We have also been hard at work making our space in the Broadmoor Galley warm and welcoming. We are enthusiastic about the district’s and Broadmoor’s commitment to social-emotional learning and look forward to building with our new Broadmoor family! ​

We sometimes forget the most important thing about being human is change. We have the ability to change whatever we want, but we seem to forget the importance of relationships, patience, and vision. One thing that I observe about us as humans is that we adapt. We learn adaptation from our environment. Adaptation isn’t a bad thing; for example, the poisonous Primrose has made a special adaptation so it could survive in desert-like areas. Humans are like the Primrose. We adapt to live, but why don’t we normalize changing the world, so we don't have to depend on adaptation to Survive?  ​

Amped Summer is in full swing! We started off the season with three weeks of summer programming that served a diverse group of youth from around the district. Our Amped Summer campers ranged in age from 13 - 19 and represented 11 schools!

During week one students set the norms and values they wanted to uphold as a summer community. They made vision boards, got to know each other, and engaged in a variety of workshops hosted by Amped Instructional Specialist Destiny Cooper, ICARE Specialist Aubrey Jones, and peer-counselor Tonja Myles. Former therapist Wanda Kuo led an intergenerational dialogue on mental health as well as a virtual yoga session.

During the second week, teachers and community members were invited to join students and summer staff as we watched the Grace Lee Boggs documentary American Revolutionary. Dr. Anna West facilitated a powerful workshop in which Amped youth and “elders” exchanged stories with one another. Later that week Dr. Leslie Grover and Dr. Reva Hines of Narrative4 led active listening sessions and theater exercises. They also gave students disposable cameras for an auto-photography project. 

​In the third week, Amped board member Dr. Andrew Kuo set up his portable recording studio so students could record the poems, songs, podcasts, oral histories, and other projects they had been working on. Summer Amped concluded with a DreamKeepers College and Career Readiness Institute. Representatives from Southern University, EBR’s Office of Career and Technical Education, LSU, and BRCC led workshops and presented about their institutions to help students prepare for the futures they desire.

To get a true sense of the Summer Amped experience, we invite you to read this  “I Remember” poem, written by one of our campers during a virtual writing workshop.

I remember the sweet smiles of everyone’s faces on the first day of camp

I remember the sweet taste of star cut apples 

I remember us all being shocked at some of the things we saw in the American revolutionary documentary

I remember the big group introductions

I remember the snacks we managed to eat in 1 week

I remember the deep conversations of our small groups

I remember the acceptance of others stories

I remember the crying laughing of my group for the theatre activity

I remember using up 20 disposable camera shots in 1 day

I remember sitting talking to sydni while we waited for our mothers

I remember using up the whole break trying to figure out the board game clue

I remember doing a recording for the first time

I remember the messy clothing left behind from tie dye

I remember the endless debate on whether it’s shein or she in

I remember trying to come up with rhymes when we rapped

And, I remember the people I met along the way
​
-I.M

​With the close of Summer Amped, we are moving gratefully into a time of collective rest by taking a shared hiatus from June 19th - July 19th.

Our team at Humanities Amped is invested in long-term, sustainable, collective care, and we know that commitment begins right where we are, in our own lives. Showing up for ourselves means being intentional about slowing down and resting. It’s how we re-ground ourselves and build our capacity to show up for the long run. 

It’s never an easy choice to care for ourselves. There is always so much to do, and for those of us whose work is caring for our communities, we often feel like it is never enough. And yet we know that if we want to show up wholeheartedly, we must invest in our own restoration. 

We hope to come back to you filled with energy, insight, and imagination. You, dear ones, deserve nothing less than our best selves!

See you in late July. :) 

Love,
The Amped Team

At Humanities Amped in 2021, we are celebrating the first of our three core values: beloved community. As we look toward the future and its challenges, this aspect of our organizational vision, to nurture a dynamic, beloved community of lifelong learners and civic leaders, has never felt more essential to our individual and collective well-being. Over the next few months, we will release a series of think pieces reflecting on the theme of beloved community and how it shows up in our work at Humanities Amped. Click here to learn more about the heart of beloved community, and read on to learn about one way it shows up in our work. ​

Today there is a girl in Baton Rouge who rides the bus to school, eats breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria, goes to her four 9th grade classes, and rides the bus home. Maybe this year she wakes up and eats breakfast at home, logs on to her Chromebook, and clicks the Google link to see her teachers and classmates in little boxes on the screen. Whether in-person or virtual, she goes to school and carries many things with her that are not evident on the surface: A talent for art. A quick wit. A grandmother who is her rock. A little cousin who she loves. A parent struggling with addiction. Memories of sexual abuse. A recent fight with a bestie. A new crush. Who asked her at school today, “How are you doing, really?” and then listened to the answer?
​​
In my youth, that question was asked more often by a peer than an adult, it was passed in the hallway notes that my friends and I wrote and read with all-consuming relish. As a teen, I pretended to not care about adult attention. However, the way I edged into my parent’s bedroom at night as they were getting ready for bed, at a time when they had nothing else going on, told another story. It was a tradition my son later repeated in his high school years, making his way into my room to pet the dog and tell me about whatever was on his heart. Young people want us to see them; they don’t want us crowding their space, but they want us to have space for them. 

At Humanities Amped in 2021, we are celebrating the first of our three core values: beloved community. As we look toward the future and its challenges, this aspect of our organizational vision, to nurture a dynamic, beloved community of lifelong learners and civic leaders, has never felt more essential to our individual and collective well-being. Over the next few months, we will release a series of think pieces reflecting on the theme of beloved community and how it shows up in our work at Humanities Amped. Click here to learn more about the heart of beloved community and why it matters so deeply to us. 

​Our second beloved community reflection is from Asia Reese, Humanities Amped Community Educator, Program Manager, and Serve LA corps member. ​

With that erasure, dissatisfaction and disinterest began to grow. As someone who always loved school, I began to grow skeptical of its purpose if it did not aim to culturally affirm the primary population that it served. This dissatisfaction is why I think many students may leave the state, as I did, in search of knowledge--and more importantly--Beloved Community. Beloved Community is only created when the space you are in is dedicated to acknowledging the full extent of your existence: your multiple identities, your past, present, and helping you create your future.​

​At Humanities Amped in 2021, we are celebrating the first of our three core values: beloved community. As we look toward the future and its challenges, this aspect of our organizational vision, to nurture a dynamic, beloved community of lifelong learners and civic leaders, has never felt more essential to our individual and collective well-being. Over the next few months, we will release a series of think pieces reflecting on the theme of beloved community and how it shows up in our work at Humanities Amped.

As we practice doing youth work with the intention to change the world, we draw inspiration from the model set by Grace Lee Boggs. She created dynamic intergenerational spaces in Detroit through which young people could find meaningfulness and a sense of self as “solutionaries” by applying their creative energies to confronting the critical problems they identified. Her thinking has greatly influenced our work. But perhaps most importantly, Grace Lee Boggs, like Dr. King, encouraged us to live the questions in an intergenerational way, to see ourselves in a process of unfolding with an emphasis on humanizing our institutions through critical connectedness. In the spirit of these civil rights movement leaders before us, we look forward to living our questions and reflections out loud with you over the next few months as we take a dive into the theme of beloved community. 

We hope you’ll stay posted on our website as these think pieces from Humanities Amped staff roll out! Click below to start reading.