Our Work

Our work broadens awareness of Ethnic Studies as a liberatory alternative to traditional schooling methods; expands the practice of Ethnic Studies in Chicago schools and youth-serving spaces; and protects Ethnic Studies through a multi-tiered strategy which includes the following:

Building communities of professional development, wellness & care.

Building institutional capacity for Ethnic Studies.

Building knowledge & skills to counter authoritarian Right actions & attacks.

Building communities of professional development, wellness & care

In these communities, educators and youth workers deepen their practice of Ethnic Studies methodologies. Educators and youth workers need a community to come home to: spaces to sustain their hope, their wellness, and their commitment.

Our current and past projects include:

Racial Healing & Resourcing Cohort

The Racial Healing & Resourcing Cohort supports BIPOC educators through healing-centered professional development. This experience centers individual and collective racial healing and resourcing as necessary practices in order to sustain our commitments to practicing healing, justice, and liberation in our classrooms, schools, and learning spaces.

Introduction to Ethnic Studies Workshops

Partners have included Golden Apple Scholar Institute, Grow Your Own Teachers Illinois, Loyola University Chicago, and University of Illinois at Chicago. These workshops are focused on culturally and community responsive, anti-racist education, and how to organize and build power to respond to the authoritarian Right forces that are moving against Ethnic Studies, anti-racist teaching, and other educational rights.

Chicago Public Schools & Umuwi Anti-Racist Teaching Cohort

Community of practice cohort for CPS K-12 social studies teachers committed to anti-racist teaching that builds, deepens and expands everyone's individual and collective beliefs, understandings, skills, and resiliency to embody courageous, healing-centered, anti-racist praxis--rooted in love, self-work, stories and solidarity--in hostile and repressive political times.

Grow Your Own (GYO) Illinois

Learning series for 125 community-centered teacher candidates across grade bands and content areas. It focuses on building a supportive community for teacher candidates and equipping them with the theoretical foundations and practical skills to integrate counterstorytelling and community oral histories into their classrooms.

Building institutional capacity for Ethnic Studies

Through consultation and coaching, formal and informal leaders will develop and enact strategic plans for shifting educational and youth serving institutional culture, curriculum, practice and advocacy to be culturally and community responsive and anti-racist.

We have provided capacity-building and consulting services to several partners and projects, including:

The focus of these services has included wellness, racial healing, organization-wide DEI, critical youth civic engagement, and inclusive, inquiry-based teaching.

Building knowledge & skills to counter authoritarian Right actions & attacks

We are building knowledge and skill to counter authoritarian Right actions and attacks at the local, state and national levels, and to ensure robust implementation of the Illinois Instructional Mandates, the Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards, the Racism-Free Schools Act, and other policies that promote and protect racial and social equity and justice.