Strength, Struggle, Solidarity - and Children’s Visions for the Future
ATD Fourth World teams and members rallied around the common concern we have for children throughout these past months of uncertainties. Although our programs and ways of being together changed, our core values and process of working together, facing the uncertainties together, remained strong and will continue to push us ahead.
Advocacy for Remote Learning
During the ATD Fourth World Community Calls, many parents expressed their frustrations regarding the social, emotional and academic consequences remote learning might have on children, especially children with special needs. In response, the New York Team held additional meetings with several mothers and grandmothers in New York and Boston, primarily to give mutual support. A longstanding partnership with The New School, a university in New York City, led to a webinar in which this working group and New York City educators exchanged on the theme, “Children and Poverty in the Era of Covid-19: How Remote Learning Exacerbates Inequality in New York.”
The parent and grandparent group presented the following statement: “Parents are worried that their inability to properly teach could count against their child and initiate failing grades, which would result in children being left behind or penalized because of external difficulties that are out of parents’ control.”
This same working group later taught three classes to students in the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. Reacting to that same statement, students wrote recommendations for the New York City Department of Education and school staff to ensure that no child is left behind.
Following the Hopes of Children
The sudden rupture in our programs with children - Story Gardens, stemDiscovery Exhibits, Tapori - due to Covid-19, was quite a shock. Long brainstorming sessions within our teams and with community members, trying new approaches and seizing new opportunities, and staying creative in our thinking were all key to maintaining relationships with children through this period of isolation.
When the Community Director of the Gregory Jackson Joko School in Brooklyn suggested that we continue Tapori workshops online, our team in New York welcomed the proposition as a beautiful gift. We were especially eager to find ways to link children to others, within and outside their own community. Our first remote Tapori workshop was the “Solidarity Birds” activity. Children made paper birds to carry their message of solidarity around the world. Aniyah, one of the students, wrote on her bird: “Thank you to all my fellow solidarity friends for helping us learn different things. I just want to say thank you a lot of times because you guys help us build the strength and for me to be stronger.”
The Team in New Mexico has been creative in staying connected to children and their families. They’ve been sending packages full of educational and art supplies, starting with Tapori’s Solidarity Birds. Through their birds, children in New Mexico shared their concern for their friends from the Story Garden. Vera wrote, “I hope you’re safe” and Kiara wrote, “Hope you guys are doing well. I’m doing fine!!”
The birds from New Mexico and from New York are now together on a joyful poster that each child will receive soon. The covid-19 crisis and the huge need to keep feeling part of a community became the opportunity to create links among children living across the country.
One lesson learned during this crisis is that ATD Fourth World Movement is not only about doing, but first and foremost about being deeply present, together. It’s been impossible to be there physically for each other and it’s a painful feeling. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not together anymore. We will continue to be connected with children, listen to them, and uphold their hopes for the future and for the world.
Ten year old Fran in New Mexico will help us. She texted to a Story Garden facilitator her vision for both a Covid-19 cure and for fairness and ending hunger in our world: “I wish the virus would go away. It stops us from seeing people's families, friends and to visit places, planets and stars. Why couldn't people eat the cure and then the virus will go away? It seems like an easy thing to do. ...Because it's not fair if other people get gifts on Christmas and others don't get gifts on Christmas. And it’s not fair that people are hungry for food and others aren’t, because they have money to get food.”
* This article is a part of our summer newsletter, "Following Children's Visions." Click here to read the full newsletter.