For five years now, Building Bright Futures Regional Managers have brought together Regional Council members from across the state around a shared theme to make connections across the early childhood system. This year, we met in Montpelier and organized a workshop and panel around the theme of “Equitable Access and Engagement.”
Watch video from the Regional Summit
The goals of the day included fostering partnerships and connections across sectors and regions, understanding best practices to drive systemic change and dismantle structural barriers to services, and building a shared commitment to meaningful and equitable engagement with those young children and families who are furthest from justice and opportunity.
Morning Workshop
BBF invited The Creative Discourse Group (TCDG) co-founder Sue McCormack and associate Dr. Reese Kelly to host a workshop on equitable engagement.
It’s always the people who are experiencing the most forms of discrimination who have the most insights into how to build the solution. —Chase Strangio, Lawyer & Transgender Rights Activist
The BBF Network is made up of people who seek to build meaningful connections to problem-solve. Equitable community engagement is one way our network of early educators, service providers, family leaders, policymakers, and others can bring in diverse voices and make informed decisions that benefit whole communities and make progress towards systemic change. TCDG guided us through best practices and considerations for this work, including 1. Centering relationships, 2. Organizing for inclusion, and 3. Sharing power. Themes of clear communication and reciprocity rose up as key takeaways for participants.
BBF Parent Leader Amber Hewston reflected on this workshop and highlighted the importance of shared power and shared decision-making: I see many activities put in place with good intentions of hearing voices, but when you boil them down, there is no actual shared decision-making or commitment to action. There are many cases where the decisions have already been made and the engagement activities are just there to pull out whatever pieces will help to support or justify what is already going to happen. There is no real power for those with lived experience to make changes; instead, they are used as tools to be implicit in pushing an agenda that was built on systems that are already inherently inequitable, but glossed over to look like more voices were heard.
Antidotes to address this include:
- Meet people where they are.
- Choose a decision-making process that is agreed to by the group.
- Be prepared to share how you plan to work with participants and use the information gathered to make decisions and create change. Share these commitments with the group.
- Invite participants to come up with solutions or ideas that may go beyond the scope of your organization’s focus or resources. Be clear about ways you will be able to support those additional ideas (for example, connecting people to resources).
Afternoon Panel
Vermont’s Executive Director for Racial Equity, Xusana Davis, moderated a panel on Equitable Access to Services with panelists Jacob Bogre, Executive Director of the Association Of Africans Living in Vermont AALV in Burlington; Kendra LaRoche, Executive Director of the Special Needs Support Center in White River Junction; Shawna Trader, Rainbow Relief Program Manager for the Rainbow Bridge Community Center in Barre; and Melody Walker Mackin, Vermont Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner & Leader of the Abenaki Community.
Questions for the panelists included:
- How do you meaningfully engage with the people you serve, beyond the transactional relationship?
- What are the challenges you encounter in the state’s or your organization’s service delivery systems?
- Based on your experience, what advice would you give to professionals in the field of providing access to services to vulnerable populations?
- Do you have a quick story of someone you have helped and who is now better off because of your services?
The contributions of the panelists no doubt helped us better understand best practices to drive systemic change, address gaps, and dismantle structural barriers when it comes to equitable access and meaningful engagement. However, perhaps the most powerful takeaway from each of the panelists was their reminder of our shared humanity. Each panelist reminded us in their own way of a lesson that children are perhaps the best teachers of: the importance of play!
In response to a question about self-care, Shawna Trader from Barre Up and Rainbow Bridge Community Center shared, “I’m reminded of the quote by [Emma Goldman], ‘If dance is not a part of your revolution, I don’t want to be a part of it.’ So dance, you know, just cutting loose outside under the dappled light coming through the leaves of the tree, fresh air, basically breaking out of any boxes or containers, because the work that we do is all about criteria and protocol and you know, boxes to be checked and so forth, and that’s such a big part of what frustrates us in our work is that control—so I seek to dance, cut loose, have a cookie, you know, that’s it.”
Conclusion
Overall, the BBF Regional Team was thrilled to hear the positive feedback from participants who shared that the morning workshop format allowed for shared learning of skills together. Attendees also said that hearing directly from representatives of diverse communities impacted by the early childhood system in the afternoon panel created a compelling shared experience.
Resources
- Equitable Community Engagement Framework – The Creative Discourse Group
- Equitable Meeting Resources Checklist – The Creative Discourse Group
