GATHER Alumni Focus on Child Soldiers, Mitigating Trauma
On August 6, Global GATHER alumni Lissette Mateus from Colombia, and Diana Alaroker and Geoffrey Omony from Uganda engaged in an online video conversation about child soldiers and war-affected children for their peers among the inaugural Gather Fellow cohort. They were joined by Theresa Betancourt, a Boston College professor who’s been performing a longitudinal, intergenerational study of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone.
The hour-long conversation included reflections and questions from GATHER alumni Jeff Waringa from Kenya, Alexander Gwanwalla from Cameroon, and Emma Rutikanga from Rwanda, who shared their experiential knowledge as well as shared challenges.
Lissette, the co-founder and visionary behind Serendipia, spoke to everyone on the video call about the challenges which she faces supporting de-mobilized female fighters as well as how she helps train communities in the “ESPERE” model for reconciliation and healing. From Gulu in northern Uganda, Diana and Geoffrey highlighted their concerns regarding the stigma which make it difficult for former child soldiers of the LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) to successfully integrate into civilian life. Employment and housing demands often force young people into homelessness or extreme poverty, but YOLRED is uniquely positioned to address the lives of former child soldiers in northern Uganda as an organization created by ex-combatants such as Geoffrey, who spoke movingly about the impact of his experiences.
Theresa Betancourt directs the Research Program on Children and Adversity at Boston College, having formerly worked for international non-profit organizations such as the International Rescue Committee in places such as Uganda, Bosnia and Sierra Leone. She and her team of students in the college’s School of Social Work are undertaking research projects in countries throughout the world, including several in which GATHER Fellows are the principal organizations. Dr. Betancourt emphasized the need to understand and mitigate intergenerational trauma, especially when conflicts unfold over decades, or post-conflict mental health systems are not developed.
Following the video conversation, several Gather Fellows were connected with Dr. Betancourt ‘s program to continue the conversation and collaboration.
The full video of the webinar can be viewed here:
It is Never Too Late to Learn
YOLRED Host Celebration for 12 Never Late Graduates
Like the famous Chinese Proverb states: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” On July 20, 2019, at least 21 women and men who were formerly abducted and forcibly conscripted into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel activities, started a journey to literacy when they enrolled for the “Never Late," adult literacy programme.
Under this five months, speedy learning programme, the learners, with the support of two volunteer primary school teachers, convened at Kirombe Primary School in Gulu Municipality, every Tuesday and Saturday to learn basic arithmetics, reading, writing and speaking skills.
While they yearned for arithmetical knowledge and admired people who spoke English Language near them, so little did they know that this journey would lead them to an equal height with their English speaking neighbours.
But five months down the road, they were in awe as they competently spoke and read in English.
It was all joy and excitement on December 18, 2019, when at least 11 women and a man, publicly unveiled their new learned skills at their graduation ceremony which also doubled as the YOLRED’s 2019 Community Festival day.
Donned in a T-shirt with the “Never Late Project” inscribed at the back, Oliver Grace Lanyero, in company of her colleagues, presented a poem in English titled, “War.”
War war war
I am the enemy of peace, security, education
War, where do you come from?
I come from nowhere
I am always there
When you are always there
You bring us suffering, poverty, famine, destruction, sickness and disease
Above all; violence to our rights
War war war
You made us to become uneducated
You destroy our lives and future
You make us hopeless, you make us homeless
You make us slaves of others
You make us medicine of sexual abuse
You make us child mothers
War war war
You go away
We don’t need you anymore
Enough is enough.
As they walked to the back stage, tears of joy rolled down some of their cheeks while they hugged each other in disbelief that they made it thus far.
“I now feel like a new person. This programme is very good because it has helped us to learn how to read and write. Such knowledge was something many of us did not have yet they are very important,” Lanyero said in an interview."
Mr. Francis Opobo, one of the volunteer teachers, said while many of the learners had no prior formal education background, he was so impressed by their level of commitment exhibited and ability to learn.
“Even while they had family commitments and many other individual challenges, they persistently attended the classes. It is true that some of them had to drop out due to reasons beyond their control. But I want to encourage that the training and learning should not stop here. There is so much that these people can still learn which will help them, their children and even the community they live in,” Mr. Opobo said.
Geoffrey Omony, the YOLRED Programme Director, said they came up with the “Never Late” project following requests from the former abductees to be equipped with such knowledge.
"Many times these people would go for public gatherings and when the registration form is brought, they had to look around for someone to help them write their names. This is a very sad and shaming experience for an adult person,” Omony said in an interview."
He said while the world could have thought that there was nothing good the former abductees could do, the December 18th graduation proved that these people were still capable of doing so much good to the world if given the chance and the right guidance.
The “Never Late” programme is a five months, rapid adult literacy project implemented by Youth Leaders for Restoration and Development (YOLRED) with support from Carlotta Ludovica Passerini, Arigatou International and the Goldin Institute.
This article was written by YOLRED's Douglas Olum who was formerly abducted and forcibly conscripted into the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Leading Lights Shine in South Africa
Dear All,
It has been a while since I provided updates about my grassroots project as a GATHER Fellow and I thought with so much happening at the Global Leading Light Initiative (GLLI), it would be nice to share some of the news. I must warn you that this will be an unusually long missive from me. Please excuse my excitement...
Red Bull Amaphiko Academy
I am excited to share with you this video which Red Bull recently produced about me and GLLI as part of their promotional materials. The Academy will be held in Durban June 14-23 during which we will, with the help from some renowned global entrepreneurs and coaches, co-create an 18-month strategic plan which they will be supporting us to accomplish, post Academy. It will end with a Red Bull National Festival, during which each of us will have a stand to exhibit our organizations and call-on support.
Leading Light Tech Academy
In April, we opened calls for applications for our grassroots IT training and Tech business incubation recently funded by IDC, an agency of the government. 213 youths applied for this program and we selected 12 to attend the interview, from whom to select five. Some community members, board members and IDC staff from Johannesburg attended the interview and were part of the selection committee. It was a very long day, with the first part of the interview in the form of a workshop during which we also asked interviewees to make presentations. We used the Marshmallow Challenge to check their technical skills and how they work in teams. At the end, it was hard to select five because they were all deserving and had gone through a thorough selection process to be shortlisted. So we selected seven and put three more on the waiting list, pending additional funding. Their nine-month program will begin July 1.
Annual General Meeting
We had a very exciting Annual General Meeting on May 25. This is one of our most important meetings where we report to members, stakeholders and the community. It is also the meeting where the governing body of the organization is elected. We are so excited to announce that Goldin Institute Executive Director Travis Rejman, Senior Advisor Jimmie Briggs and fellow GATHER alumnus Cynthia Austin joined our Advisory Team. GLLI relies on its Advisory Panel for technical and strategic advice. This is quite big for us! We produced the entrepreneurship curriculum for the Academy and Cynthia proofread and edited the manual. Our sponsors are very excited with this manual and how things are unfolding with this project.
Making Global GATHER Connections
We are working on our school curriculum and refining the concept. It will now serve as a community outreach activity for trainees of the Academy. According to their engagement terms, they will offer one to two hours weekly to teach students digital skills and entrepreneurship as well as act as mentors. I am very excited to announce that I had an online meeting recently with Peace Fellow Ms. Jacquelyn Moore, the outcome of which will bring lots of good things to our work in the school clubs. Jackie is working on providing some information and training to our trainers and students on robotics and will help us design a community website on robotics - I'm crazy about this.
I am very grateful to GATHER, the Goldin Institute and the Alumni network! As you can see, there is no way we would be here without them. #proudGATHERfellow!
Wishing you all a great week ahead!
Sincerely,
Dieudonne Allo
Founder, Global Leading Light Initiative
GATHER Fellow Alumni, Mthatha, South Africa
One Year Anniversary of Shyne!
Hello to the global network from San Diego!
I am pleased to share an update on the work of Shyne on our one year anniversary!
The Social Garden, a new space designed to include holistic alternative therapies to assist with healing complex trauma, officially launched with their Sprang Thang on May 25, 2019. It's a space where Shyne held its first Leadership Retreat Day back in April. We are pleased to share that the Social Garden will be home for Project SEEN on a bi-weekly basis moving forward, providing artistic expression and creative writing classes led by survivors as well.
The Social Garden is a 501c3 not-for-profit organization based in Oceanside, California. It is the sister program to the Victory Garden Sanctuary that will include a tiny home village of safe homes for survivors of sex trafficking and cults. Also, they’ll be partnering with more organizations that help survivors of sex trafficking by focusing on business development, professional development, leadership, and other survivor services.
[quote]At this time, Shyne already has 11 survivor-owned businesses in the network we are calling "The Velvet Tent."[/quote]
In the photo below is Naseem Murakami from Healing Sound Alchemy in Los Angeles. Her business partner, Andrea Saenz, is a friend of mine and they've been running events where they also support Shyne with donations.
We are working on some summer sound healing events for survivors, yoga classes free of charge, and an end-of-summer music event fundraiser. In addition to all this, Shyne has 10 new volunteers to train as soon as possible, so we’re creating those screening systems now and will launch Biz Dev LV2 on June 19 with 3 new survivor-owned businesses joining the class. Really what is being created is commUNITY - a place where survivors of sexual exploitation come to learn, share, connect, heal, find resources, network and listen.
Thank you for helping us celebrate our one-year anniversary of Shyne on June 9. I'm working to put out a newsletter soon with more updates about clients’ successes! Be inspired ❤
Solving Tough Issues through Community Parliaments in Uganda
Warm greetings from Uganda!
On Saturday, April 20, Youth Leadership for Restoration and Development (YOLRED) organized a community dialogue, called a ‘Kabake,’ where the community was granted a platform to share their experiences and derive solutions. The dialogue was attended by, among others, local council leaders, the police, child rights activists, business men and women, and the general community.
In the Layibi Division of the Gulu Municipality, there had been an epidemic of rape, robbery and violent attacks, especially on women in Library Parish. The community was engulfed in fear and hopelessness. Women could not walk out of their houses past sun-set if they were to avoid rape and attacks. Those in business had their property and money robbed, even in broad daylight, by a known gang who threatened them with violence or murder. And yet both the police and local leaders could not help the situation.
Mrs. Beatrice Ayat, a member of the local council and secretary for community service and production who represented the division chairperson, said the situation in the area had gotten out of hand because the perpetrators of violent crimes who started as children and would only steal from people had grown up and gained confidence to attack directly.
Ayat said they openly robbed people and raped women, threatening to beat the victims or torch their houses if the crimes were reported.
[quote]“I am so thankful to YOLRED for organizing this dialogue. When we have a problem in our community and we meet and discuss, we can always find a solution,” Ayat said.[/quote]
The officer in charge of Layibi Division police station, Assistant Inspector of Police Wilbert Adekere, said as police, they have been aware of the insecurity in the area but could not take any action because no member of the community was opening up to tell them who the perpetrators were.
Assistant Inspector Adekere consequently invited members of the affected community to secretly walk into his office and tip him on any security problem.
The Honourable Rose Aparo, a member of the local council, said she was going to forward the people’s plight to the council for discussion. She expressed confidence that the council would arrive to a logical conclusion that would save the community.
Mr. Odong Walter (We-yoo), the Community Sensitization Officer, said he was going to meet with the area Local Councilor One and his executives to forge a lasting solution to the problem. Collins Chwa Kisembo, the Counsellor and Monitoring and Evaluation Officer at YOLRED, appreciated the community for attending the meeting in large numbers. T
The former child soldiers also had the opportunity to share their experiences and receive healing in what we called testimonial therapy, which aims to heal the traumas and symptoms of depression, low mood and PTSD within the vulnerable populations.
In addition to sharing news from our recent Community Parliament, we are pleased to provide an exciting update on the project for which we raised funds through Indiegogo: the construction of a community resource center to offer counselling, training and recreational services to the victims. Some days it feels impossible to get this up and running, but we remembered one thing that was also core during our GATHER class that "adaptive challenges require changes in values, beliefs and approaches to work."
To that end, we have set off with a group savings and loan plan with the hope of driving the group towards a self-reliant, participatory development that should be sustainable. "Start with what you have" is the principle we applied for the construction of the community resource center. The Indiegogo funds we raised during GATHER for this project was not enough to acquire the land by itself, but we are building on these donations from around the world with local support.
[quote] We are happy to report that together we were already able to secure a piece of land, where we plan to have a permanent headquarters for YOLRED![/quote]
My sincere thanks for the support the entire team at the Goldin Institute gave us during our GATHER course, especially with the Indiegogo campaign, which made all the above development possible. I will share additional updates as we progress on our services to the community and the development of our headquarters.
Best regards,
Geoffrey
GATHER Alumnus Jamal Alkirnawi Honored as Torch Lighter
GATHER Alumnus Jamal Alkirnawi, CEO of a New Dawn in the Desert, a Bedouin-Jewish organization in Rahat, Israel, was recently named as one of 12 prominent people in the Negev Desert, a sparsely populated, but culturally diverse and vibrant region of southern Israel. Along with an actor, an oncologist, a choreographer and others, Jamal was honored in a feature story by the Yediot Aharonot’s Be’er Sheva edition as a person who deserves to light a torch on Israel’s Independence Day. Every year, twelve prominent Israelis are assigned to be part of a national torch-lighting ceremony, and the newspaper’s nominations for prospective torch-lighters have won significant attention in the Negev and beyond.
In an interview, Jamal said he appreciated the newspaper’s recognition on multiple levels, as a Bedouin and as a resident of a region beset by poverty and attendant issues, but most of all as someone who has striven to forge links with Jewish Israelis. Bedouin are an Arab, mostly Muslim community with a nomadic heritage who make up a quarter of the residents in the Negev, and Jamal’s organization is based in Rahat, a town composed of settled Bedouin families. Like other Arab citizens of Israel, Bedouin face frequent discrimination in education and employment, and Jamal said the show of support from the national newspaper chain was particularly meaningful to his work demonstrating the important role his community is playing in the national scene.
[quote]It’s good that it shows that in the periphery of Israel, there are a lot of people who working to make Israel a better place to live. -- Jamal Alkirnawi[/quote]
Jamal continued, “I feel myself very much Israeli. I can’t be anything else, but I sincerely hope that my work will contribute to the whole of Israeli society.”
A New Dawn for the Negev offers a range of educational, development and exchange programs for youths as well as adults, but concentrates its efforts on those with the toughest challenges, including families in crisis and youths who have dropped out of school. In this regard, Jamal said the recognition for New Dawn’s efforts will also be encouraging to those he works with.
“They don’t always feel the state is there for them,” Jamal explained.
Jamal said the article has already led to an interview with channel I-24 and hundreds of congratulatory e-mails and phone calls.
“I have always worked for the opportunity to lead our young people to a better place in society, and my dream is the full integration of Bedouin society into Israeli society and to completely break the expectations of people who claim that it is impossible,” Jamal told the newspaper.
[quote]I am working for mutual responsibility, mutual respect. That's what I've been doing for years and that's what I'll continue to do.[/quote]
GATHER: For the Margins, not the Masses
DePaul University Professor Lisa Dush recently presented the Goldin Institute’s GATHER program as “A Learning Platform for the Margins, not the Masses,” at an April 1, 2019 "Research Meet and Greet" event for colleagues, members of the university community and special guests.
GATHER is both a curriculum for grassroots organizers and an on-line learning system that was designed by Goldin Institute Executive Director Travis Rejman working with a team of software engineers and advisors. Both the GATHER curriculum and the software were designed in collaboration with the Goldin Institute's network of community leaders in over 50 countries and the design is based on 17 years of experience empowering organizers in some of the world’s most difficult circumstances. As an expert of digital learning as well as a longtime ally of the Goldin Institute’s efforts, Lisa focused on the GATHER software’s genesis and development, analyzing its versatility as well as its potential.
Reviewing GATHER’s history and outlining the program’s future options, Lisa asked,
[quote]“Why were a scrappy group of less than 15 people able to create a learning platform with more novel features than an enterprise learning management system?”[/quote]
Lisa first worked with the Goldin Institute in 2011, teaching a workshop on digital learning and storytelling in Haiti, where Goldin was collaborating with Malya Villard-Appolon, a founder of KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims), to establish security for women in the wake of a massive earthquake that had destroyed the homes and infrastructure for much of the population the previous year. Lisa worked with leaders from five women's rights organizations in Haiti to teach digital storytelling so that they could tell their own stories in their own words using equipment donated by the Goldin Institute.
Lisa discussed the evolution of GATHER from its initial concept and shared the role that faculty and student assistants from DePaul played in the process. Lisa noted that while the Goldin Institute is not a technology-driven organization, but the GATHER team progressed deliberately and brought in professional software developers to help realize the vision. The introduction of Apple’s iPad and other tablet devices in 2010 was a fortuitous development that sparked a "tablet-first" development strategy to make use of a mobile toolkit for community leadership.
After years of testing and development, GATHER was first deployed in the spring of 2018 with an international cohort, and Lisa began an ongoing, intensive research study that includes a study of the behind-the-scenes architecture of the software as well as feedback from users. She documented every step of the way, including the delivery of the specially configured iPads to “all sorts of crazy addresses.”
When it comes to facilitating peer-to-peer learning, GATHER has significant advantages over existing learning management systems, which are designed principally to facilitate teacher-directed learning. Additionally, Lisa noted that enterprise LMSs’ devote significant effort to optimizing their platforms for learning analytics, rather than for student engagement and learning.
About GATHER, Lisa said,
[quote]“First, the platform is designed for a networked, global cohort of learners, so that they can learn together to scale up their work. Overall, you are constantly reminded that you are a community of learners.”[/quote]
Lisa continued, "GATHER’s interface makes the participants visible to each other in ways that are unavailable in other learning programs, while the use of a tablet encourages “walking through the world, engaging with your environment, sharing with your community.”
The GATHER toolkit, moreover, gives participants useful techniques through earned “tools” that can be brought along to real world situations. Lisa cited surveys which showed high satisfaction among the GATHER graduates, who pledged to stay in touch with each other and said that their work already had been positively influenced by the program.
The Goldin Institute is currently engaged in a new GATHER curriculum designed to build the capacity of organizers based in Chicago neighborhoods, the Chicago Peace Fellows, a joint initiative with the Conant Family Foundation.
Jacquelyn Moore, a Peace Fellow with extensive experience in technology and finance who runs robotics programs for young people in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, said Lisa’s presentation accorded with her experience with the GATHER software thus far. As a new member of the GATHER community of learning, Jacquelyn said she particularly enjoyed getting to know the international alumni of the programming. Jackie shared:
[quote]“Even though the GATHER fellows in Africa are spread out across that continent, we here in Chicago often feel isolated from each other. Through GATHER, I’ve gotten to know people I could talk to.”[/quote]
Evaluation Workshop with Rebekah Levin
Evaluation.
No word provokes fear more promptly among non-profit organizations, who depend on positive assessments of their work to keep receiving grants, contracts and other crucial resources. But evaluation can help grassroots leaders do their work and communicate effectively with funders as well as potential supporters, according to Rebekah Levin, director of evaluation and learning with the Chicago-based Robert R. McCormick Foundation, which makes about $80 million in grants each year.
On March 29, Rebekah led a virtual workshop for an international roster of Chicago Peace Fellows and alumni of GATHER, the Goldin Institute’s on-line capacity-building curriculum. With 3 decades of experience as an evaluator, an academic and a political activist herself, she has become a self-described “proselytizer for evaluation,” especially when it is practiced in a way that empowers community leaders rather than penalizes them for not fitting into narrow categories and pre-ordained expectations.
[quote]“Though there are horrible things that have come from evaluation, there is fantastic stuff that has come from it, and when you don’t use it, I tell people in activism that it’s like leaving money on the table. It is a very powerful tool and you should have it working for you.” -- Rebekah Levin [/quote]
Philanthropies, government agencies and other funders demand data and have a strong preference for numbers and quantitative information over qualitative information and anecdotes, while generally failing to account for their own biases and assumptions. People who work for non-profit groups, in turn, frequently find evaluation to be a burden or a problem, and begin their evaluation process by asking “What data can I get?”
However, Rebekah averred that grassroots organizations can take control of the process by defining the questions that will give them information to help them do their work more effectively.
“With evaluation, you are gathering data to answer a question for which you don’t have the answer,” she said.
[quote]“Gather your data to answer questions, and when you have the answers to those questions, use those data to teach your supporters or people you want to support your organization about the power of what you’re doing.”[/quote]
The Chicago Peace Fellows and the alumni of GATHER’s inaugural class operate grassroots operations in a wide variety of circumstances, but all have extensive experience with evaluation, and they were brimming with questions for Rebekah. Eyob Yishak, a peace program coordinator from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said his program spent a year coming up with evaluation parameters and assigned one person with monitoring responsibility, but after hearing Rebekah speak, he wondered aloud if evaluation should be a team effort.
Speaking as an evaluator herself, Rebekah agreed with Eyob’s instinct, and encouraged those with evaluation duties to fully involve those who were doing the work as well as those being studied throughout the process.
“It’s a humbling thing,” Rebekah confessed. “We have to let go of our power and our roles.”
Cynthia Austin, who works with survivors of sexual violence from her base in San Diego, USA, said her team produces a lot of data about age and demographics, especially during their intake of women leaving the sex industry, but aren’t always sure what they can do with it.
Rebekah encouraged Cynthia’s team and other groups in that situation to reflect on their work, introspectively consider what information they really need, and improve their efforts by adding additional data to those which do prove useful.
Diana Alaroker, the accounts manager and social worker at Youth Leaders for Reconciliation, Education and Development in Gulu, Uganda, noted that many international agencies paid people for interviews, which risked the integrity of the research.
[quote]“When you give them the money, they give you the answers you want to know, not what they have really experienced.” -- Diana Alaroker[/quote]
The phenomenon Diana described was widespread, Rebekah said, recommending that the subjects of the interviews be fully involved so that they understand the potential benefits of accurate research to them and their community.
“Bringing people into the power circle can really have an effect,” she added. “You can use this as a tool to make the evaluation stronger.”
Peace Fellow Robert Biekman, senior pastor of Maple Park United Methodist Church and urban ministry coordinator of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church, wanted to know how small organizations could handle the cost of evaluation.
Rebekah answered that funders had an “ethical responsibility” to pay for the costs of any required data collection, but she always tried to match the methodology to the available resources:
[quote]“To me, it goes back to if the question is really important, what will it worth to you to get it answered?”
Nevertheless, Rebekah quickly added that evaluation doesn’t have to cost extra money and can be done less formally. Basic evaluation can be performed even if organizations sit together at regular intervals, talk about what they’re experiencing, take notes, and then analyze those records.
“Like anything in your life, you should be asking questions and looking for information that helps you learn and move forward,” she said.
Frank Latin, founding executive director of the Westside Media Project, said his organization already receives funding from the McCormick Foundation and others, but because they were concentrated in schools in one Chicago neighborhood, felt that he needed to use evaluation to explain he was having a significant impact.
Rebekah urged Frank to collect both quantitative and qualitative data, and use stories to tie them together and let funders understand the breadth as well as the depth of his organization’s work.
Jamila Trimuel, founder of Ladies of Virtue, an award-winning mentoring and leadership program on Chicago’s South Side, wanted to know how to approach universities to do evaluation.
Rebekah cautioned that while working with academics is appealing because they are thorough, professional and often do not charge, non-profits should make sure that their academic partners’ agendas align with theirs.
“Some of the university research is very good, but some of it is not benefiting communities,” she explained.
The online workshop ended with applause from the Fellows in Chicago and around the world and a commitment to continue the conversation about how evaluation can help us improve our efforts towards community driven social change.
Confessions of a Rebel Architect
Confession: I am an architect.
Architects are skilled at approaching issues from different angles. We have the ability to research a problem and the tools to design a solution that meets a specific problem. In this way, architecture has an amazing potential to contribute to society.
Yet too often the daily realities of the profession result in days full of long meetings picking apart trivial details and reducing the conceptual aspirations of design to shallow one-liners. Architects are often only invited to the project after investors, developers, and other stakeholders outside of the community have established project outcomes based on profit models and resale potential. These realities leave me feeling that as a profession, we are somehow missing the point.
Outside the profession, the term “architect” denotes the idea of a mastermind, a strategic inventor who thinks in big, broad strokes and establishes an impactful plan or course of action. However, inside the profession, the architect’s scope is most often relegated only to the building and the immediate needs of the physical components in the space. We allow ourselves to reduce our impact by only considering design at a building scale. We too often ignore our responsibility to define the built environment at an urban scale, as part of the larger context that imagines the future of how society might convene, collaborate, protest, and thrive.
As an architecture student, I was trained how to generate an idea, how to iterate options for that idea, and how to present and adapt that idea based on feedback. While these tools can be applied to the physical realm of architecture, they are similar to the tools used by community leaders and grassroots activists working at an urban scale. Architects are trained in the skills needed to approach society’s most adaptive challenges.
I recently left an innovative architectural office known for its integration of design with social needs because I had grown frustrated with the limited voice we architects allowed ourselves in the larger discussions around hard topics most affecting our cities and towns. After joining the Goldin Institute, I came to realize the tools the Institute works to instill in grassroots leaders and encourage policy makers to adopt are the very tools that, as architects, we are trained to wield. Focusing only on beauty and form is an irresponsible application of our skills. The role of the architect demands that we understand the legacy of a place, of a people, and translate it into the built environment that holds the next chapter.
It’s time to rebel against the building-scale-only convention of architecture and recapture the holistic legacy of the title. It’s time to train up Rebel Architects who can imagine a more desirable future as a vanguard of new social solutions!
Last year, I partnered with Erin Sterling Lewis, 2017 president of the North Carolina Chapter of the American Institute for Architects (AIA) and co-founder of the Raleigh-based architecture firm in situ studio, to create an initiative that seeks to create conversations centered around a community-driven process leading to responsive design and responsible development that would authentically consider place, context, and social change.
In May 2018, we issued a call to the Raleigh community and its designers to spend three days discussing how social issues and cultural legacy shape city growth. The response was overwhelming. Based on the community’s engagement and interest in the questions posed in the workshop, North Carolina State University contacted us and asked us to facilitate a semester-long architectural class that would ask students to tackle the same issues over an extended period of time and in a more robust way, giving them the chance to expand upon the work that was started by local professionals. This studio is ongoing and we are currently planning for Part 2 of the professional and community workshop to be held in fall 2019.
Our project looks at an 81.2-acre site located southwest of downtown Raleigh, a flourishing city of roughly 500,000 people that is projected to grow another 50% by 2030. The site is currently inhabited by the Governor Morehead School for the Blind and North Carolina’s maximum-security Central Prison. While this site once was located outside the city proper, seemingly a perfect setting to deposit all the city’s “undesirables,” the city has grown so much that it is now centrally located, though still shrouded in isolation and stigma.
The project explores the hypothetical closure of Central Prison and the hypothetical reabsorption and renovation of the Governor Morehead School buildings while incorporating this institution's fantastic work more inclusively into the city. The participants are looking at the legacy of both institutions, what they have offered the city since their establishment, and rethinking ways that their civic impact can benefit the present and expanding urban population.
These conversations with the students and professionals are redefining the current role of the architect as one of optimist, innovator, researcher, community partner and activist. We are approaching urban growth holistically by interviewing teachers and students from the Morehead School and learning from local re-entry organizations. Most importantly, these initiatives are guiding designers to see that built solutions will only succeed at a societal scale if those most affected have leading voices in our design solutions.
This project incorporates the mission of the Morehead School and addresses the disruptive cycles of incarceration and recidivism, but more than that, it has the chance to revitalize a central portion of Raleigh and provide an example of socially responsible city growth to other cities beyond the region. Our group of Rebel Architects has jumped into the exploration with both feet. We are taking seriously our roles as researchers and archivists and adding the rebel’s charge to listen, interpret and improve. The enthusiasm and level of participation, together with the strength in design solutions proposed thus far, is proof that the profession is capable of, and urgently desires, more.
The hope is for this newfound role to take root beyond the confines of this initiative, to seep deep into the ethos of design. Community-driven projects conceived through an authentic process that are facilitated and implemented by Rebel Architects: Now that is a soaring aspiration worthy of the profession.
