by Leah Lader, WSP Music Teacher & DEIJB Committee Member
Welcome back from the DEIJB committee! DEIJB stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging. Our committee consists of faculty and administrative staff members who meet weekly for self-study, healthy discussions, and collaborative projects which make a positive difference in our school’s ongoing work of better incorporating DEIJB.
We have great news to share – starting this school year, AWSNA, the governing body for Waldorf Schools in North America, added an 8th Principle to offer further guidance: Waldorf schools honor and embrace human diversity and dignity.
Over the course of the next two years, WSP will work with Alma Partners to start us off on the right path and advance our commitment to DEIJB. Alma Partners works primarily with Waldorf schools to align their practices with their values and bridge the gap between ideals and actions. We experienced the first two workshops in August with Masumi Hayashi-Smith, our Alma Partners Facilitator, who will continue to lead us through an additional six workshops over the course of the next two school years.
During these first two workshops, we discussed the differences between intention and impact. In the context of DEIJB, our intentions might be rooted in kindness or a desire to be inclusive, however, focusing solely on good intentions can sometimes serve as a defense mechanism to avoid accountability. This often arises due to a lack of awareness around the historical and cultural contexts which inform how our actions are received. Understanding the impact of our actions requires a deep commitment to self-reflection and learning.
By centering impact, deepening our understanding of bias and privilege, and grounding our work in shared agreements & community aspirations, we can move from well-meaning gestures to transformative actions that truly support diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, as well as create a community of belonging where all feel welcomed and supported.
by Ashley Brickeen | N – Grade 8 Admissions Director & Member of the DEIJ Committee
What is DEIJ?
DEIJ stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice. Put simply, it means working to create a space where everyone sees themselves reflected in our community and where our community enjoys the benefits of each person’s ability to participate fully, creating a sense of true belonging.
Why DEIJ?
WSP’s vibrant and diverse community of people come from all over the world. We have families representing every major religion, with ties to every continent. Our community has families in all shapes and sizes with family members with different gender identities and orientations.
What is the DEIJ Corner?
WSP’s DEIJ committee meets weekly to plan professional development workshops, study related topics and work on projects related to DEIJ. In the DEIJ Corner, we will report to the community on our work, share resources, and provide information.
This month we are spotlighting the local group, Girls Leadership. They were founded in Oakland in 2008; and offer workshops, professional development and classes for students from K-12th grade as well as adults. Many of their materials are offered for free, such as SEL (social-emotional learning) check-in materials or their workshop on Belonging in Basketball, offered through a partnership with the WNBA.
I’ve found their Bias Intervention and Developing Culturally Responsive Mindsets workshops particularly useful for my work at WSP. As a parent, I’m currently taking a Girl & GrownUp class with my daughter about friendship, managing conflict, learning to set boundaries, and find her own voice. I’ve found this one to be helpful, not only by providing skill sets, but also by creating a space for us to talk about some of the social challenges she is facing.
Keep an eye out for future updates from WSP’s DEIJ committee in our DEIJ corner. If you have any suggestions for resources or comments, please contact us via email.
Last Friday, the WSP faculty and administration were busy learning and training. There was time dedicated to rethinking Waldorf curriculum, and emergency preparedness, but the most significant amount of time and energy was dedicated to learning more about neurodiversity and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion with Dan Lebowitz. His presentation was entitled: Neurodiversity meets Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Mindsets and Scaffolds that Support All Kinds of Minds. Here’s what Dan shared after his time with at WSP:
“Thank you for the opportunity to visit WSP and explore the topic of neurodiversity with your faculty and administration. A shared interest in meeting the needs of all students, especially those who think differently, was palpable. Community members celebrated what was working and welcomed ideas for making responsive changes.”
Dan provides educational consulting services to students, families, and schools in Marin County, the larger Bay Area, and beyond. He combines 25 years of experience in K-12 schools with expertise in learning disabilities, ADHD, executive function, and assistive technologies. Dan integrates his experience as a dad of two boys twelve and fourteen years old, as well as working with parents, helping them navigate many of the challenges, joys, and predictable problems that arise at school and in the home.
The daughter of parents who fled the South and Jim Crow, Isabel Wilkerson sought real stories from real people. She was the first black woman to be a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the first African American to win for individual reporting, at that. Wilkerson dedicated fifteen years to the making of this six-hundred-page book, interviewing over 1200 individuals documenting the widespread phenomenon that was the Great Migration.
“Such may be the sheer force of determination of any emigrant leaving one repressive place for something he or she hopes will be better. But for many of the migrants from the South, the stakes were especially high – there was no place left to go, no other refuge or other suns to search for, in their own country if they failed. Things had to work out, whatever it took, and that determination showed up in the statistics.” (Wilkerson 530.)
These stories that Isabel Wilkerson brings to paper capture the desperation of the times. There was a blind faith that so many people simply had to put in their plans of leaving the south because they had no other choice. The times were cold, and there was word of sunshine in the north.
Isabel Wilkerson translates real life experiences gracefully on the page, blending these three stories with information and context of the times with care. She shows us experiences from people who would have otherwise blended into history as simply a small part of the great phenomenon that swept America. She brings these similar yet very different experiences to light for us, following three of millions who had gone in search of warmth.
I recommend reading this book because the switching of focus on different main characters saves from a droning on and on about one person. You’re allowed to take a break from someone’s story and read something new without having to put down the book. It adds depth to the whole of the reading and learning experience, as sometimes the material can get to be a lot. This book gives the reader a view through the eyes of three people who had to find their ways in the dark, trusting that they would reach a light to bring the warmth of other suns.
Read more student perspectives in the Waldorf Chronicles, a newsletter run by WSP high school students.
I recently got a job working at a restaurant and after a couple of weeks the abstract concept of food waste became concrete in my mind. It was no longer just the idea of food being lost, I was starting to see real food wasted. And much of the food being thrown out was still perfectly edible! It could probably be reasonably inferred from the contents of any restaurant’s dumpsters that humans have an excess of available food. But we see in the world as well as in the United States that that is not actually true.
Imagine you have a pound of food in front of you. For a visual, that’s about the weight of a bowl of pasta. That is how much food is wasted every single day per person. This means that every day, for every person in the world, a whole bowl of pasta is lost. That is equivalent to over seven billion bowls of pasta wasted every day. One pound of food per person per day.
In the United States, a whole thirty to forty percent of available food goes to waste, and the reasons it goes to waste vary a lot, ranging from farming practices to cooking practices. During every step food takes to reach our mouths, food is wasted.
The first concern comes with the fact that we are, in fact, wasting thirty to forty percent of our food, and in turn, putting too much effort and labor into something that will never see the light of day (or the inside of a stomach). We are losing so much money paying for workers whose work ends up being wasted. This, and the food insecurity we see all around us today, are reasons food waste is an important topic.
One reason that waste is so commonplace is how we unnecessarily nitpick what food reaches stores. Companies will reject food that doesn’t look the way a customer might imagine, because it’s been shown that people are more likely to buy visually aesthetic food than “misshapen” food. This problem is in the process of being overcome, with companies like Imperfect Foods selling “misshapen” produce (like that in the picture above) so that it doesn’t go to waste.
A large contributing factor to food waste is over purchasing. This is a problem both in average households and, to a much more dramatic degree, in restaurants. What we as average citizens can do is to keep over purchasing to a minimum. Buying too much food ultimately leads to that food being thrown out for spoiling or for lack of need. If we all limit what we buy to what we need, food waste would be reduced on a small scale. The restaurant industry, on the other hand, has a larger impact on the creation of food waste. Restaurants need to buy extra food, as is understandable, because of the nature of the industry, but there must be better ways of dealing with leftovers than to simply throw them away at the end of the day. Restaurants could, at the end of the day, take the edible food that was destined for the trash and instead offer food to people in need.
This is not a completely hopeless fight. We may have no control over the restaurant industry or the packing and processing of food, but we do have control over what we buy and what we throw away. The things we can do to reduce the amount of food waste is to buy the amount of food we need and to only throw out food that is inedible. There’s no reason so much food should be going to waste, especially considering the large number of households that are food insecure.
