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Measuring Youth Wellness
22 Plays6 months ago
How do you measure youth wellness?
In episode 5, “Measuring Youth Wellness”, we hear from:
- Barbara Hetaraka a Māori educator who introduces us to a framework of wellness and suggestions on how to measure it
- Musician and Artist Jordan Huez who reflects on his education experiences in the Bay Area
- A Q&A with Soraya Sajous-Brooks, a veteran Bay Area educator and Jordan's mother about her cumulative understanding of youth wellness both inside the classroom and at home
- A reflection by scholar and poet Derikka Hunt, who speaks to her experiences on wellness through the lens of travel
Drawing From the Well is hosted by Tiffani Marie and is produced by Jon Reyes.
Music by King Most.
DFTW is supported by Community Responsive Education, continue the conversation at youthwellness.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Youth Wellness Movement
00:00:02
Speaker
Drawing from the Well is a podcast series from the youth wellness movement. We are educators, researchers, healers, parents, and community members striving to repurpose schools to address the critical wellness gaps in our youth's development.
Early School Experiences and Social Challenges
00:00:19
Speaker
Founded by Community Responsive Education.
00:00:25
Speaker
When i think about my schooling experiences, And I think about the most pivotal year For me, it would probably have to be the second grade.
00:00:41
Speaker
I learned so much that year about myself. I learned so much about my relationship with other people. i learned what race was that year.
00:00:53
Speaker
I learned that I was different. And there's this unique story that pulls so much together for me around my self-worth, around the gifts that I bring, around my purpose, my sacred purpose in life.
00:01:07
Speaker
And that was when my best friend, Day Davidson, went to the Philippines for two weeks. And i was alone at school.
00:01:19
Speaker
That was the first time that I can really remember being alone, being socially isolated and I remember I asked my teacher if I could bring my dolls to school.
00:01:34
Speaker
And I don't remember her response, but I know that she allowed me to sit in the back of the room in those old school testing desks that had like every part of it was blocked. And so I just remember being by myself, being with my dolls and playing with dolls. And I know I snuck them from home because know my mom didn't let me bring that to school.
00:01:54
Speaker
but I remember it being okay for me to be alone. And at that time, I was one of only four black kids in the entire school.
00:02:05
Speaker
And my brother was one of the other kids, just so you can do that math. And so I'm playing in the back of the room. Day is gone, and two weeks seems you know more like two months to this second grader. And I just was so sad and so lonely. And I cannot remember anyone noticing let alone seeking to intervene.
00:02:27
Speaker
And so the loneliness just continued to increase. And so ah had a plan. Second grade Tiffany had a plan. I was going to bring my Lisa Frank stickers to school with me because I was going to get some new friends. And for those listening, Lisa Frank,
00:02:45
Speaker
It's a big deal in the second grade. Those metallic stickers, those binders, those folders, those pencils, that was a big deal. And for me, my family and the unique experiences that we were having around our own socioeconomic adversities, it was a huge deal for me to bring that gift that my mother had given me to school.
00:03:10
Speaker
And so I had this plan. And again, I asked this teacher if I could stay in at recess one day. And she says, yes. So I just want us to think about the norming of my isolation, particularly from adults who are responsible for my well-being. She says, yes.
00:03:27
Speaker
So the kids are outside at lunch, at recess, and I'm walking around and I'm sharing my Lisa Frank stickers because my plan was to place one sticker on every desk of my classmate, of their desk so that I could get new friends.
00:03:43
Speaker
And, you know, by the time they came back, I would have a plethora of friends. So I'm placing them and I'm smiling. I'm so excited. I think I hear the bell ring outside. And my teacher's gathering folks and they're coming in the class. And I'm waiting to see their responses. And some of the kids were, you know, excited about these stickers.
00:04:02
Speaker
But I remember my teacher's face when she saw the stickers on the desks. And my little heart sunk because she looked so frustrated.
00:04:16
Speaker
She looked so furious. And she yelled at me and she said, you ruined my desks. And she ordered me to go around each desk and remove the stickers from the desks.
00:04:36
Speaker
And as I'm peeling ah these gifts that I had brought. I remember the stickers tearing. I remember the embarrassment and the sadness and the isolation and how it just increased drastically in that moment.
00:04:58
Speaker
And in reflection as a teacher myself now, I realize all of the moments that my teacher missed for intervention And I, to this day, am able now to have a little bit more compassion for her because of what she was being told mattered.
00:05:21
Speaker
Because what she was being taught to normalize in her practice, in what to look out for, particularly in what to measure. And it was uniformity. It was conformity.
00:05:32
Speaker
It was adherence to this structure. that deemed success, that merited being awarded and celebrated and not a sense of social belonging and not a sense of sharing and caring. Those were not tenets and attributes that she was taught to center.
00:05:54
Speaker
And she missed out on so many moments of intervention because her focus was on the wrong thing. Her focus was really on adhering to the normative practices and procedures of schooling and not the gifts and the attention that i needed for my own wellness at that time. Both the gifts that I was bringing and those signs of the need that I had for particular components of wellness.
Measuring Youth Wellness: Insights from Educators
00:06:27
Speaker
so today we want to explore this phenomenon. We want to explore this idea of wellness, what it means to look for it, what it looks like, and particularly how we measure it.
00:06:47
Speaker
Welcome to Drawing From The Well. I'm your host, Tiffany Marie. This episode will focus on measurements of youth wellness. For the next hour, we'll hear from Maori educator and leader, Barbara Hetseraka, who will introduce us to a framework of wellness and suggestions on how to measure it.
00:07:07
Speaker
We'll hear from youth expert Jordan Brooks, who will reflect on his high school experiences, his relationship to caring intervention, We have Jordan's mother and veteran educator Soraya Brooks, who will reflect on her cumulative understandings of measurement within the field.
00:07:23
Speaker
And finally, they have scholar, poet and sister friend, Derika Hunt, who closes this episode with a deep reflection on wellness through the medium of travel.
00:07:38
Speaker
Hello everyone, welcome to the people of the world, and welcome to all of you. He kākaro tēnei mainga hau maha nao te raki. I am a seed sown in the warm winds of the northern reaches of our whenua here in Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud.
00:07:56
Speaker
In common language, New Zealand. The whenua that I whakapapa back to through blood is te reo karikari, whatu whifi. My iwi is ngātukahu, my hafu is te whānau moana.
00:08:10
Speaker
My whānau names are rupāpera and he teraka. on my paternal side. My mother's lineage links me to the heart of Ngāpuhi, my tūranga waiwai, my rightful place of standing and belonging, is with my feet in and on the whenua of Aorua.
00:08:26
Speaker
My whānau names are Neho and Remana. My parents are Mary and Bruce Hetaraka, therefore my given names are Barbara May Hetaraka. I was born in an era that my maternal grandmother deemed a time of the Pākehā, the coloniser, and there was no place for a traditionally Māori name.
00:08:46
Speaker
When she was formally educated in our northern lands, she was physically punished for speaking Māori, our native tongue. The only accepted tongue was that of English. If she wasn't able to communicate in English, she was not permitted to speak whilst at school until she learned how to do so according to the teachings of the time.
00:09:06
Speaker
early nineteen thirty s My two older sisters and I have very English names, whilst my two younger brothers carry the prestigious Māori names of our grandfathers.
00:09:17
Speaker
I am the mother of rei kura. Rei translates to feather. Kura is a deep red. Red feather represents chiefly aspirations for the betterment of our people.
00:09:29
Speaker
I'm an intricate member of my whānau, a toto, in blood, and I aspire to be there in the field of education here Te Parehauraki, the region that I am currently based in for work as a kaiako teacher and learner and educational leader principal.
00:09:45
Speaker
Kia ora ra. Youth wellness is something that we need to nurture way better than we currently do. Our youth grow in a time where they are heavily tainted with trauma their own and that of the generations before them.
00:09:59
Speaker
before we can grow as well-grounded carriers of our ancestors' wildest dreams and hopes. We need to acknowledge that they need time to understand their trauma, unpack them, identify their support structures and identify what is needed for them to heal, for them to be able to work soundly towards realising their fullest potential. we all need to identify the pain, the harm, the trauma and find ways to heal so that we don't take this baggage into another generation.
00:10:29
Speaker
This is a work in progress. There is no quick fix, but there is acknowledgement that we have to do better, the adult population that is, and there needs to be urgency as well as care.
00:10:40
Speaker
We have to stand up, we have to have fierce conversations and continue to have them when things get raw and beyond, uncomfortable. Then we have to navigate a path forward with everyone's mana intact, mana, not ego.
00:10:56
Speaker
Our ancestors were some of the greatest navigators of the oceans. I trust we can navigate this. Tiwi Māori, we derive from gods. Therefore, we must remember this when delicately determining the best paths forward for our people.
00:11:11
Speaker
Young people are at their most well points when they have a strong sense of belonging as an individual as well as a member of a whānau, a collective.
00:11:22
Speaker
And when they understand, live and breathe, the full concept of reciprocation. Youth are well when they realise their importance to the collective. Genuine happiness, authentic connectedness, sound identity, self-belief, knowing your value and importance, having a village and whanau to support and get your back.
00:11:50
Speaker
I think through Indigenous eyes, yeah, there's ways to measure that. I think what we get tainted with often is for some unknown reason, we measure it against tools that aren't designed to acknowledge our successes as Māori, as Indigenous.
00:12:10
Speaker
And I suppose that just stems from a history of colonisation. So how do we indigenise? How do we wake our people up?
00:12:23
Speaker
I'm also the first to admit that our people are sleeping. They haven't woken to see and understand and fully unpack the detriment of the white man's way as such as the coloniser.
00:12:37
Speaker
So we're still, a lot of our people are stuck in white is right. And I think in terms of measurement, we just need to start with a blank slate and we need to think about our own celebrations and our own successes and then evaluate what that looks like for our youth of today.
00:13:03
Speaker
Thanks, Barb.
Cultural Influences on Wellness
00:13:05
Speaker
Up next, we have musician and artist Jordan Hughes, who will serve as our youth expert for this episode. Jordan's time with us will reflect his experiences growing up in the Bay Area and his high school experiences as they relate to wellness.
00:13:20
Speaker
After Jordan, we have an amazing interview with his mother, educator and mentor Soraya Brooks, who will share with us her understandings of measuring wellness both inside of the classroom and at home.
00:13:36
Speaker
My name is Jordan Hughes and I'm a musician from the Bay Area. I think wellness is a romanticized term. Actually, it is a very painful process to be well, or at least maybe while being Black and American.
00:13:53
Speaker
I think that it is extremely difficult to be well. I have to do, and I'm still doing, a lot of work to convince myself that I was not crazy. just because of the way that schools and institutions like schools are built, right? Where it's like, if this doesn't work for you, there's something wrong for you and you need to figure that out before this time is up or you're never going to succeed.
00:14:19
Speaker
And that ideology and that logic, right, is something that it creates something that you're trying to like this kind of big bad wolf that you're trying to break down and trying to figure out what their weakness is. You're trying to figure out where it came from and what's happening and why. And the reality of it is, is that doesn't really matter to you.
00:14:34
Speaker
And not only doesn't matter to you, it doesn't benefit you. I think that if we apply that same pressure into just pushing people into their passions and allowing people to make mistakes and not punishing and grading those mistakes, I think that we get a radically different society and I think we get radically different results.
00:14:52
Speaker
I think that strategically there's nothing to measure wellness because I think that if we measured wellness would find that none of us are well. And if none of us are well that becomes overwhelming because that commonality could actually do a lot of damage to a broken system or a well-functioning broken system.
00:15:12
Speaker
schools measure organization. And I think that that is why have always struggled. I think that schools prioritize how well you can keep things in your backpack, how well you can get to places, the timely manner of such.
00:15:31
Speaker
I don't think that schools measure much else. yeah I think that maybe people within those institutions start to, but I don't think that that is what that institution is tasked with at all, at all. I think it's completely They're to reaffirm your position in this world, right? Whereas if you are not organized, then you are going to stumble and you are going to feel like you are a failure. And we are going to tell you that you are a failure at every step of the way.
00:15:58
Speaker
But if you are organized and you play by our rules, you can have it all, right? And it's the same thing that they use for the American dream. It's like, you can have it all. It's the imaginary all.
00:16:11
Speaker
If our society were to actually measure wellness, I think that it would look for what we shun most, not only within education, but within the Black community. And I think it would be curiosity.
00:16:27
Speaker
I think that we have to harness that curiosity. I think that questions are more powerful than we ever knew that they were. I think that curiosity is if we could just hold on to wanting to know, right? And just harness on the power of wanting to know and let that lead the path for where we go with education.
00:16:48
Speaker
Oh man, I can't even imagine what that world would look like, but I'm sure it would do something beautiful. I think we want to measure emotion, but not in a way where it's like measuring up, but more so like measuring appropriate emotional responses.
00:17:05
Speaker
Once again, when in context with oppression and just being Black in America, we are robbed of that. There's so many layers to that, right? Where, I mean, what we have to respond to, right? And then the conditions that make us want to respond the way that we do.
00:17:22
Speaker
So yeah, I think appropriate emotional responses, I think that we would measure connection. I think that we would measure socializing. I think that we would measure camaraderie in a strange way. Like we would measure how well we celebrate each other.
00:17:39
Speaker
I think that we would prioritize the people. Actually, if you relay math to me as it related to my people, I think then I'm a lot more interested in math.
00:17:51
Speaker
If you tell me that I have to do the numbers as to why my people so many of my people are in prison and then have me do that math, I think me personally, I'm more interested in that. Yeah, I think that it would measure passion, but it would also embrace culture.
00:18:11
Speaker
I'm here with the one and only Soraya Brooks. Super excited to have her. I've worked with her son. worked with her children in different capacities, and I've been able to be mentored by her and teach with her as one of, I would argue, the dopest educators in our nation. But I'm to her go ahead and introduce herself. So my first question to you today.
00:18:32
Speaker
is what's your name, how long you've been teaching, and how do you understand yourself within the field of education? Yeah, my name's Soraya Saisu-Spricks. I think I've been teaching for about 25 years.
00:18:45
Speaker
I think that I'm always learning, kind of seeking the truth. And one of the things that I think over the years that I've learned about teaching in general is that It's really hard and you have to, and it's hard sometimes, but you really have to leave your ego at the door sometimes so that you can really be relevant and there for the kids in a way that they need it.
00:19:10
Speaker
For me, culture is everything. I work in West Oakland. When I started, the population was 75% African-American and maybe a quarter Chicano.
00:19:22
Speaker
And it felt like home because at Prescott, it was really about going into kids' culture and making them really proud. of who they are. And I think that my work has really been rooted in that.
00:19:36
Speaker
And then also just making kids know that you see them, you know, that you appreciate, that you understand that they're tired sometimes or that they're grouchy sometimes or that it's hard and just showing up in a way that is honest and real.
00:19:51
Speaker
Definitely. I really appreciate that grounding. You said 20, 25 years, right? So I know you've seen and experienced a lot. What would you say are some of the highs of your time in the field? And then as we say, what do you think have been some of the lows of your time in the field?
00:20:09
Speaker
Highs would be seeing kids come through and come back and just kind of bumping. You know, I've had grown women, bump into me by the lake and be like, Ms. Brooks, do you still read Addie to your class? That was dope. I mean, Ms. Brooks, that was dope. You know, and you're just, and I'm like, wow, you know, she's like 27 now. And she was seven when we read that, you know, and that she remembers, you know, and that they're always just so happy to see me.
00:20:37
Speaker
They want me to know how they're doing and that they let me know that I was one of their best teachers ever. And that makes me feel really good as their teacher. One experience that really made me proud, because at first when I got to Prescott, it was like,
00:20:52
Speaker
Africa, Africa, Africa, you are African, you come from great people, you are, you know, and that was what everyone around me was doing. And so coming in and having Miss Secret and all these kind of queens of the game, really looking at you and being like, don't play, you know, i'll do what you need to do.
00:21:10
Speaker
And there was one child, i just loved her. She was so bright, beautiful chocolate girl. And you just knew that she didn't see herself that way.
00:21:22
Speaker
And I taught her in the second and then something happened where two years later I was her fourth grade teacher. And I remember someone was saying, you and your black ass.
00:21:33
Speaker
And she said, I don't know why you haven't gotten the memo, black is beautiful baby. And I knew, knew in that moment that that was me, you know, that that was the work that we'd done in honoring who you are, you know?
00:21:44
Speaker
And those are the high moments. I have one little girl. i said to her, oh you have the most beautiful skin. I bet you hear that all the time. And she was like, Miss Brooks, I have never heard that before in my life ever.
00:21:57
Speaker
You think my skin is beautiful? And I said, yeah, baby, it's so smooth. It's so pretty. It's so even. And she said, no, I've never heard that. miss bre And that just moments like that where you provide that for kids, you know,
00:22:11
Speaker
is dope. It's dope that they know that you see them and that you get them to see themselves sometimes in a light that's not so broken. The lows are definitely seeing hard things. Like, you know, you know, just, I have had several students over the years, like, you know, as their teacher, parents call you, you know, so that my cell will ring or they'll be like, Ms. Brooks,
00:22:39
Speaker
His mother was just killed and I'm coming to get him. So can you get his stuff together? And that feeling When that child leaves my room and I'm looking at his back goal and I know that his life is about to change forever.
00:22:56
Speaker
And this student is happy. You know, he's happy because he's getting out of there. It's the afternoon. He's not going to have to do history. He's like, oh, yeah, it's hot. And he thinks he's escaping, you know, and he's smiling. And I'm like, that's going to be.
00:23:12
Speaker
That's going to be your last smile for a minute. And that hurts. Those things are really hard. Also, another tough thing is once something like that happens, it happens like in two, threes, fours, and people are just dying.
00:23:26
Speaker
And our community is so tight-knit that all the kids are really afraid and really wounded. And those are tough times too, where it's like, what am I going to do except for tell the truth and be sad with you?
00:23:39
Speaker
What do you think, based on the story after story after story, what would you say are some of the greatest lessons that you have learned, particularly around youth wellness?
00:23:50
Speaker
I think that in order for youth wellness to really be a priority, we have to make space for pain and healing.
00:24:03
Speaker
Like I remember so many times I've had to come to bat for my sons about things that just were unjust. And I remember always having to position myself and poise myself in a way that showed that I knew what I was talking about and that I could work a system and that you weren't gonna get away with it.
00:24:21
Speaker
And how you have to water down your anger at really, really unjust, immoral things.
00:24:35
Speaker
So I think youth wellness is really about actually giving the youth a space where they, one, experience some joy.
00:24:45
Speaker
We have to let kids experience joy instead of, feeling like they're in prison all the time. And two, like for me, I feel like I raised all three boys in fear of if they didn't do it the way white people want you to do it, you aren't gonna be anything. And what does that mean?
00:25:06
Speaker
You know, what does it mean to be nothing? Or if you don't get this paper or that paper and all papers that are stacked against us anyway, you know what i mean?
00:25:17
Speaker
And then we make ourselves feel bad about what you have or don't have. And it's really like, how do we really teach people to do what they love, do what makes them feel joy and let spirit guide them in a way where they feel whole. And you talked a little bit about what it is, right?
00:25:37
Speaker
right I hear you about the self-love piece, but part of what you shared earlier was for that to be possible, we also need the messages, the institutions, and the structures that hate us to also cease so that we can love ourselves on a more consistent basis.
Redefining Metrics of Wellness in Education
00:25:57
Speaker
If we were to measure this, right, this idea of what you're talking about, whether it's around self-love or just wellness as a whole, What do you think that looks like or what does it take to actually measure wellness? because we measure a lot of things. We have grading, we have testing.
00:26:12
Speaker
In this country, we are very serious about measurement, but we don't, I haven't seen so much emphasis on measuring wellness. So part of what we're interested in is if we were to do that, like what do you think as an educator in 25 years, what would that look like? Like what would we focus on if we wanted to measure wellness?
00:26:31
Speaker
I think measure joy. You know, how much joy are children experiencing? Measure love. How much love are they receiving from us on a daily basis?
00:26:48
Speaker
You know, how are we modeling that for them so that they can love one another? You know, I've seen an education, even competition among teachers or people are hating this teacher because she's dope or he's dope. And what kind of foolishness is that?
00:27:02
Speaker
Everybody should be doing what the dope teacher is doing. That's what we should do. How'd you do that? What'd you do? Okay. And then you, what? Really? You bought them lollipops? I mean, we should be writing that down.
00:27:13
Speaker
We should be studying that person in order to see what we can do to make our kids whole, you know? And I think that, yeah, the wellness looks like letting them figure out who they are and accepting that and not having to, you know, I mean, it's so much stuff. It's like, you know, there's judgment about everything. If you're on time, are you late? Is your stuff in?
00:27:42
Speaker
And then what we say is, oh yeah, well, but when you get there, I could be loving, but when you get there, people are going to do this and do that. And I'm like, just with this whole pandemic and everybody, you know,
00:27:55
Speaker
a lot of the mamas are doing the test people. I mean, come on. I got kids who miss school who are in first grade at the third grade level with the test because they're taking the test at home and parents are freaked out, you know?
00:28:06
Speaker
And so I'm like, why can't we even imagine a compassionate world so that when we come back to school, right? um I've got first graders. When we come back to school, instead of spending all this money on these tests and these measures for that stuff,
00:28:22
Speaker
We are going to kind of have a triage of, okay, what is the plan? How can we spend all the resources we have on making kids feel better and loved and happy and safe and dealing with loss?
00:28:36
Speaker
And then also, okay, what are we going to do so that we can catch them up as much as possible with this skill or that skill? What works to accelerate reading right here, right now? But that's not what we focus on. We focus on stupid stuff.
00:28:51
Speaker
Why are we testing kids while they're in their house? What are we focusing on that for? What do you think kids who haven't been in school for I'm doing phonics like this. I'm the only person, Tiff, going, mmm. Kids are looking like this, Brooks, what you doing?
00:29:06
Speaker
I'm teaching you how to make an N sound. Okay. I mean, it's funny. I mean, I am doing it because reading is fundamental. And so I'm trying to get that through the Zoom. And the Zoom is making cracking noises. Their video is coming off and on because they got Chromebooks. It's a hot mess.
00:29:23
Speaker
I don't know. They might know the M. That might have been an M. But we're doing the best that we can. Do you know what i'm saying? And still people are wanting to measure different things. and And another thing, too, is the control of black and brown bodies. I learned that teaching with you where I'm just like, what is it?
00:29:42
Speaker
We can't be loud. I don't know anybody else that they do this to but us. We can't be authentic. where Our voices are too loud. Our bodies are too big. We are just offensive to you all the time.
00:29:56
Speaker
Even in fear, we want to control them. And I remember one teacher that really mentored me, Ms. Carrie Secret. I said, I have the worst line, Ms. Secret. And she says, oh, you can't talk to me about no line because I don't think I have a good line either.
00:30:10
Speaker
She said, only thing they need to line up for is free handouts or a welfare check. Mine ain't doing that. So guess what? The line ain't, so what? Talk to me about it them if they're not learning.
00:30:21
Speaker
And I would just like, yeah, what is it? What is it about the line and don't talk? And it's not even natural, you know? And then later on, they're like, oh, well, we can't get black boys to speak in class even. Well, yeah, we were just controlling them all the time. Black boys and girls are brilliant.
00:30:41
Speaker
And I'm not just saying that to blow smoke up my own behind or anybody, but they have a gift in the world. I've watched eight-year-olds who can catch two buses, get on a train, walk down the street to grandma's house and be watching somebody who's a little bit smaller than them.
00:30:57
Speaker
That takes genius, but we don't value that stuff. We don't value our kids' gifts. you know We keep trying to mold them into something else instead of imagining. you know I don't even know what it's like. When people ask me, well, what do you want? What do you need? I don't even know how to imagine it. you know And that's sad.
00:31:16
Speaker
i don't know how to imagine what it would look like to let us have peace and feel good about ourselves and be joyful in a way where I just feel safe.
00:31:29
Speaker
And you don't even realize it, it's like, it's that deep. Like you don't realize i i went to Brazil with a girlfriend who's white and the plane was so empty that she was like, let's get up and go get a whole row to ourselves.
00:31:44
Speaker
And I'm sitting in my seat like, are you crazy? Girl, they not coming to get me. Oh no, don't you hear it? And I mean, and I realized we're both very sassy, we're both fun, ah but we exist in two totally different ways because she feels so safe doing that.
00:32:00
Speaker
And I'm like, oh no, they're not gonna correct me. And I realized that, you know just traveling with her and watching how easily she, you know every time they make an announcement through the airport about watch your bags, I'm like this.
00:32:12
Speaker
Because you hear so many stories and they're not good with us. They see us in this automatic you know harshness. I love being black. I love being born of African descent. I do.
00:32:28
Speaker
But I hate all the hatefulness and anti-blackness. My brother was sick in the hospital fighting for his life and he was on a ventilator machine and he had no idea where he was.
00:32:41
Speaker
He was put under, he had major surgery. And then when he would wake up at night, they would say, he's violent. No, he's not violent. He doesn't know where he is. And it's that all the time. So it's hard.
00:32:55
Speaker
It's hard to be well in an environment like that. And I don't wanna say, because I think that one of the, Jordan taught me, because you know he would be the first one to tell you that race is, what is it, Tiff? Because you, the one that put that in him.
00:33:08
Speaker
It's not that I don't believe it, but here I am, know, fighting for them not to kill my brother when he is dying. And he says it's a social construct, which it is, but they need to know it too.
00:33:24
Speaker
And I don't want to say we have to be completely apart from them in order to feel peace. But I feel like It's hard to feel peace and joy when you are constantly fighting for your life.
00:33:42
Speaker
And, you know, I'm a believer and all that, but I don't want peace just when I go to heaven. There's nothing wrong with us having some peace right here on earth. We need to stop valuing their wealth and their things, you know?
00:33:56
Speaker
And it's hard because we are a complex human because I think it's African. i I got this sweater in every color. I don't know what that's about, but it's real, you know? And so I don't know. It's like constantly looking at ourselves and coming back to the table and saying, okay, how do I feel like good about myself.
00:34:17
Speaker
This makes me laugh, but you know how the Buddhists put on the orange robe and they get rid of everything and nothing else, you know, matters, you know, or whatever.
00:34:31
Speaker
can't even imagine myself, you know, like what? I shouldn't have to be stripped away of everything. You know what I mean? And it's not a judgment on how, because that works for some people, you know, but my wellness should not be just, I can have absolutely nothing or I love so much and don't need to be loved back.
00:34:55
Speaker
To me, that's not wellness either. It's like somewhere in the middle where we can just be comfortable being, right? Really in a level playing field. That's how I'm go get wellness.
00:35:06
Speaker
Give me a level playing field. Well, there it is. wisdom drop, the mic drop from the one and only Soraya Brooks. I want to thank you for giving us a little bit of your time and really just pushing us to think about just frameworks of wellness, but also the complications with attempting to implement that in a society that does not do a good job of centering wellness. And so such important ideas to take up.
00:35:35
Speaker
I appreciate you. Thank you so much.
00:35:41
Speaker
Soraya's powerful testimony reminds us of the richness of our work and its proximity to pain. Pain is often a familiar feeling in this work and the deeper and more loving we are, often the more we open ourselves to deep hurt and grief.
00:35:59
Speaker
Next, Derica takes us through a journey of deep reflection, offering meaningful pathways to funnel our pain.
00:36:11
Speaker
I offer my voice as the altar today. I've lit candles and I bring my ancestors to this space with me.
00:36:23
Speaker
You cannot see them, but you can feel them and you can feel me. My name is Derica Hunt and I am the daughter of Sylvia Renee. always start by introducing myself as my mother's daughter.
00:36:39
Speaker
Sometimes I forget, but I tried to start that way because that is one of the most important roles that I've been able to hold in this lifetime, is being the child of Silvio René.
00:36:54
Speaker
Calling in my mother and my ancestors, I also call in the people of this land that I'm currently on. And I just give so much thanks and gratitude that they have allowed me to be here, to continue to touch the soil with my bare feet, to continue to make life in a place that has been ravished by colonialism, imperialism, and so many other systems of destruction.
00:37:25
Speaker
And yet these gracious people of this land continue to allow me to make semblances of a home here.
00:37:37
Speaker
I am so grateful. I start my reflection with those meditations as a way to bring you here with me. As I think about youth wellness and wellness and what it means, my heart feels heavy.
00:37:56
Speaker
I feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I feel that feeling in the back of my throat. like it's all scratchy and it wants to close up.
00:38:07
Speaker
And the tears, they start to stream down my face, soft and steady. And I know that those tears are coming because I've often imagined wellness as something not available for people like me, for Black girls.
00:38:24
Speaker
And so as I reflect on youth wellness and my own education work and my own journey, it brings up a lot of emotions.
00:38:35
Speaker
A lot of emotions rise to the surface. I think those emotions have come up for me because I've had a series of experiences with education that have been both enlightening and devastating. And I think that moving in between those two is a bit challenging at times.
00:38:58
Speaker
So i want to share a couple of stories with you all to really ground my own work. So the first story y I'll share is, as I said, I usually introduce myself as the daughter of Sylvia Renee.
00:39:12
Speaker
Sylvia Renee is my mother. My mother died when she was only 36 years old, young, ripe, ready for life, and her life got cut short too soon. And so I often think about the Black girls and Black women who became ancestors too soon.
00:39:33
Speaker
And my mother falls into that category. And as I think about my mother's death, I think about the things that she wanted for me. And one of her dreams was connected to education.
00:39:48
Speaker
I've often come to realize that my mom's work before leaving this earth this lifetime was to plant her dreams so that I could bloom them.
00:40:01
Speaker
I was my mom's caregiver. She was really ill. She had several medical conditions. And so that little word wellness is something that resonated with me from early on in my childhood.
00:40:16
Speaker
While I didn't necessarily know the word wellness, I knew the difference between being well and being sick. And I've often talked about my mother's room in our house as the sick room and the years that I spent caring for her in this place that I knew as the sick room.
00:40:34
Speaker
In the sick room after school, i would go and I would sit with my mom on her bed. and if I could help paint the picture for you, it was a small room with big windows. It had big glass doors that led out to a little patio.
00:40:49
Speaker
And my mom's bed was sitting right when you walked in the door. It was off to the left. And so let's imagine a typical day of me coming home. have my backpack on, my loud little feet are running pitter patter towards my mom's room.
00:41:05
Speaker
And I go inside and I see her soft, tired eyes looking up at me as I enter the room. And I see something in her eyes that I can't quite describe, something painful.
00:41:17
Speaker
And I will usually sit on the side of the bed with her and I'll ask her, did you take your medicine today? Are you okay? How do you feel? Let's get you a bath. And I could see something in her eyes, but my little childlike self couldn't quite distinguish what it was.
00:41:36
Speaker
And so I would fill the room with laughter and sound and words. And one of the things my mom would say almost every day, Derica, I want you to always do your best in school.
00:41:50
Speaker
That's your way out. And she believed so deeply that schooling would give me opportunities to live a life that perhaps she was
Representation and Alternative Education Practices
00:42:03
Speaker
dreaming for. him But one thing I really respect about my mom is though she felt like school would be my way out, my mom brings a lot of nuance and complicates the notion of school itself.
00:42:16
Speaker
So I always always jokingly tell my friends about my mom the troublemaker. And I used to be embarrassed because oftentimes if we were given assignments in school that did not reflect me as a black girl or did not reflect the varieties of experiences that black people have, my mom would tell me that I could not do the assignment.
00:42:40
Speaker
Or if it was a book, I could not read the book. And she would also tell my teachers or the administrators at the school, she was very vocal that my child needs to so be surrounded by not only people that look like her, but she needs to find herself in the literature.
00:42:57
Speaker
She needs to have experiences that represent her culture. She needs to be able to speak the way that she speaks in a classroom. And so I remember if teachers corrected the way that black kids in my neighborhood talk, I remember my mom saying, that's just how we talk.
00:43:15
Speaker
And that's OK. That's legitimate. That's valid. They don't have to change how they talk. And I just remember her always having a very strong stance in protecting me and my identity and my culture and not allowing me to lose that in the process of being schooled.
00:43:33
Speaker
And so I'll never forget, I might have been in the seventh or eighth grade because my mom died when I was going to the ninth grade. And we were reading ah very popular novel for school.
00:43:45
Speaker
I want to say that the book was either The Secret Garden or it might have been Anne of Green Gables, actually. I remember it had like a white girl on the cover. remember coming home and my mom, I think the book was in my hand or she saw it.
00:44:00
Speaker
And I'll never forget her snatching it and said, what the people at that schoolhouse got you reading? She looks at the cover. There's a white girl and there's no black person in sight. And my mom is just livid.
00:44:13
Speaker
Like how many times i have to tell those people, my child's not reading that. And so my mom says, you know what? I got something. And so she tells me, you're going to read a book by a black woman.
00:44:24
Speaker
That's the kind of literature I want you reading. And so I can't remember if we had the book at home or if she got the book later, but I ended up reading, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.
00:44:36
Speaker
And I read it collectively with my mom and she felt so strongly that I needed to read that book. And I remember asking her, well, mom, why can't I read the book that my class is reading?
00:44:51
Speaker
And she looks at me without skipping a beat. And she says to me, you're not doing what everyone else does. You are going to grow up knowing who you are.
00:45:05
Speaker
You read those books that do not have people that look like you in them. You will not be able to fully love who you are. And that was that. And I remember just going outside to play after that. That was the end of the conversation.
00:45:18
Speaker
And so I remember moments like that throughout my entire childhood. If there was a play at church, because we went to church a lot, that was a big part of my upbringing. And my mom was very clear, we're not celebrating white Jesus.
00:45:31
Speaker
We're not doing anything connected to whiteness. It needs to be black because we are black people and that's how we have to show up. I give the example of my mother to say that one of the things I learned so vividly from my mom is that children, in order to truly be well,
00:45:52
Speaker
I believe they have to see themselves reflected in classrooms, curriculums, experiences. They have to see themselves reflected.
00:46:04
Speaker
And my mom did such a beautiful job at protecting that for me and making sure. I can't recall a time where I engaged in assignments or activities or experiences that did not center Blackness.
00:46:20
Speaker
that did not center my world. And so as I grew up, I naturally did that kind of work for myself. Fast forward to now with my own work with young people, one of the things I think extensively about is what does it mean to be a Black girl right now in this world?
00:46:41
Speaker
you know Black girlhood is so beautiful. It's so beautiful. And it is so vibrant and colorful and so full of life.
00:46:52
Speaker
And Black girlhood also comes with a lot of challenges, oftentimes a lot of pain, oftentimes a lot of trauma.
00:47:04
Speaker
It can be really difficult to navigate that. And so in honor of my mom, One of the things I feel very strongly about is making sure that in schooling experiences, black children see themselves reflected, that they see who they are in the curriculum.
00:47:26
Speaker
I think a lot about this because I am someone who believes in the abolition of schools. And I think what's beautiful about this is that my mom was a school abolitionist before I knew that terminology.
00:47:40
Speaker
My mom was refusing the logics and politics of whiteness in my own schooling experiences. And I remember her telling me like she would have homeschooled to me if she didn't have to work.
00:47:52
Speaker
And of course, once she got sick, that was no longer an option. And so as I think about school abolition, something that has come to mind for me is that while we may not be able to fully abolish schools right now as we know them, we can start to do some work around school.
00:48:12
Speaker
abolition in moments. What are some things that we can refuse in schooling experiences for children? In particular, I'm thinking about the experiences of Black children, Native children, brown children, poor children, children whose first language is not English, some specifically thinking in reference to the United States.
00:48:32
Speaker
All of these different oppressive forces that shape the experiences of children as they enter classrooms. What does it mean to refuse? As we refuse, I believe those small refusals add up to what we might imagine as abolition.
00:48:47
Speaker
So one of the ways that I try to refuse the logics of schooling is I started a program, Passports for Change, through the Dreamers for Change Foundation.
00:48:58
Speaker
And with Passports for Change, we work towards sponsoring passports for youth And I want to really sit with this because while we sponsor the Passports for Youth, we are also very clear about the logics of settler colonialism.
00:49:15
Speaker
We are very clear about capitalism. We're very clear about neoliberalism. And we're very clear about the different ways these systems of oppression work in tandem.
00:49:27
Speaker
to create a global world that has uneven power dynamics. And so while we do our work with Passports for Change and we get passports for our youth and we take them on trips abroad, a big part of our work is imagining the world beyond borders and not in a dreamy fairytale sense, but in a real concrete way.
00:49:52
Speaker
Because what we do know in our work is also that borders are very political and that borders often dictate who can and can't move through in and around the world.
00:50:07
Speaker
And we also know that those borders are often created by powers like the United States government. and other world powers, meaning that people in other countries don't have the luxury as oftentimes to get passports and visas to travel the world.
00:50:25
Speaker
So as we do this work with Black girls, we're hyper aware of the privilege that comes with accessing a US American passport. And so I think that's important to say because that's the foundation of our work is as we do this work of making sure that Black girls have access to travel, to seeing the world, to imagining something beyond their current realities, we do that in tandem with encouraging Black girls to imagine a world beyond borders, to imagine a world beyond settler colonialism, to imagine a world beyond capitalism,
00:51:03
Speaker
where we would not even need passports to travel, where everyone would have access to the world in meaningful ways that are non-capitalist. And those dreams are big
Expanding Youth Worldview Through Travel
00:51:15
Speaker
dreams.
00:51:15
Speaker
And so I would like to tell a story about Passports for Change and some of the youth that we've been able to impact. So I started Passports for Change because before my mother died, she told me that I would travel the world and I would write books and learn languages.
00:51:34
Speaker
And she said to me, it's so important to me that you travel the world. i want you to see the world. Now, my mom died when I was 13. Her funeral was the day before my 14th birthday.
00:51:47
Speaker
it was such a It was such a painful time for me. But I remember holding on to her words. I took those words. And I planted them in my broken heart.
00:52:00
Speaker
And I just watered them with my tears. And I was held by so many beautiful black women, my aunties and uncles and family members and so many black men, so many black people beyond those gender binaries.
00:52:13
Speaker
So many black people loved me in the wake of my mom's death. And all of that love, my tears, those things nourished those seeds that my mother planted.
00:52:25
Speaker
And I've bloomed those things. and one of the things I did in college, I started studying languages as a child. My mom enrolled me in Japanese in my elementary school.
00:52:37
Speaker
She felt very strongly about me learning languages. global languages. She would always say, and I want you to learn an African language. We would practice Swahili at home sometimes, but my school didn't offer an African language, but they did offer Japanese.
00:52:51
Speaker
And so she kept telling me, and that as a child, a poor black girl growing up in the hood, I never saw anybody that's learned those languages that could speak all of those languages. So I was really like, why is my mom doing this?
00:53:05
Speaker
But what I love about growing up in South Florida With the Black diaspora, I met so many Black people from Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, other countries who spoke multiple languages.
00:53:19
Speaker
And I remember my mom always being so amazed by that and celebrating that. and wanting that for me. And I think that was her impetus. we We're in community with quite a few Haitian people in particular. My mom had quite a few Haitian women friends and she loved hearing them speak Creole. And she would just tell me like, I want you to learn a language that's so beautiful. That's so important.
00:53:43
Speaker
That's your lineage as black people. We come from a multilingual people. And because of colonialism, oftentimes we haven't been able to experience that. My mom's words were always replaying in the back of my mind throughout my entire life.
00:53:56
Speaker
So fast forward, I go to college and that was a miracle. I'm so grateful to my aunt and uncle, Willie Stevens and Marjorie Stevens. They are truly my angels.
00:54:07
Speaker
And thanks to them and so many other people who loved on me, I made it to college and Now I know college comes with a whole set of other politics and I know that it is not the greatest measure for black freedom and liberation. In fact, I will argue sometimes it's socializing us into capitalism and other things.
00:54:29
Speaker
But for me, it did represent a sort of opportunity to leave the hood and to see something else. And I'm grateful for that. I can hold both things and both things can be true.
00:54:43
Speaker
So when I get to college, I remember that my mom wants me to learn languages and she's planning to see it now. By now I've been speaking Japanese for a few years, taking classes. So I do an exchange trip to Japan and that blew my mind.
00:54:57
Speaker
My mind was blown. i didn't know black people could travel. I didn't know we could. It was just so many things that it shattered so many myths I had about what it meant to be a black girl.
00:55:08
Speaker
And so going to Japan, I had a host family. i improved my language skills. I became more fluent. And it was just so eye opening. And I kept thinking, I want more of the black girls I grew up with to have this experience.
00:55:23
Speaker
Most of us from my hometown hadn't gotten passports. We didn't go on trips as children. We barely even may have left the city. And so to then fast forward and go to another country was just like, wow, how do I make this accessible to youth?
00:55:40
Speaker
What would it mean? And I remember for me, Japan represented, I didn't have to live a life where my life was always in progress of death. And what I mean by that is as a black girl and my mother, as a poor black woman,
00:55:55
Speaker
And I see how my mom died so young. I've always said my mom died for two reasons. A broken heart from trying to live and navigate this world as a poor black woman. And two, as a black woman, her life was in progress of death for being poor.
00:56:10
Speaker
And what I mean by that is the air quality in our neighborhoods isn't the best. The water quality wasn't the best. We didn't have a grocery store where you could get fresh fruit and vegetables.
00:56:22
Speaker
We often would have to leave our city to go to the grocery store. So you would shop at the corner store, which had less options. So you have the food quality, the air quality, the water quality. All of these things are slowly killing you.
00:56:36
Speaker
And we haven't even touched the stress. of being a black woman navigating the intersections of gender and race and class and sexuality and language and citizenship and all of the layers upon layers.
00:56:51
Speaker
And so I think about that. And when I went to Japan, I remember crying so much because I thought maybe I won't die at 36 because maybe I could live somewhere else.
00:57:04
Speaker
Maybe I don't have to live in the United States and stay somewhere where my life is going to always be in progress of death. And I want to pause there for a moment.
00:57:16
Speaker
That's what travel did for me. It taught me as a black girl and now a black woman that I could imagine a different future for myself. That Derricka Hunt, the daughter of Sylvia Renee, might not die at 36 like my mom did because I might have an opportunity to create a different reality.
00:57:37
Speaker
I want to pause with that and read a poem to you. And I dedicate this to Renee. I love you, Renee. Lucille Clifton, won't you celebrate with me?
00:57:50
Speaker
Won't you celebrate with me what I've shaped into a kind of life? I had no model. Born in Babylon, both non-white and woman, what did I see to be except myself?
00:58:05
Speaker
I made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight, my other hand. Come, celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.
00:58:26
Speaker
Lucille Clifton, won't you celebrate with me? I pause and I read that poem as a reminder that I'm still alive today and I can celebrate that every day something has tried to kill me and it has failed.
00:58:45
Speaker
And my life looks different because of my mother's dreams. And so when I measure wellness, sometimes I think for Black people, for those of us who are oppressed people, for Native people, for people who live at the shorelines.
Dreaming as Wellness for Marginalized Communities
00:59:02
Speaker
I think for those of us who are at those multiple intersections, wellness is something we often have to dream about and imagine, something we may have to invent because we've been born into so much turmoil and trauma and chaos and pain that wellness in the typical traditional sense may not be accessible to us.
00:59:27
Speaker
But I love to dream, and that's a gift my mom gave me. And so when I think about schooling in relation to that, I also think about how school also inhibits the wellness of a lot of oppressed communities.
00:59:43
Speaker
Oftentimes we know that the physical school, I know my high school, we had lead. Some of my teachers got asbestos and got blood cancers from that.
00:59:54
Speaker
My high school, sometimes there were fights. You didn't know what might happen. It wasn't always the safest place. There were a lot of layers of the things that happened.
01:00:06
Speaker
And in the same breath, my high school felt like a black Mecca. I was surrounded by blackness in the most beautiful sense. And so there was this kind of dance between being well and not being well.
01:00:22
Speaker
And so wellness, like I said, I think is something sometimes we have to dream about. because it may not necessarily be available to us even if we want it. And I know for me, I didn't even know that it was a possibility.
01:00:37
Speaker
i think when you grow up in environments where you're so used to seeing people sick, you may not even realize what it's like to be well and alive and whole. And travel opened my eyes to all of these different possibilities.
01:00:53
Speaker
And that led me to starting Passports for Change. We've serviced over 100 youth with our programs. We've granted passports. We've traveled to South Africa, Abu Dhabi, Trinidad and Tobago.
01:01:06
Speaker
We've traveled to India, to Thailand with our youth. And it's just been beautiful to see our youth grow. One of the trips that stands out to me the most, because what sets Passports for Change aside, is that not only do we work with youth in the United States, but we also work with youth globally.
01:01:27
Speaker
And part of that global alliance is to shatter those borders that privilege American citizenship and American passports and American visas as the priorities to move in and out of the world.
01:01:40
Speaker
So I also have worked with a group of youth who are in India. They are located in Assam, India. and right before COVID, we had a chance to take some youth to Thailand from India. They're Indian nationals.
01:01:54
Speaker
They hadn't ever left their community. They hadn't ever left their village. And i've been working with that community for the past eight years. I've been studying Asamis.
01:02:06
Speaker
I've built very solid relationships with them. So part of this is how do we do this work really thinking about decolonial efforts, really thinking about anti-capitalist efforts, really thinking about this youth work from a perspective that centers love.
01:02:24
Speaker
And in my work with those youth in India, I have learned so much, so, so much, and I've been so grateful for all that we've been able to share and exchange.
01:02:36
Speaker
And so The group of youth that we went to Thailand, we got their passports. We went through a ah process. We usually do a whole workshop series and learning exchange around colonialism and imagining the world different.
01:02:51
Speaker
And we did all of that. And so when we finally get to the airport, one of the youth starts crying and she says, I did not know i could leave my village.
01:03:03
Speaker
I didn't know. And she says, am I going to be OK? Is the plane going to crash? She has all these questions. And I tell her, I can only imagine how afraid you are, but I want you to trust me and trust the journey.
01:03:15
Speaker
So she trusts me. She trusts the journey. We go to Thailand. We have an amazing time, but it comes with challenges. Some of the youth are mistaken for Thai because they have certain similar features.
01:03:28
Speaker
Some of the youth miss their home food, miss their family. So we go through all of that. And then when we get back to India, you know, we do like a follow up and we check in. And I'll never forget what one of the youth says to me. She says, Derika, when I used to sleep at night, I would see white paper.
01:03:46
Speaker
And now my mind is so overrun with colors. All I see are colors. Her eyes were welling up with tears. She said, I don't have the words. I can't really put it into words, but it's in my heart, Derica.
01:04:01
Speaker
It's so colorful. There's something else to the world. And i think we both just sat in silence and we both cried. That to me is a measure of wellness that this beautiful, beautiful youth can now see color,
01:04:18
Speaker
She's moved from blank paper to color. Her world was expanded. She can imagine a world beyond anything she could have imagined.
01:04:29
Speaker
Those are things that she could not learn in school. School would not have been able to do that for her, but traveling did that for her. And I think that that is so beautiful and so transformative.
01:04:46
Speaker
And that's the kind of work I'm invested in with young people. That's the kind of work young people do with me. They push me. They challenge me. They help me to dream it in ways that I didn't even know were possible.
01:04:59
Speaker
And that leads me to my final piece of this reflection, a reflection on language. Sometimes I think about how we don't always have the words language. I speak multiple languages.
01:05:12
Speaker
And i always find that English is so limiting. It's so limiting. And it's so hard sometimes to conceptualize the kind of liberation that I find myself dreaming about in English.
01:05:26
Speaker
And I think of Ntozake Shange, one of my ancestors whose work is just so beautiful and was so important to my mother. My mother loved Ntozake Shange. And I love Ntozake Shange. My mother gave me that gift of language from Black women whose language I could understand. And one of the things I think about with Ntozake Shange is in one of her essays, My Pen is a Machete, she talks about this desire to break English, to strip it down to the bone, to malign the language.
01:05:59
Speaker
that black children learn to hate themselves in. She talks about her pen being a machete to cut, to dissect, to take apart this language that has done those very things to her.
01:06:12
Speaker
And I've carried those words with me, and that notion with me. What does it mean to break English, to rearrange it, to stitch it back together? ah think about how my ancestors did that with their tongues.
01:06:27
Speaker
How we were told as black children growing up, Ebonics doesn't sound good. It's not intelligent. And my mom really celebrated Ebonics. And I think my mom knew something then that how intelligible it is to be able to fix your tongue, to speak a language that is not of your soul, a language that is forced upon you, and to then make something really beautiful with it.
01:06:53
Speaker
And as I meditate on language, I think that's what I see young people doing when we travel. I believe travel becomes a mechanism through which to take some of the ugliest things in life and to make something really beautiful.
01:07:10
Speaker
To really put it together, to rearrange it, and to turn that brokenness into a mosaic. And whether it's from the black girls from my hometown to those girls in India, the youth that I've seen and the ways I've seen them be able to imagine something else for not only themselves, but for the world has truly been fascinating.
Conclusion: Water as a Metaphor for Wellness
01:07:37
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And so if I could measure wellness in youth, I would measure it by their ability to dream. Can you still dream? Do they still dream? I think when youth can dream, then they are well. They can imagine themselves as well.
01:07:52
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They can imagine a world where their needs are met. And so i really and grateful for this opportunity to share my experience and my understandings of wellness is so vast, it's so deep. I love the name of this podcast, To Draw From the Well.
01:08:13
Speaker
And I end by thinking about water and how it flows and how in all of its murkiness is something that cannot be contained.
01:08:25
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Water gives us a metaphor for life. I want to be like water. i encourage our youth to learn from the water. And I believe our wellness can be measured by three things with water.
01:08:41
Speaker
Salt water. are My grandma used to say salt water is the answer, whether it's your tears, your sweat, or the ocean.
01:08:49
Speaker
Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to my words. Thank you for this opportunity. And big thank you to the young people who've helped me learn.
01:09:01
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I refuse the idea that I teach them, and I know that it's a reciprocal relationship where I learn in tandem. Thank you, Hayuti. I told her I would say her name every opportunity i got.
01:09:14
Speaker
Hayuti, thank you. Thank you, Sylvia Renee. Thank you, ancestors. Thank you, indigenous communities for all that you've given us access to this lifetime.
01:09:27
Speaker
And I end with my freedom dreams that all Black people will be free, that all brown people will be free, that all oppressed people will be free, and that this idea of even needing to measure wellness will no longer exist because we will be well.
01:09:44
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Ashay.
01:09:52
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After this episode, I think of young Tiffany. And I think about how greatly she would have benefited from educators like Soraya and Derica, Black women who have an immense understanding of what it means to piece children together within a world that is invested in their unraveling.
01:10:17
Speaker
Jordan's moving testimony and Soraya and Derika's profound stories help us to understand that when we think about wellness and we think about the measurement of it, that measurement is so much about what we value.
01:10:34
Speaker
We center, we follow, we track, we gain data on what matters most to us. And so if we look at schools as they exist, We provide students with grades and scores that really reflect their adherence to whiteness.
01:10:54
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And our young people are rewarded for how well they follow rules, even when those rules work against them. But today's guests are pushing us toward new understandings of measurement.
01:11:10
Speaker
And if we value joy, we value children's sacred purpose. value the medicine that comes from their histories and their people, we will also seek to center and measure these attributes.
01:11:26
Speaker
We will center them within our practice, and we will align ourselves with these sacred teachings. We have work to do. And thinking back to my experiences with Barbara, I call her Barb, and the kids call her Firebar.
01:11:44
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One of the greatest means of respect. think back to when i first traveled to New Zealand and Barb took one look at me and we had spent a little bit of time together but she said after a few days she said, you coming in with me?
01:12:04
Speaker
And she had me check out of my hotel and we hit the road and she took me to her people's homelands and I met her family, I met her friends.
01:12:14
Speaker
We never spent time with each other. As I think about that experience and the entire time I was with Barb, she asked me about the stories of my people, where I came from, how their breath still emanated through me.
01:12:31
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She asked about my life's purpose and how I use my gifts to improve the lives of those around me. And I was so confused about how a woman who had just met me would take me in to ensure that I was cared for and was genuinely interested in my purpose.
01:12:52
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And for me, Barb represents the greatest possible outcome of what happens when we center a sense of belonging, solidarity, care for others, and indigenous ways of being.
01:13:08
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That what it means to center these tenants, right? And the more that we place them at the center or the foundation of our learning environments, the more likely we are to return to ways of life that are sustaining rather than subtracting.
01:13:28
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So I'm grateful for our guests today. And I'm so grateful for the work that we'll continue to do, particularly as it relates to what we measure, as it relates what we value in our society.
01:13:52
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Drawing from the Well. I'm your host, so Tiffany Marie. This podcast was produced by John Reyes and music by King Most.
01:14:03
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Join us as we continue the conversation at youthwellness.com.