Roundtable Descriptions
PARCEO’s Community Symposium
March 1, 2014 9:30-4:30
El Museo del Barrio
- 9:30-10:00 Breakfast, Registration, and Hopes for the Day
- 10:00-10:30 Welcome
- 10:30-11:00 Setting the Framework for our PAR-Based Organizing
- 11:00-11:10 Break
- 11:10-12:05 Roundtable 1
Session 1: Sapna NYC: Local Leaders and Empowerment: Sapna NYC’s Community Health Worker (CHW) Program
The CHW Program is at the core of Sapna NYC’s unique model of community health education and service delivery. This program upturns the traditional top-down paradigm by recruiting women from the South Asian community that Sapna NYC serves to design and lead its health, education, and economic empowerment programs in collaboration with staff, researchers, and activists.
After completing their training, Community Health Workers then serve as peer educators, coordinating monthly health fairs, health classes, outreach and recruitment, Action Groups, etc. Each program has its own Action Group comprised of program participants who meet regularly to learn about relevant issues, discuss common challenges and strategies to overcome them, and bring about change in their community. In addition to facilitating Action Group meetings, Community Health Workers also conduct outreach and recruit new program participants. Sapna NYC currently has five Community Health Workers who have completed their training and are coordinating or implementing our initiatives.
Session 2: EL Museo and PS 72: Instintos Creativos/Creative Instincts:
Parent leaders at PS 72 Lexington Academy in East Harlem share on how they’re using art with El Museo del Barrio and PARCEO to explore and act on their vision of a quality school in the El Barrio community. Together with an El Museo Teaching Artist/Peace Poet we will share some tools that can help to access the creativity and cultural touchstones of the families and young people in all of our education community building and organizing work.
Parent leaders at PS 72 Lexington Academy in East Harlem share on how they’re using art with El Museo del Barrio and PARCEO to explore and act on their vision of a quality school in the El Barrio community. Together with an El Museo Teaching Artist/Peace Poet we will share some tools that can help to access the creativity and cultural touchstones of the families and young people in all of our education community building and organizing work.
Session 3: PARCEO: Creative Approaches to our Organizing Challenges
Discussion and activity based around group interests in organizing strategies, building conversations, strategies and tools from shared challenges and strengths.
How do you develop an action plan around an issue? How do you integrate new members? What are some methods for organizing with hard to reach communities? How can we stay participant-led? How can we build sustainable leaderships and membership? We will break into small groups and grapple with the questions that are most pressing to our organizing practices, and think of tools for dealing with challenges. We will then come together as a larger group to share what we gathered from our smaller conversations, considering resources for developing tools to address our questions and organizing challenges.
- 12:05-1:00 Lunch
- 1:00-1:10 Afternoon Send-Off
- 1:10-2:05 Roundtable 2
Session 1: NYCORE and Parent Leadership Project: Exploring parent-teacher partnerships: a discussion exploring our challenges and what we hope and envision
The Parent Leadership Project (PLP) and the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE’s) Educators of Color working group are co-facilitating a discussion around parent-teacher relationships and partnerships in a climate of the implementation of common core, high stakes testing, and the new teachers’ evaluations. Recognizing these realities, we hope to facilitate and engage a meaningful dialogue exploring challenges, parent-teacher-student relationships, and also envision what we want in coming together, through sharing our experiences, asking questions, and hopefully building a nurturing network that can extend beyond this experience.
Session 2: PARCEO: Fundraising is Organizing (or at least it should be): Grassroots Fundraising Strategies for Justice Organizations
Every single social justice organization faces fundraising challenges – whether it’s scraping together enough money to make fliers, or funding programs to take care of our communities over decades. But too many social justice groups don’t connect our brilliant organizing wisdom to how we raise money. In this workshop we’ll discuss how to connect fundraising to organizing – and make sure we can raise the stable funding we need to reach our goals.
Session 3: Muslim Consultative Network: The Empowered Community
The roundtable will ask participants to explore their ideas of civic engagement. The group will reflect upon, discuss, and debate the different systems, structures, and processes that enable individual agency or present barriers to action. Participants will share their experiences with civic engagement and consider the extent to which they feel empowered or disempowered to enact change within their communities.
Session 1: Justice by the Pen: Engaging and Supporting Youth Organizing
The workshop will discuss the balance between political education and action, and how to engage/support youth organizing without imposing projects. This workshop will showcase components of our curriculum during a round table discussion on how all the issues youth are organizing around intersect.
Session 2: La Union: Parents and Teachers: Collaborations to Advance Educational Justice
La Union and teachers from PS 24 will present their model of parent-teacher collaboration, where they will explore their vision, practices and challenges at PS 24. Through the small group discussion, facilitators will share how our purpose for wanting parent activism in the school is that we believe parents should be part of shaping what they want for their schools and communities, and that parents are vital in supporting their children’s education. This is a space for parents and teachers to be able to share their own experiences around parents-teacher collaborations and learn from each other.
Session 3: PARCEO: “Fundraising is Organizing (or at least it should be): Grassroots Fundraising Strategies for Justice Organizations”
Every single social justice organization faces fundraising challenges – whether it’s scraping together enough money to make fliers, or funding programs to take care of our communities over decades. But too many social justice groups don’t connect our brilliant organizing wisdom to how we raise money. In this workshop we’ll discuss how to connect fundraising to organizing – and make sure we can raise the stable funding we need to reach our goals.