Wake Up and Create the Future!

Creating the future with education!

The theme at St. Stephen’s this summer is “creating the future.” It comes from a quote by the brilliant and multi-talented Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space.

As someone working with children and teens at St. Stephen’s this summer, the idea of “creating the future” is meaningful to me. In our world, so many factors conspire to destroy futures, rather than create them. Patterns of racism, sexism, poverty, illness, oppression, etc. poison futures unevenly, impacting children from marginalized groups most severely. Inexcusably, our society often supports--both explicitly and tacitly--this foreclosing of futures. We must be vigilant, constantly critiquing the ways in which our society fails to support expansive possibility and full flourishing in every child’s future.

Mae Jemison was vigilant. She recognized and disavowed the constricting messages that society was telling her: that women cannot be scientists, that Black people should not be ambitious, and that young people cannot work hard. Even as society told her that “all futures matter,” it covertly signaled to her that her future as a Black woman held little promise.

Jemison took these damaging messages and used them to make her own future even more incredible. She saw the sexist and racist expectations of her teachers and peers as a challenge to prove people wrong. Today, she continues to live an incredible life that inspires others because of the way she reacts to society’s message of “limits,” proving that the real limits are in society’s limited imagination.

Young people ready to learn

Oftentimes, the young people at St. Stephen’s are likewise confronted with the message of “limits:” that the circumstances of race, class, poverty, and zipcode have preordained a limited future. The beautiful thing about working with young people, though, is that their imaginations refuse to be downgraded. They intuitively know that they have the power to “create the future,” one where they view society’s low expectations not as a barrier, but as fuel to propel them to unexpected heights.

Catchin’ Bugs (not the boy discussed in the post)

Yesterday, on the way to a field trip at the Boston Nature Center, I asked some of the kids about the future they hoped to create. I heard cries of “doctor” and “police officer,” but the answer that caught my ear was “butterfly doctor.” This gentle response came from one of the kids (not pictured) who is generally regarded as rambunctious and challenging. Already, society is spinning stories about his limited future: “he’s a troublemaker, he’s a wanderer, he’s unintelligent”... in defiance of these tales, the young boy talked about how much he loved bugs, worms, and dragonflies. He wanted to help butterflies that had been hurt! The innocent trust that a career of such delicacy and care even existed, much less awaited this boy in particular, pushed back on all my limited expectations. While I don’t want to downplay his genuine behavioral difficulties, it struck me that I had allowed society’s story of “limitations” to foreclose this boy’s future in my mind’s eye. Only when I invited him to create the future did I wake up to his authentic sense of possibility and compassion. May all of us who work with young people likewise invite them to create futures of hope, peace, and possibility. And let us wake up and join them when they actually do so.

By Cooper McCullough, Teen Staff Coordinator

Cooper is a recent graduate of Boston College’s Schools of Social Work and Theology & Ministry. He enjoys working with teens and children to increase resilience and build prosocial skills. Fun fact: he loves to waterski and spend his day on a lake with his family.

What’s Going Right When Everything is Going Wrong

As a member of the Academic Team here at St. Stephens, I’ve spent the past month painstakingly planning out every moment of our young people’s summer at B-SAFE. From fun at home days, to full-day field trips, to every second of an academic rotation, we have planned out the most idealistic, smooth running program that’s ever existed. Unfortunately, life happens. Academic rotations don’t stay on schedule because the post-lunch sugar rush is causing a surge of talking, our young people are exhausted in art class from a high energy health class, and sometimes just the heat in the middle of July is enough to derail a great day.

But here’s the thing about derailed lessons: they’re ultimately more engaging for our young people, and more educational for our teaching specialists. When lessons don’t adhere to the timeline, more often than not it’s because one of our young people has asked a question that leads us down a different path and allows our specialists to teach a deeper understanding of a subject that the class has expressed a genuine interest in.

My first experience teaching on the fly came with the presence of baby birds in the courtyard at St. Stephens. Instead of arts and crafts, the young people were more interested in figuring out why one of the babies was flying around while the other was sitting huddled in a corner. The day turned into a lesson on nature, animal care, health, and an eventual trip to the emergency vet. So while those paintings still sit unfinished, our young people now hold knowledge on subjects that would have been hard to teach in a classic classroom setting.

Regardless of how hard we try to preemptively perfect a classroom, sometimes the best thing to do is allow something to go wrong. 

By Jean Bellamy, PICS Academic Coordinator

Jean Bellamy is originally from Hillsborough, North Carolina, where she grew up surrounded by books and animals. She is a Psychology major at Princeton University interested in studying developmental and educational psychology with eventual hopes of becoming a teacher. In her free time, Jean loves to ride horses, read, and drink coffee at a furious pace!

B-SAFE 2016 Blasts Off!

Today, the B-SAFE Program launches into our seventeenth summer!  

Staff in purple T-shirts are welcoming hundreds of smiling, excited, and slightly nervous young people to our 11 programs in six neighborhoods across Boston and Chelsea (South End, Lower Roxbury, Uphams Corner, Codman Square, Mattapan, and Chelsea).

A recent New York Times op-ed by KJ Dell'Antonia described the importance of high-quality, affordable summer programs that include an academic component. In the absence of summer opportunities such this--programs like B-SAFE--the "lack of affordable child care and the achievement gap collide for lower income families." Young people in the neighborhoods B-SAFE serves can lose, on average, more than two months of reading skills over the summer and studies indicate that they never make this up. Dell'Antonia notes that this gap keeps getting wider, and by the end of 5th grade, young people from lower-income areas are nearly three years behind their higher income peers in academic skills.

But it does not have to be this way! B-SAFE offers solutions. Research shows that the summer slide accounts for about half of this disparity in academic achievement, which means that young people in B-SAFE will stay on track for their reading and writing skills. Plus they find friends who are fun and a community of adults who care about and love them. Meanwhile, our team of teen organizers are meeting with public officials to create longer term solutions for the economic and educational issues in our cities. 

This summer, B-SAFE's theme is "Create the Future," taken from a quote of Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel in space. Together, we will be building communities where EVERYONE feels safe, feels big, and feels connected. Together, we will be fostering a life-long love of learning that is evaluated not by standardized tests but rather by the quality of final projects and the enthusiastic engagement of students. Together, we will be creating experiences that enact a future with more love, more justice, more health, and (perhaps most importantly) more smiles!  

We are so excited that you are part of this solution and the B-SAFE community!

Now, BLAST OFF to a future of fun! 

By Liz Steinhauser, Director of Youth Programs

Liz Steinhauser joined St. Stephen's staff as the Director of Youth Programs in August 2003, bringing over 30 years of professional training and experience as a youth worker and community organizer to the position. Liberation theology developed her commitment to social justice; Girl Scouts built her arts and crafts skills and her repertoire of goofy songs. She is a graduate of Colgate University and Harvard Divinity School and lives in Roslindale with her modern family, including her eleven-year-old son, Heschel, who is studying to be an actor.