant it's not just that it's a bigger picture thing you know i feel like in twenty nine big part of me that has learned to accept myself is through some things like mediation so when it comes to education there is so much power in it and in the high school curriculum it's really opened up about talking about racial issues especially in english and history we learn more about the past in the civil war in more detail and we learn where these stereotypes stem from and through education you see the inaccuracy and as a community it's not just about here's how not to be racist it's about like i know you're different and i even if you can't accept the fact that someone is different there is a difference between racism in confused what racism is is your different and i'm in you're not white but i am and i don't accept that what confusion is is i am a different race but someone else is white and they're confused they don't know what to do with it and sometimes that leads to ignorance but the best thing you can do is listen to the stories of individuals because it really rationalizes in humanizes them you really see the impact in the experience experiences people have had and that is really what changes people's minds so how do you help your peers overcome some of these things that you are facing or have faced and are overcoming yourself so aside from the casual finster posts where i go oh guys like i experience something really annoying today often what i have done is just shared things i've been through and in middle school especially i experienced a lot of things where progressions i experience being called racial slurs and i used to go at it with people i used to just go directly for and i would just basically lecture to people and i have found that's not what works what works is just being rational and be like hey like here's what's happening in here's how you can do something about it in if you are casual in your column about it most of the time people listen it is not a lot of people's intentions especially in belmont to be racist or to be ignorant they're just unaware of their actions and i think actually speaking to people in speaking about the topic and actually mentioning racial issues even though it is controversial it fosters community and it fosters a conversation that is extremely important to be had and i asked john a but i'll ask you do you feel supported in at the general in the end that the high school on these issues so actually i had a very different than i had at the high school we had a lot of assemblies regarding race and we had a lot of discussion of it and i remember bishoff gins talking to me after trying to support me trying to calm me down because i was getting very irritated assemblies are much more casual and not as high stakes and i've noticed that transitioning from one school to the other and finding new support systems is not easy but i am so lucky to have amazing teacher especially in the subject of english in history who are so understand miss bloom my english teacher who i literally vent to every day after we have a class discussion about race she is so understanding about everything and she always listens to what i have to say and so i think there's such importance especially for kids who are in public school systems to form these connections with these teachers because there will always be someone who can help you you just have to love thank you so so much thank you very much cortico a nonprofit technology company previously was co founder and c e o of blue fin labs which is a media analytics company in two thousand and thirteen bluefin became twitter's largest acquisition and consequently served as twitter's chief media scientist until two thousand and eighteen some of you may remember debs amazing wife professor ripoll patel the speech technologist spoke to us a couple of years ago and set a very high bar i might add for a closing speaker so we're really delighted to have you deb thank you very much for being here deborah everybody with this image just to give you a little bit of the back story of what led us to create the local voices network this is a visualization of a graph of about a one million people on twitter that were tweeting about the two thousand and sixteen election in particular the graph structure of who follows who and i won't go into a lot of detail but i'll just say that the that red cluster to the right are we call that the trump tribe those are followers of donald trump during and when you look at where the journalists are we actually identified thirty thousand journalists who had written at least one story in the international print media they're all pulsating you'll notice that all embedded on one side of the divide so this is really a picture a fragmented social landscape where the journalists are part of that fragmented picture and this really motivated us to st of all reflect on social media something that is supposed to connect us  communities the national media often simply does not reflect and so there's a disconnect and i kind of isolating nature so we sort of summarize our media environment today across mainstream media and social media you might say the loudest voices tend to dominate the loudest polarizing voices the public discourse tends to be shallow reactive divisive we've heard a lot today about divisive studio types and it turns out that polarization is a great business model and so in many ways this kind of content tends to dominate because it's profitable and ultimately the topics in particular if you think about was could we leverage a state of the art technology and and experiment with creating a new kind of communication space where quiet voices could be heard where we could have nuanced reflective constructive conversations that were grounded in our everyday lives so we we started with a very modest experiment last year in which is in the south bronx where a couple of members of our team  including andrew heyward are based in the new york area we ran an ad in the local once a month print edition of the little known might have been harold actually part of the q and a journalism school that that operates this paper on the back page of the paper we ran this ad we want to share an important story about your neighborhood that no one else has heard yours in fine print it says come on down to the bot haven public library will be here for four afternoons we'd like to hear from you if you came to the library you would find this decidedly low tech we called the listening box it a microphone had a little screen and when you walk up to it it just had a single question it was just an experiment which is what do you like most and what do you like least about living here and a few people said short utterances it was meant to be designed as a kiosk and then we switch things  and we set a table for two and one a member of our team that's max resnick part of or the cortico team was there along with the box people opened up and over four afternoons over fifty people by spoke usually for a few minutes talking about both what they like and what they don't like might have been by the way lowest poorest congressional district in the entire country as of last census and to our surprise a couple of people unprompted at the end of recording their answer said can i volunteer for this project so we start to realize or something interesting going on with this experiment meanwhile i met  kathy kramer kathy is an extraordinary political scientist she's based on the university of madison in wisconsin she wrote this book which a healthy recommend called the politics of resentment her method as a political scientist she years ago abandoned the focus group in the survey and started walking up to coffee klatches in the wild asking if she could join turn on a tape recorder and ask some very simple open ended questions and get  people talk people who are familiar with one another so she was outnumbered by the group who knew one another and yet as a prompt she could open up conversation so we got to know each other she took decide take a sabbatical join my lab  started collaborating and she really helped shape what has taken on form as the local voices network so our mission is to foster constructive public conversation by the way there is a theme in this evening i didn't realize but it's pretty obvious now so foster constructive conversation in communities and in the media that improves our understanding of one another the way this works at its core is in person face to face conversation community led facilitated dialogue and one pack that intimate a technology layer that both connects people and conversations that creates a network and that network is designed to be public so it forms a listening channel for local journalist policymakers and the community at large so if you ask what is the local voices network my answer is it is a public conversation network so let's talk about version two of the listening box which is called the digital hearth instead of one microphone we designed a circuit board with eight mikes some like fun or a we package it now in a round we still love the wood there's a glow ring at the bottom there's a raspberry pi there's a bigger chargeable battery twenty hours without between charges and nice speakers so it can also play audio the groups can listen to and that's what it looks like in fact i brought one along so this is a model of the hearth it's not recording right now it's green if it turned orange it would start recording and there's a remote control that goes with it is designed to sit of a small group and capture multiparty conversations and high fidelity speech and also bring voices into the room that's why there's also a speaker for output under host control so we've been working with expert facilitators to design a kind of scaffolding for a constructive conversation so as a small group gets together  host that's who someone is designated and knows what the script how the script works introduces the project the rules of the conversation for how people are what their hopes are for how people interact and gets verbal consent to be recorded and then there are a couple of sections in case people don't know one another to talk about what value they hold dearly that brought them into the conversation that tends to create common ground and then a story to open up the conversational play for you an example in a moment of what that looks like then the meat of the conversation is to ask people about what they love about life in their community whether it's in a city or town or rural their biggest concerns both today and as they look ahead a few years and this is key whatever the hopes and concerns they express to connect them when they can with a story of their own lived experience so this is not story corps stories of my dear uncle and his his words in his dying days but instead just an every day something that's happened to me that informs my point of view on this hope of this kind and something of experience and then finally a kind of cap where the group goes around reflects on what were things they heard that they're going to take away from that conversation a kind of highlighting of things that are worth carrying away and maybe elevating so others who aren't in the room might hear and one of the cool things by having not just speech recordings but a whole kind  of powered analytics backend is we've made it possible to do something beyond the conversation in the group which is once there is a series of conversations that have been captured we have the ability to do what we call cross pollination which is to take a story from one conversation and bring it into another and let the host bring that voice in that otherwise wouldn't be in the room and create an extended converse so as these conversations continue we have a kind of network of these connected conversations and then we have been building a search and discovery engine that sits on top of these aggregation of conversations creating this kind of listening channel the hope is local policymakers and journalists become more responsive to local voices there and a key idea that i haven't mentioned yet is community powered understanding so i've given you the system diagram and now we have to hydrate with human beings and the idea here is not to put a team in place who is paid to organize these conversations and so forth that'll never scale and that then has an outsider perspective coming in and running things instead our goal was to activate people in the community in madison to do this for themselves to step up and lead these conversations in their community and so we developed a training handbook and we gave it a name if you are trained to to use this script kind of minimal script to have a conversation and you learn how to use the hearth you become a l the local voices network host you join the conversation corps there's other roles you could also be a recruiter or you could be a harvester i'll get to that in a minute but l v n hosts are key so we put the word out in madison population two hundred and fifty thousand people if you have at least forty hours a facilitator experience you facilitate it you've been trained as a facilitator we'd like you to come and go through a two and a half hour in person training session and then you're certified and then what you want we want you to further on your own time volunteer to organize the small conversations and become part of l d n so that was we put the word out late last fall  we now have trained about seven thousand and seventy dollars hosts and we have a wait list of seventy plus more that we have really been surprised at just the level of interest so this is just a picture from a couple of months ago at one of our training sessions at a community center in madison people checking out the hearth learning how to use the tech we then went to the medicine public library and we said please become a partner and serve as an n host and they have become a critical partner in this so here in the library they're promoting the project so every every lead we branch in this nine branches you can learn about the project there are recruiters now these this is a volunteer who at the donuts for dad saturday morning meet up in the library is promoting on our behalf there she is holding the hearth if you go into any law ibrary you will actually find in circulation a digital hearth in every library and all the librarians have now been trained to keep the hearts charged and we use their why fight to upload eight channel audio files into the cloud  this is one of the st alex in the red cap is a trained l v n host she checked out she was actually the st to get a get her hands on a hearth there was a librarian next to her she tweeted this picture she actually runs a pancake  restaurant shop in madison so later that day she gathered a group of young women in madison here they are at the end of a conversation so over the last six weeks two hundred and forty people mainly in madison have now completed over fifty conversations so over the last six weeks we really have seen some initial exciting traction so what i want to do now is break out of the slides and give you a sense of what's actually happening so i've now shifted over to a live online portal you see these little dots here are conversations that i've been recorded we actually did some test conversations in boston with essential partners developing the script and so let's zoom in to madison and you can start to see each of these as a conversation we can click on it to see who recorded who was the host of the conversation or we can scroll down and each of these little bars little cards represents one conversation so i'm going to click the title that was given to the conversation by kathy as we scroll down we see a visual visualization of the conversation so kathy and we keep only st names of participants so we see there were three participants and the hearth was a participant because she actually decided to bring a voice from another converse in these bars indicate who's talking when so you can get a sense of the flow of the conversation and up here are the introduction to the project this is what the folks in the room are hearing so welcome to this conversation of the local his network we're so grateful that you decided to join us and i mean that sincerely even though it's written on the page  and it's really time he did i say ok so she explains a little bit about why we're all getting together and then she explained she reminds everyone that this is being recorded for public purposes so this is a public conversation and portions appear in a local newspaper or a website or be broadcast on a local radio station or appear elsewhere including other forms of media so please don't say anything that you would want heard by the general public right that everybody understands that if you could please say i agree on the recording that would be great so anybody can go st ok i agree and i agree ok so we have consent is introductory material you can actually see from the ribbon here each person is asked to tell the little bit about themselves and then just give you a sense of where we go into what's called the stories for starters so take a minute and think of a personal story from you know i think that she and it would help people there are other people understand what's important to you so it helps you can we one of our goals with l v n is can we mainstream this kind of a conversation so when i group gets together it's actually amazing we've had for example a couple who've been married for over twenty years and that prompt share a story from your childhood who shapes who you are today has led people to share stories that their own husbands and wives have not heard even though they've known each other for decades so i'm going to play for you one example of a story now that was shared this is from a senior professor from the university of madison who you share this as her opening everybody just watch us the whole time that we i'm still incredibly uncomfortable in small town so we have this kind of exchange of stories and then let's just go through the script a little bit actually let me just let's go to the top here and i'm just going to go to cathy played an excerpt from another converse and let's just go to that point in the conversation by the way and also you get a sense of it's quite easy to navigate around and find things we can search and so forth but i'm just going to play a bit so you see how cross pollination works so in this case kathy explains so one thing and this heart does is allow us to hear parts of  you get the jest and then we'll hear a reaction to that from one of the people in the room but actually there's also a lot of gratitude when we hear people reflect at the end of these conversations that there's a space where they're actually able to share i just got the five minute warning from from last year's speaker that i'm going along so i'm going to try to wrap up here what a cool thing that you can do with the technology we have a topic index we can automatically do semantic indexing  and find topics that are emergent across many conversations so we can see people going about housing inclusive body we can say you know who's talking about inclusive of the click on the conversation see the top conversations where inclusive and housing are coming up so this starts us look at patterns across conversations i want to play a two minute clip just to give you let you main papers in madison this is actually just from yesterday so the st of what we expect to be a series of stories are going to start writing which are actually pulling quotes patterns from the one more reflection i mean i just think that you know just just taking the time to listen to people people stories has been so enriching to me thank you so you know for building that opportunity that's what this is the kind of thing i need so we are hearing a lot of that it's not us was so excited about giving this this presentation today this is a map of every library in america and if you carve up the country there's seventeen thousand of them  we are now in as i mentioned all nine of the libraries in madison and we have activated this network of members of the community and i didn't show detail but we have already soft launch so our plan is in the summer to expand into rural parts of the state which is one of the biggest red blue divides in the country and meanwhile we have done a soft launch  in the bronx and in may partnering with advance local ale dot com we will be launching in alabama and of course the question is when can we come to boston and maybe some of the people here would like to help make that happen and the goal really is to build the infrastructure to be able to create essentially a trance local network  country if if the country will have a so my last light here is just what does it take to launch a local voices network chapter back to what is it at the core conversation and so facilitation skill around the greater boston area that would like to become hosts people who would like to recruit participants into these conversations harvesters that's what we call people who find highlights and elevate them so they can move around between conversations we need to create a network that requires hubs emphasize libraries we are starting a conversation the boston public  libraries we are also starting to build relationships with the community centers and with religious centers in fact we have now two pastors from two different churches in madison that are hosting conversations and one hearth is now has been moved into a church so it's also very interesting interfaith dialogue that is possible through this we need to build hearts to put them around the city and finally to make this a public network we need to build and so if anyone here is interested in learning more or even better rolling up your sleeves and being part of it just send e mail to hello at l v n dot org we also have some fliers out front and thank you so much for attention really awesome very it's just fascinating i think it's so valuable when in a time when people are just aching to feel community and to feel connected and to feel heard i just think it's such a great idea a couple quick questions how do you make sure that you reach diverse communities socio economically diverse ethnically diverse voices in conversations how do you make sure you're getting into different communities to actually get authentic voices so the primary strategy in madison and now in the bronx is to make sure we have diversity amongst our hosts and then there is a natural kind of birds of a feather clustering of who hosts tend to gather working through their own networks we're also in the process of modifying the script there's been a incredibly long debate amongst your team of how or whether and how to collect demographic or any kind of identify information about participants and so we're going to be experimenting with some modification modifications a script to allow people in their own words to talk about themselves in ways that we don't want to put people into demographic boxes on the other hand it's really important one of the impact criteria which i didn't talk about is whether we are reaching all all parts of a community and  also are we seeing boundary crossing conversation but we've spent a lot of time in madison medicine's a racially very segregated city the latino communities in the south are very very disconnected from so we've put particular emphasis on recruiting hosts from those communities and we've been quite successful but it took africa it took really deliberate outreach and that works through networks of trust in the case and if your goal is to help policymakers  journalists be responsive to the local voices i love that the boston globe is is on board i'm just thinking of these local communities where their local newspapers are disappearing right and so how do you how do you ensure or how do you how do you help policymakers and journalists utilize on a very practical level what you're finding here if the local newspaper is gone if you know that if the voice just doesn't exist anymore yeah well we're one of our pilot sites is in the south bronx which is a media lab and so we have some students the media lab experiment in what sort of community journalism techniques where there is no newspaper at all to do coke creation of media forms  podcasts pure digital forms of media that can create feedback loops without the local news it's a hard problem as you know you know the business model of local news is circling the drain  but it might be that with a kind of renegotiation of kind of power and economics if you really can have a network of people in the community step up and lead these conversations they lead them no one's paying them but in return they have the agenda setting influence over the conversations they in the protests and there's this idea of a flipped newsroom where the agenda setting is seeded from the newsroom to the community but in return you get kind of beat reporters for free if you will right and so it's kind of this it's a very different i mean the economics of it could be radically different it could have a very lean professional newsroom that can produce the sort of media amplification which is part of what we seek and so i mean the kind of dream here would be a model to rehydrate news deserts but i thank you all for coming tonight thank our panelists for their preparation it's really a nice evening i just want to say one thing before i step aside many of you know that doug john has been influential and really made these events along with carole trager and a host of other people but i john has really been here since the beginning and i just feel sad that we're losing doug and tina john to to the west they're moving  and i just want to thank god for his contribution to the community of belmont and stand up please stand up let us thank you thank you