REPARATIONS AND PARENTING

June 15, 2019

Join JACK and Brooklyn Children's Museum for Reparations & Parenting -- a community conversation in which we will gather ideas, affirmations, and solutions to actively decolonize and reclaim a concept of parenthood that ensures that all children and their caregivers have the agency, access, and community necessary to truly thrive. Join special guest speakers Sarita Covington, Megan Hester, Kate Malinowski, as well as moderator DeeArah Wright, as we discuss how we, as a village, can raise the next generation without repeating patterns of systemic racism, trauma, and toxic power dynamics.

Part of JACK's ongoing Reparations365 series.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Sarita Covington is a multi-disciplinary artist/activist/educator from Harlem. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and co-founded ACRE (Artists Co-Creating Real Equity), an organizing body that works closely with grassroots community organizers the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. She has served on the Advisory council for The Field Leadership Fund and supported Race Forward’s Racial Equity in the Arts Innovation Lab. She co-facilitated a breakout session called WOC Decolonizing Mothering In Community during the 2018 Facing Race conference in Detroit. Sarita has been a teaching artists for over 20 years where she has taught and facilitated workshops among a variety of communities including the Fishkill Correctional Facility, Yale and numerous High School populations. She is currently the co-founder of Upper Manhattan Forest Kids providing classes in the outdoors to preschool aged children based on the Danish model for forest kindergartens. She has chosen unschooling for her five year old daughter.

Megan Hester has worked in the education justice movement for two decades as an organizer, trainer and researcher. She is the Director of the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative (EJ-ROC) at NYU's Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools. EJ-ROC builds on a long tradition of movement-driven, participatory community research and uses in racial justice lens in providing research, policy, data and strategic support to parent and youth organizing groups across the country. Prior to coming to the NYU Metro Center, Megan worked with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, where she supported the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, the Urban Youth Collaborative, and other education organizing groups in New York City. Before that, she worked as a parent and youth organizer with neighborhood and faith-based organizations. She has two children in Brooklyn public schools.

Kate Malinowski is a white parent living in Clinton Hill. She is a member of two different groups for white parents (one city-wide and one Brooklyn-based) focused on understanding how white privilege shows up in parenting and increasing the capacity of white parents to parent for racial justice. Kate teaches reading intervention at a charter middle school in Bed Stuy.

DeeArah Wright (moderator) is a Brooklyn-based mama, artist, mover, and collaborative leader. DeeArah is a former Co-Director of JACK, and her approach to activism, facilitation, leadership, and partnerships are informed by over 20 years of experiences and experiments in diverse fields, such as: education, dance and performance, social entrepreneurship, and community engagement. She is currently Director of Education at Brooklyn Children’s Museum and guides the strategy for innovative programming, collaborating with the BCM team and community to power a vision for inclusive and interactive learning experiences rooted in exploration, inquiry, and play. DeeArah's current adventures also include writing, cooperative initiatives, and development of revolutionary educational framework and philosophy.

Reparations365 is made possible in part by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.