SchoolHouse: Equity in Education

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This week:  CJSF’s Allison R. Brown speaks with Jim Freeman and Ricardo Martinez about their new report “The $3.4 Trillion Mistake” exposing the money trail that created mass incarceration and about the concrete changes needed to fix the broken system.

About the SchoolHouse: Equity in Education podcast:

SchoolHouse is a podcast created by the Communities for Just Schools Fund and hosted by Allison R. Brown. SchoolHouse shares stories about how young people, their families and communities, and other advocates and activists are working in and around schools to make them healthy, safe, and equitable places for children to be. In SchoolHouse, we will learn together about the global implications of local movements for change in our schools.

About CJSF:

The Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF) is a nationally-focused donor collaborative. CJSF provides resources in support of community-led organizations that are working to ensure positive and supportive school climates that affirm and foster the success of all students. CJSF’s community partners organize young people, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members to advocate on behalf of students who are disproportionately impacted by the over-use of exclusionary school discipline practices, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools. They organize community members to stand up for positive, healthy, and supportive school climates that produce better academic and social outcomes for the students who enroll than school climates with a heavy police presence, zero tolerance school discipline policies, and over-reliance on exclusionary discipline methods. CJSF’s community partners educate students, parents and caregivers, school officials and teachers, police departments, and community leaders on highly beneficial alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and school-based arrests. For more information, email us at info@cjsfund.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.cjsfund.org.

SchoolHouse: Equity in Education

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This week:  CJSF’s Allison R. Brown speaks with community leaders who describe protest actions of late – walk-ins, 150-mile walks, a youth-led candidate forum – to #ReclaimOurSchools.

About the SchoolHouse: Equity in Education podcast:

SchoolHouse is a podcast created by the Communities for Just Schools Fund and hosted by Allison R. Brown. SchoolHouse shares stories about how young people, their families and communities, and other advocates and activists are working in and around schools to make them healthy, safe, and equitable places for children to be. In SchoolHouse, we will learn together about the global implications of local movements for change in our schools.

About CJSF:

The Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF) is a nationally-focused donor collaborative. CJSF provides resources in support of community-led organizations that are working to ensure positive and supportive school climates that affirm and foster the success of all students. CJSF’s community partners organize young people, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members to advocate on behalf of students who are disproportionately impacted by the over-use of exclusionary school discipline practices, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools. They organize community members to stand up for positive, healthy, and supportive school climates that produce better academic and social outcomes for the students who enroll than school climates with a heavy police presence, zero tolerance school discipline policies, and over-reliance on exclusionary discipline methods. CJSF’s community partners educate students, parents and caregivers, school officials and teachers, police departments, and community leaders on highly beneficial alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and school-based arrests. For more information, email us at info@cjsfund.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.cjsfund.org.

SchoolHouse: Equity in Education

*Subscribe to RSS  *To Download Episode Right Click and Save Target As...  *Listen on ITunes

This week:  CJSF’s Allison R. Brown speaks with members of the Dignity in Schools Coalition, which recently released a set of recommendations for schools to remove law enforcement officers from school buildings.

About the SchoolHouse: Equity in Education podcast:

SchoolHouse is a podcast created by the Communities for Just Schools Fund and hosted by Allison R. Brown. SchoolHouse shares stories about how young people, their families and communities, and other advocates and activists are working in and around schools to make them healthy, safe, and equitable places for children to be. In SchoolHouse, we will learn together about the global implications of local movements for change in our schools.

About CJSF:

The Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF) is a nationally-focused donor collaborative. CJSF provides resources in support of community-led organizations that are working to ensure positive and supportive school climates that affirm and foster the success of all students. CJSF’s community partners organize young people, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members to advocate on behalf of students who are disproportionately impacted by the over-use of exclusionary school discipline practices, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools. They organize community members to stand up for positive, healthy, and supportive school climates that produce better academic and social outcomes for the students who enroll than school climates with a heavy police presence, zero tolerance school discipline policies, and over-reliance on exclusionary discipline methods. CJSF’s community partners educate students, parents and caregivers, school officials and teachers, police departments, and community leaders on highly beneficial alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and school-based arrests. For more information, email us at info@cjsfund.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.cjsfund.org.

About DSC:

The Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC) challenges the systemic problem of pushout in our nation's schools and works to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. As a national coalition, the Dignity in Schools Campaign builds power amongst parents, youth, organizers, advocates and educators to transform their own communities, support alternatives to a culture of zero-tolerance, punishment, criminalization and the dismantling of public schools, and fight racism and all forms of oppression. We bring together our members through direct action organizing, public policy advocacy and leadership development to fight for the human right of every young person to a quality education and to be treated with dignity. For further information: http://www.dignityinschools.org/

SchoolHouse: Equity in Education

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This week:  CJSF’s Allison R. Brown speaks with Marc Bayard of the Lee Bayard Group about putting a face to the racial justice movement through #SayTheirNames, a multimedia project working with grieving families to celebrate the lives of police brutality victims.

About the SchoolHouse: Equity in Education podcast:

SchoolHouse is a podcast created by the Communities for Just Schools Fund and hosted by Allison R. Brown. SchoolHouse shares stories about how young people, their families and communities, and other advocates and activists are working in and around schools to make them healthy, safe, and equitable places for children to be. In SchoolHouse, we will learn together about the global implications of local movements for change in our schools.

About CJSF:

The Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF) is a nationally-focused donor collaborative. CJSF provides resources in support of community-led organizations that are working to ensure positive and supportive school climates that affirm and foster the success of all students. CJSF’s community partners organize young people, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members to advocate on behalf of students who are disproportionately impacted by the over-use of exclusionary school discipline practices, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools. They organize community members to stand up for positive, healthy, and supportive school climates that produce better academic and social outcomes for the students who enroll than school climates with a heavy police presence, zero tolerance school discipline policies, and over-reliance on exclusionary discipline methods. CJSF’s community partners educate students, parents and caregivers, school officials and teachers, police departments, and community leaders on highly beneficial alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and school-based arrests. For more information, email us at info@cjsfund.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.cjsfund.org.

About Marc Bayard:

Marc Bayard is an Associate Fellow and the director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Black Worker Initiative.  He was the founding Executive Director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University. He is a leading expert on racial equity and organizing strategies with extensive experience in building partnerships between labor, faith groups, and civil rights communities. A frequent speaker and social commentator for a number of institutions and organizations, Marc’s dedication to achieving just and humane treatment for workers worldwide is grounded in his first-hand work and experiences in nearly 50 countries. From 2003 to 2011 he was the Africa Regional Program Director for the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-CIO, and was recently a fellow with the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University. For more information: http://www.ips-dc.org/

SchoolHouse: Equity in Education

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This week: CJSF’s Allison R. Brown speaks with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) about their instrumental role in the passage of a historic state law that makes suspensions and expulsions a last resort.
About the SchoolHouse: Equity in Education podcast:

SchoolHouse is a podcast created by the Communities for Just Schools Fund and hosted by Allison R. Brown. SchoolHouse shares stories about how young people, their families and communities, and other advocates and activists are working in and around schools to make them healthy, safe, and equitable places for children to be. In SchoolHouse, we will learn together about the global implications of local movements for change in our schools.

About CJSF:

The Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF) is a nationally-focused donor collaborative. CJSF provides resources in support of community-led organizations that are working to ensure positive and supportive school climates that affirm and foster the success of all students. CJSF’s community partners organize young people, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members to advocate on behalf of students who are disproportionately impacted by the over-use of exclusionary school discipline practices, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools. They organize community members to stand up for positive, healthy, and supportive school climates that produce better academic and social outcomes for the students who enroll than school climates with a heavy police presence, zero tolerance school discipline policies, and over-reliance on exclusionary discipline methods. CJSF’s community partners educate students, parents and caregivers, school officials and teachers, police departments, and community leaders on highly beneficial alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and school-based arrests. For more information, email us at info@cjsfund.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.cjsfund.org.

About VOYCE:

Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE) is a youth organizing alliance for education and racial justice led by students of color from  across the city of Chicago and Illinois:

Communities United (Convening organization of VOYCE)
Southwest Organizing Project
Westside Health Authority
Blocks Together

Since its formation in 2007, VOYCE has worked to increase Chicago’s graduation rate by using youth-driven research and organizing to advance district-level policies that support student achievement.

VOYCE’s work is driven by the belief that young people who are most directly affected by educational inequity are in the best position to develop meaningful, long-lasting solutions. To lay the foundation for VOYCE’s campaign, more than a hundred youth conducted an in-depth, year-long Participatory Action Research study on the root causes of the city’s 50% graduation rate. The students found that to increase graduation rates, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) must build a foundation for student success through district- and school-level policies and practices that foster trusting and supportive relationships with peers and school staff. For more information: http://voyceproject.org/

SchoolHouse: Equity in Education

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This week: CJSF’s Allison R. Brown chats with Rev. Starsky Wilson, President and CEO of the Deaconess Foundation in St. Louis, a pastor at St. John’s Church, and former co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, about faith and philanthropy in his radical giving.

About the SchoolHouse: Equity in Education podcast:

SchoolHouse is a podcast created by the Communities for Just Schools Fund and hosted by Allison R. Brown. SchoolHouse shares stories about how young people, their families and communities, and other advocates and activists are working in and around schools to make them healthy, safe, and equitable places for children to be. In SchoolHouse, we will learn together about the global implications of local movements for change in our schools.

About CJSF:

The Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF) is a nationally-focused donor collaborative. CJSF provides resources in support of community-led organizations that are working to ensure positive and supportive school climates that affirm and foster the success of all students. CJSF’s community partners organize young people, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members to advocate on behalf of students who are disproportionately impacted by the over-use of exclusionary school discipline practices, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools. They organize community members to stand up for positive, healthy, and supportive school climates that produce better academic and social outcomes for the students who enroll than school climates with a heavy police presence, zero tolerance school discipline policies, and over-reliance on exclusionary discipline methods. CJSF’s community partners educate students, parents and caregivers, school officials and teachers, police departments, and community leaders on highly beneficial alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and school-based arrests. For more information, email us at info@cjsfund.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.cjsfund.org.

About Reverend Starsky D. Wilson:

Pastor, philanthropist and activist pursuing God’s vision of community marked by justice, peace and love. He is president & CEO of Deaconess Foundation, pastor of Saint John’s Church (The Beloved Community) and former co-chair of the Ferguson Commission.

Deaconess is a faith-based grant making organization devoted to making child well-being a civic priority in the St. Louis region. From a corpus of approximately $50 million, the foundation has invested more than $76 million to advance its mission in the area. Starsky’s leadership has birthed a dynamic community capacity building model, aligning policy advocacy, organizing and community engagement with grantmaking.

Through Saint John’s, Wilson has led congregational activism on myriad issues, including youth violence prevention, Medicaid expansion, public school accreditation, voter mobilization, capping payday lending and raising the minimum wage, while more than quadrupling worship attendance and annual giving. There he established The Beloved Community Conference to resource local social justice ministries and Sojourner’s Truth: A Celebration of Preaching Women.

In 2014, Missouri Governor Jay Nixon appointed Rev. Wilson co-chair of the Ferguson Commission, a group of sixteen citizens empowered to study the underlying conditions and make public policy recommendations to help the region progress through issues exposed by the tragic death of Michael Brown, Jr.  On September 14, 2015 they released the ground-breaking “Forward Through Ferguson: A Path Toward Racial Equity” Report, calling for sweeping changes in policing, the courts, child well-being and economic mobility. For more information: http://sjuccstl.org/ or http://deaconess.org/

SchoolHouse: Equity in Education

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This week: CJSF’s Allison R. Brown talks with Dr. Micah Gilmer, a Senior Partner at Frontline Solutions, and Riki Wilchins, Executive Director of True Child, about their report on society’s expectations of Black manhood and how they’re detrimental to men’s health.

About the SchoolHouse: Equity in Education podcast:

SchoolHouse is a podcast created by the Communities for Just Schools Fund and hosted by Allison R. Brown. SchoolHouse shares stories about how young people, their families and communities, and other advocates and activists are working in and around schools to make them healthy, safe, and equitable places for children to be. In SchoolHouse, we will learn together about the global implications of local movements for change in our schools.

About CJSF:

The Communities for Just Schools Fund (CJSF) is a nationally-focused donor collaborative. CJSF provides resources in support of community-led organizations that are working to ensure positive and supportive school climates that affirm and foster the success of all students. CJSF’s community partners organize young people, parents and caregivers, educators, and other community members to advocate on behalf of students who are disproportionately impacted by the over-use of exclusionary school discipline practices, including suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools. They organize community members to stand up for positive, healthy, and supportive school climates that produce better academic and social outcomes for the students who enroll than school climates with a heavy police presence, zero tolerance school discipline policies, and over-reliance on exclusionary discipline methods. CJSF’s community partners educate students, parents and caregivers, school officials and teachers, police departments, and community leaders on highly beneficial alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and school-based arrests. For more information, email us at info@cjsfund.org and sign up for our newsletter at www.cjsfund.org.

About Frontline Solutions:

Like many of our peers and affiliates, we want our work to be impactful. And we know that the consulting services we offer— convening design and facilitation, research and analysis, project management, and strategy advisement —do not guarantee change by themselves. They must be steered by the right theory of change. So we’ve developed a simple and broad approach: helping people and organizations engage, learn, and grow. In our view, these three components are essential for change. Regardless of the project we undertake, we want our partners—individuals, institutions, networks—to strategically engage with the right individuals or groups; learn and apply valuable data and relevant information; and experience smart, sustainable growth. Optimally, these processes occur at the same time. Our core values, consulting services, expertise, and organizational investments in leadership development are applied throughout in this process. For more information: http://www.frontlinesol.com/

About True Child:

TrueChild helps donors, policy-makers and practitioners reconnect race, class and gender through "gender transformative" approaches that challenge rigid gender norms and inequities. We are especially interested in the impact of gender on at-risk communities, including those that are of color, LGBTQ, or low income.

What We Do

1. Conduct trainings and briefings;
2. Develop white paper reports, tool-kits, and other intellectual collateral; and,
3. Work with grantees to develop and disseminate model "best practice” programs that have a strong gender focus.

For more information: http://www.truechild.org/