Faculty
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Commitment
Wednesdays from 3:30-5:30pm
Mondays (are encouraged but not mandatory)
When: Starting October, 2023 and ending June, 2024.
Where: Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center
640 Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, MA, 02130
This opportunity is for adults who work with young people, ranging from early childhood education to college age. (Even if you do not work directly with young people, please reach out anyways!)
The Racial Reconciliation and Healing Project gives faculty the opportunity to explore three core elements of racial justice work:
a Radical Democracy framework
how to interlace the head and the heart
the different roles of BIPOC people and white people in dismantling racism
Faculty will develop tools to support youth in their understanding of these three elements.
What you get from working with us:
The Racial Reconciliation and Healing Project gives faculty the opportunity to explore three core elements of racial justice work (a Radical Democracy framework, how to interlace the head and the heart, and the different roles of people of color (BIPOC) and whites in dismantling racism. Faculty will develop tools to support youth in their understanding of these three elements. There is an assumption that new faculty will be aligned with the elements themselves prior to beginning the project:
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The RRH model emerges out of a Radical Democracy understanding and framework.
• Faculty will learn how to facilitate group development, community dialogue and youth centered discovery focused on racism in its many forms. Instruction will center on both the way racism intersects with other forms of oppression to worsen impact, and on how racism is maintained through policies, procedures and practices.
• Faculty will learn how to work with youth as they develop the skill of making implicit racial dynamics explicit in their own lives and communities.
• Faculty will learn to help youth assess how structural racism and racial identity development manifest in different contexts.
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“You have to feel, to heal, to deal”
Faculty will learn more about how to support youth in their engagement in long term relationships with family and their community in ways that are regulated, sound and motivated for change.
• Faculty will learn to hold the space for youth as they reconnect with their heart in order to heal the head/heart disconnect caused by the trauma of racism.
• Faculty will be trained in how to self-regulate and offer regulation to youth as they develop skills in self-modulation and dialoguing with powerful affect.
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The RRH model assumes that BIPOC and whites have very different roles in racial justice work.
• Faculty will develop their ability to help youth as they internalize and manifest an understanding of the roles in racial justice work.
• Faculty will learn how to facilitate an environment with youth that allows youth to conceptualize and spearhead racial justice work in their own communities.
• Faculty will deepen their understanding of how to work with youth in a manner that creates space for youth self-empowerment but does not burden young people with the unnecessary responsibility for managing adults.
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• Readiness: This is not a place for adults to come into their own understanding of their racial identity and the impact of racism on their lives. The expectation is that the adults in the room have been engaged in their own learning/feeling and are able to be fully emotionally available to the young people. Even with this, it is guaranteed that all the adults will experience big emotional moments as they support the young people. We provide a monthly space for the adults to process but also expect that faculty have other spaces that they can utilize to keep them regulated and fully committed to their supportive role.
• Availability: Throughout the year we ask that faculty make themselves available to young people for check-ins (we will discuss how this has worked best in the past).
• Racism explicitly but not exclusively: The RRH project leads with a racial analysis but considers all forms of oppression and how they intersect. The inability to connect across the margins has been the downfall of many social justice movements and faculty will demonstrate openness and knowledge in all areas of oppression.
• Taking it back: Faculty are getting trained in the RHH model and learning how to take it back to the youth spaces that they work in. The faculty needs to have the autonomy and an authorizing environment in those spaces to implement some of the Racial Reconciliation and Healing practices.
Before You Apply
Please become familiar with all the information provided
on our site and the video posted on our homepage.
Apply
Any questions can be directed to:
Abigail Ortiz
Co-Director of Racial Justice and Equity Initiatives
Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center
Email: aortiz3@bwh.harvard.edu
Phone: (857) 203-1202