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"Future Dreaming: Coalition Building with BIPOC Youth and Families for Empathy, Critical Engagement, and Praxis toward Educational Reform" by Francisco Torres and Astrid Morales

Abstract:

This research project centers coalition-building between BIPOC Youth and Families for their shared success and advocacy in educational contexts. By promoting and facilitating alliances of marginalized groups that tend to occupy different spaces and work separately on equity and social justice issues, this project seeks to create an institutionalized mechanism in Akron by and for BIPOC youth and families. Through a qualitative, ethnographic approach, we aim to understand what coalition building across communities in Akron, OH can look like through the lens of BIPOC Youth and Families. Using the Freirean method of culture circles, the project will also explore how storytelling opens avenues for critical engagement across difference, empathy-building, and, ultimately, coalition-building. Bridge the Village, a local non-profit, will help facilitate this work because we recognize that local non-profits, especially those run by people of color, have made lasting commitments to local contexts and the people within those serving areas. Findings hope to highlight that the work of education reform must start with our most marginalized up and that the voices of these individuals, together, as a unified front, are the best ones to advocate for the change they need and want in their local communities.