The Roc2change summit is a summit focused on racial equity, racial injustice and racism hosted Hilton Central School district as. Its mission is to build bridge toward racial equality through education, often during summits like these.
The entire schedule of the Roc2change summit can be found here. I will be trying to summarize the summit and my experience.
There was an asynchronous and a synchronous opening to the summit. The asynchronous one was simply a video that introduced the conference and had a couple people speak on the topic of racism as well as give thanks to the youth leaders. Here is the video if you are interested:
Next we entered a video call where we watched the following presentation:
When we reached slide three of this slideshow we were asked to attribute a couple of words or phrases to photo
Tear gas and riots
George Floyd
Black Lives Matter
After this we switched zoom links and watched a keynote address by Dr. Collin D. Williams, Jr. Dr. Collin is the senior director at RISE, an organization dedicated to racial equity through sports. He had us define and discuss the definitions of race, interpersonal vs systemic racism, and antiracism.
We then attended three breakout rooms from 9:40 am – 1:20 pm. The first systemic racism in education, the second on protests as an agent for change, and the final one was on systemic racism in healthcare. My favorite was systemic racism in education because it raised a lot of interesting questions about school today. And the jam board for this session had really great questions that made me think about the education system since brown vs the board of education and the lack of resources in predominantly black schools. We also talked about solutions, like cross county bussing to encourage diversity, a large joint money pool for the entirety of Monroe county, or more scholarships.
To finish up we used padlet to write our thoughts on how we can take action to build more bridges in our community. In addition we were given the short assignment to create a one to two minute video with our school name, specific actions steps to improve racial equity at my school.
Heres what slice this event falls in:
